Family Meal’s 2022 Year in Copy / Paste!
An endless scroll of the year you'll always remember as 2022
This is it! I stripped out almost all the intros, outros, and all other genius non sequiturs to copy/paste the entirety of Family Meal 2022 in one long endless scroll for your endless scrolling (and command+F’ing) pleasure! Unfortunately, right at the end, Substack wouldn’t let me add any more text, so a few from December are just links at bottom.
So it goes.
Here it goes…
January 4th:
The Relief – Remember when you got your Restaurant Revitalization Fund application in right away and still missed out? Per the NYT’s Stacy Cowley, maybe it would have been better to file at the last minute… “James Hutton submitted his claim just one minute after the application system opened on May 3, seeking $2.4 million for his business, Players Sports Grill & Arcade in San Francisco. At the end of June, his grant was denied. Rocky Aiyash applied on May 24 — the last day the program accepted applications — seeking $1.8 million for Pazzo’s, an Italian restaurant in Chicago’s financial district. His grant was approved.”
Some of that may have had to do with the lawsuits and rule changes that happened around priority groups, but there’s also this: “A senior [Small Business Administration] official… acknowledged that some late applications had zipped through the system. Myriad technical reasons affected their speed, the official said. For example, claims for large sums faced more extensive vetting, and single-location restaurants were less complicated than chains seeking multiple grants for multiple spots, the official said. Perhaps most crucially for Pazzo’s, Mr. Aiyash applied using Toast, a restaurant sales software vendor that worked with the Small Business Administration to integrate its system, which significantly simplified the agency’s review.
“The agency official compared the very late applications that got funding to a ‘perfect straight flush’ — a wildly unlikely jackpot.”
Sounds fair!
That Hotel $$$ – “José Andrés and his D.C.-based ThinkFoodGroup are returning to Los Angeles, with plans to open three restaurants and a bar at the Grand L.A., a new retail, residence and hotel development designed by Frank Gehry. Located across Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Concert Hall, Andrés’ restaurants will join a number of shops, apartments and the Conrad Hotel Los Angeles.” Jenn Harris has details in the LA Times. “And similar to the hotel arrangement Andrés had when he first opened the Bazaar at the SLS in 2008, the chef and his team will be responsible for the entirety of the Conrad Los Angeles’ food and beverage program, including room service.”
On a side note: I think there is a solid argument to be made that the two biggest chef winners (depending on your metrics!) over the last year were Andrés and Kwame Onwuachi (both of whom got their clearest career starts in small market / media heavy DC). After quitting his sole successful solo restaurant, Onwuachi is signing endorsements left and right, headlining parties and guesting on shows with A-list celebrities, hosting the 2021 James Beard Awards placeholder, moonlighting as an Executive Producer at Food & Wine, and is set to release his first cookbook into a warm spring shower of positive attention this May. Andrés has all but been beatified by his fans (including some in the media), is opening massive restaurant complexes with design/build credits from Gehry and Philippe Starck in Chicago, LA, and NYC, had board seats more or less named after him (Eat Just), and got Jeff Bezos to cut him a small check for charity.
The biggest losers of 2021 were, of course, birds.
The Crypto-staurants (working title) – The team behind anachronistically named VCR Group, a hospitality company launching the “World’s first NFT restaurant” has officially announced plans to start selling their NFTs / club memberships to the public on January 7th. They promise: “Members will have unlimited access to a private dining room that will span across 10,000+ square feet in an iconic, New York City location. The space will consist of a bustling cocktail lounge, upscale restaurant, intimate omakase room, and an outdoor space.” Which will all sound sweeeeet to some people, but… there is one small caveat per the email announcement from principals Gary Vaynerchuk, David Rodolitz, Josh Capon, and Conor Hanlon:
“We are actively looking for the ideal space within New York City, with an expected opening of early 2023. In anticipation of opening… we will produce physical and virtual events, pop-ups, tastings and culinary experiences exclusively for members.”
Bold 2022 crowdfunding pitch: Be a member of a club so exclusive, it doesn’t even know where it is.
The Media – There are way too many “Most Read” lists out now to include here — highly recommend a quick scan of your local food section / website’s list — but I do want to run through NYT Food’s top 10 (via Sara Bonisteel), as classified by me:
1. One simple trick to master this popular dish!
2. “Best Of” Listicle
3. Easy recipes listicle
4. Bad chef exposé
5. Holiday recipe listicle
6. Easy recipes listicle
7. Easy recipes listicle
8. Regional Food Fight Clickbait
9. White Woman Nice to Black People?
10. Negative Restaurant Review
So… maybe pivot your “Complicated Recipes From My Restaurant’s Pro Kitchen” cookbook to something a little more like: “Le Bernardin? Sheet pan!”
And last and least – If you’d like to jump Through the Looking Glass real quick, here in Hong Kong, an airline worker skipped out on mandatory home isolation and visited a restaurant while infected with omicron just before New Years. That breaks the city’s long COVID-free streak, and now six people who were at the restaurant and have still not come forward for testing are basically on the city’s most wanted list.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” - The Red Queen.
January 7th:
The Relief – First, the bad news you probably already knew. Headline in Restaurant Hospitality: “Another round of the Restaurant Revitalization Fund is looking less likely.” Joanna Fantozzi backs that up with some anonymous source reporting from John Harwood and Betsy Klein on CNN — “Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi held preliminary conversations with stakeholders on additional relief… in December… But the talks were shelved before any legislation was introduced and there was no buy-in from Senate leadership.” — and a perceived lack of urgency from press secretary Jen Psaki at around the 34:15 minute mark in Wednesday’s media briefing.
JOURNALIST: Would the White House be open to spending for restaurants — COVID relief for restaurants — or would the President be opposed to that?
MS. PSAKI: Well, as you know, we did a major relief package that included helping restaurants just last year…
Oh, and CNN also quoted a “senior Biden admin official” as saying, “We are not going to write checks to incentivize people to sit at home, and we are not going to bail out businesses if the economy seems strong.”
If a tree gets blight in the forest, but the forest seems strong, does the parks service care?
Lists I Like – It’s time for another round of Eater’s “Most Anticipated Restaurants of Next Season” listicles, which are among the more useful roundups around for those of you keeping track of comings and goings. So far I see Vegas; LA; the Bay Area; Portland, OR; NOLA; Chicago; Atlanta; Austin; Nashville; Boston; and London, with presumably more out there or on the way.
The Media – Not necessarily restaurant related, but maybe some of you tag dishes with #feedfeed on Instagram time to time? Welp, you might should read Tim Carman’s latest in the Washington Post: “Women allege racism, sexism at food media company Feedfeed.” Is there a word in English for “Unsurprising story you’ve read several versions of before but is still important”?
Oh, and since many of you have followed Alison Roman’s ups and downs over the past few years, you should know she just signed a deal for a new show on CNN+, in collaboration with Anthony Bourdain’s old production company Zero Point Zero. I think it’s safe to say she’s made it all the way out of the cancelled box at this point? Though it might still be a while yet before paragraphs like this one stop feeling the need to mention that time she was cancelled.
The Media Too (Opportunities) – Eater DC is officially hiring for their vacant editor position, and Maine’s Portland Press Herald is looking for a Food & Dining reporter. It would be great if no one would apply to the DC job so that Eater EIC Amanda Kludt is forced to email me and ask how many zeros I need to move back home. Thank you.
For Design Fans – I had a whole paragraph ready to go about how I didn’t really like the look of Evan Funke’s new Mother Wolf space in Hollywood, because it felt like it needed another color to offset all those shades of red, and the space looked like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be fun and busy or staid and neat. But the writing was a bit harsh so I looked back and am now reconsidering my initial call for the walls to be painted in a stripey mishmash homage to Swiss Guard’s uniforms because… I think I love it as is? Even those lamps? You? Photos in Eater LA by Wonho Frank Lee.
And last but not least: The Zeitgeist – Almost didn’t read this Brooks Barnes NYT piece about how “Hollywood Glamour Is Pandemic-Proof at the Polo Lounge,” but it really has it all: A disrupted and flailing industry (film), liberal Hollywood’s inability to stay away from a restaurant owned by a man who literally made gay sex punishable by stoning (the Sultan of Brunei), Harvey Weinstein stench, and a classic old vs new money confrontation for a kicker: “At tables favored by film executives, there is eye rolling and nose upturning about Silicon Valley’s push into entertainment: Apple is spending how much on Martin Scorsese’s next film? And barbarians await at the gate. TikTok creators and Instagram influencers have discovered that the hotel’s lawn makes an interesting backdrop. Mr. Mady, the hotel’s general manager, tensed up when asked about the social media crowd. ‘We’re not proud of that,’ he said. ‘We’re trying our best to curb it.’”
Truly, all the magic of the world happens in and around restaurants.
January 11th:
The Optimism – After noting last week that a refill of the Restaurant Revitalization Fund looks unlikely, a restaurateur / reader in Hawaii noted he had read a few more optimistic takes, including this “flicker of hope” piece from Peter Romeo in RBO. I love some good hope! And the Independent Restaurant Coalition did get a handful of American mayors to sign a letter asking congress for help, but… Ted Cruz et al are banging an “inflation bomb” drum, and I’m not sure even targeted spending can escape that messaging beat this election year?
The Next Exposé? – Reading both Chris Crowley in Grubstreet this week (“The Restaurant Industry Has Always Treated Sick Workers With No Remorse; Will anything change because of Omicron?”) and Judd Legum in Popular Information (“Red Lobster workers say they are forced to work sick”), I’m wondering what impact a potential “This Indie Restaurant Is Serving While Infected” story will have, and who it will be about…
The Profile Treatment – Sorry I missed this when it came out on December 27th, but I had no idea that during the pandemic, the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park hired its “first female Black chef instructor”?! In Albany’s Times Union, Abbe Wichman has a profile of chef Roshara Sanders, who came back to teach after coasting into culinary school the easy way a decade ago: “She was accepted by the CIA in 2007 but couldn’t afford the tuition, so she joined the military. ‘Just to get back to the CIA on the GI Bill,’ she said. Two deployments later, one in Iran and one in Afghanistan, the veteran returned to the school in 2011 and graduated in 2014.”
So… Is the CIA suddenly a case study of solid DEI progress? “Sanders points to a growing number of Black hires in both the front of the house and in the kitchen at the CIA and notes the CIA’s nine-week extracurricular course: ‘The Cuisines of Africa and its Diaspora in the Americas,’ developed in collaboration with Dr. Jessica B. Harris… ‘The school is really doing what it needs to do in regards to diversity,’ says Sanders.”
The Profile Treatment Too – In the LA Times, Jean Trinh has a long look at Yangban Society, a new project from Katianna and John Hong. It’s a deli / minimart with a bit of an upscale side (“Customers will be able to buy canned cocktails and bottles of Hite beer or Krug Champagne to pair with their meals…”) and would sound like a classic COVID pivot-to-grocery story except the two say they started dreaming it up in 2019.
My warm and fuzzy side liked the intertwining journeys of personal cultural acceptance (Korean-American style in this case), and the industry career love story: After meeting at Mélisse, “Katianna and John were still only colleagues when she moved on to work at Christopher Kostow’s The Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa, where she eventually became the first female chef de cuisine at a Michelin three-star establishment in the United States. She convinced John to join her, and they eventually began dating and moved up the ranks together. Katianna went on to open Charter Oak, Kostow’s second restaurant in Napa, and John became Meadowood’s chef de cuisine.”
My business details side is happy to know: “They funded Yangban by partnering with Sprout L.A. — the restaurant group that oversees spots like Bestia and République — through a random connection, John explained.”
And my design side learned both that: “Shin Irvin, the founder and creative director of Folklor, notable for his work with the Line Hotel and Gjelina, helped design the space.” And that Shin Irvin’s blue paint dealer is now very rich.
The Media (Moves) – I put all this in a tweet on Friday after details came in too late for that Family Meal, but wanted to include again here… ATTN PR: There’s a big hire-and-shuffle going on over at Eater this month: Stephanie Wu started as Executive Editor last Monday. Lesley Suter is moving from Travel to edit “Special Projects.” Matt Buchanan is moving to a new role handling larger stories as "Enterprise editor," with Jesse Sparks joining that Enterprise team as Senior Editor. Jade Stewart took over as editor in Seattle yesterday. Brittany Britto Garley starts as editor of Eater Houston on 1/18, which is the same day Paolo Bichieri officially becomes an Eater SF reporter. And Nat Belkov is joining as Design Director on 1/24.
And they’re also looking for a part time editor in the Twin Cities, alongside that open DC Editor job. Jeeze.
The Media Too – Maybe omicron is “mild” for most people, but mild is relative, especially for food folks. NYT Food’s Kim Severson tweeted yesterday that she recently joined her colleague Tejal Rao in (hopefully temporarily) having lost her sense of taste and smell. Severson asks (as far as you know) that PR pitches now first wish her well, before tying totally unconnected restaurant news to her illness in a deeply insensitive way. Good luck, all!
The Media Three: For the Somm – Editor Serena Dai says, “The [SF] Chronicle’s food and wine team is thrilled to announce our new wine reporter: Jess Lander, a seasoned Wine Country journalist who has covered topics ranging from the impact of wildfires on wine to the unique parenting challenges of women winemakers.” If you haven’t seen Lander around Napa, the Chronicle’s official press release has a full bio and headshot here. NB: Landler’s Instagram handle is “WillWrite4Wine,” so if you need good press, try bribes?
And last but not least: The Critics – You wild ones went and freed Britney and now she’s a restaurant influencer! Recent restaurant review on Instagram (via Mona Holmes in Eater LA): “I immediately go to the bathroom… holy crap !!! I wanted to stay in that bathroom forever !!! It was so beautiful and the lady in there offered me candy !!! I declined…. Then I went to my seat and was given the menu. First up… the salad. HOLLLLLY WOWZA !!! Is God food??? … I failed to mention I had my first glass of red wine in 13 years !!! I felt more sexy in that restaurant than I ever have in my entire life… I cried over food in this beautiful restaurant.”
She has 38.7M followers, folks. Get her in for a comp.
January 14th:
The Funge – There are a handful of articles out there right now treating VCR Group’s “World’s First NFT Restaurant,” Flyfish Club, as if it wasn’t announced months ago, but if you want some useful information about this new crowdfunding strategy, head to Lisa Jennings interview with co-founder/CEO David Rodolitz in Restaurant Hospitality, where you will hear a bit of an NFT restaurant SWOT analysis that goes something like:
STRENGTHS: Free money. “I brought in a little bit north of $14 million on my NFT drop, not including (10%) royalties on the secondary market. Every time it trades hands, I make money. And there’s been over $14 million as it gets traded on the secondary market over a couple weeks (including the smaller private launch in December).” Assuming that’s the royal “I” (meaning the partners?), but the NFT-buyers have zero equity beyond their membership. Those members have just given VCR fourteen million American dollars and are hoping/trusting for the best!
WEAKNESSES: Non-dining NFT traders. “This is a private dining club and I need to make sure the club is full [of members paying for food]... I’ll give a drastic example, but if people who bought [membership tokens] originally all live in China and are just doing this for a quick speculative investment, we could have 1,500 token holders and end up with an empty restaurant.” The partners have held back a number of tokens they can release selectively later, but that might obviously piss off current owners who value the supposed rarity.
OPPORTUNITES: Rich people. “Some people spend $20,000 to do an idle wine tasting with [co-founder Gary Vaynerchuck]…. Companies pay [co-founder] Josh Capon $10,000 hour to do a virtual cooking class.”
THREATS: Crypto rollercoaster. Memberships are bought and sold via Ethereum tokens. “And, as it happened, on the day [the NFT] dropped, Ethereum was down a bit. It would have probably been a couple million dollars more if Ethereum pricing was from two days earlier. But that’s the volatility and some of the exposure that we have, but it’s all been calculated already.”
Always a little wiggle room in the biz plan when a bunch of strangers hand you $14M for a pocketful of mumbles (such are promises)!
That Secondary Market – Meanwhile, there exists a world in which restaurant guests trade access passes without a middleman… Headline in Eater from Luke Fortney: “Diners Turn to Reddit to Sell Their $1,500 Reservations During Omicron.” Peer-to-peer ticket resale. Brave new world.
The Lists – Both Vogue (via Kat Odell) and Robb Report (via Jeremy Repanich) are out with more Most Anticipated Restaurants of 2022 lists this week. Congrats, all! Plus big congrats to those making both lists, including: Brochu’s Family Tradition (Savannah); Kono (NYC); Bar Spero (DC); Marigold Club (Houston); Little Saint (Healdsburg); and Philotimo (DC).
And congrats also to folks getting featured in the upcoming season of PBS’s Migrant Kitchen series, including: Jon Yao of Kato in LA, “Bonnie Morales of Portland’s Kachka, José Enrique of Jose Enrique Restaurant in San Juan, Chris Williams of Lucille’s and Jonny Rhodes of Indigo, both in Houston, and Brooklyn’s Jenny Kwak of Haenyeo and Sohui Kim from Insa.” Announcement details and show trailer from Eater’s Madeleine Davies here.
Runnin’ Down a Scene – Also lists of sorts… NYT Food is apparently spending these slow January days putting out roundups of cuisine scenes city by city. Brett Anderson and Christina Morales had a photo heavy look at Miami’s baking world on Tuesday, which comes after Tejal Rao sang the praises of LA’s sushi masters last week. (Nice to see Miami food getting national attention for something other than New York chain restaurants moving there these days.)
The End of an Era – In Oakland, “After nearly 15 years in business, Tanya Holland’s game-changing restaurant, Brown Sugar Kitchen, has closed the doors of its last location for good.” Berkeleyside’s Eve Batey has the obit (including what feels like a bit of a gift to Bay Area crime hawks?): “Like many other restaurants, including well-funded chains like California Pizza Kitchen, Brown Sugar Kitchen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last May, a last-ditch attempt to save her business… But still, it wasn’t enough. ‘We were undercapitalized from the beginning,’ Holland said. Add to that high rents and increasing crime in Oakland, and ‘It was all too much,’ Holland said. ‘Safety. Car break-ins. Murders. A reduced police department...’”
And last but not least: The Longest Year – Hate to end on a downer, but this COVID story, from the Miami Herald’s Carlos Frías, shook me a bit: “Everyone thought it odd when Nino Pernetti called the afternoon of Dec. 31, 2020, to say he was skipping the annual New Year’s Eve dinner at his landmark Coral Gables restaurant of more than 30 years, Caffe Abbracci. He injured his ankle while playing his daily round of tennis, he told his friends, family and staff... ‘We should have known better,’ his ex-wife Marlén Pernetti said… Days later, he would be transferred to the COVID-19 ward at Mercy Hospital, where no visitors were allowed… More than a year later, Nino Pernetti has not returned home… He is fighting for his life.” Pernetti turned 76 in the hospital last summer.
January 18th:
The Big Day – Email from the Independent Restaurant Coalition: “TUESDAY: National Day of Action to Save Restaurants.” That’s today! The plan: “Look out for an email from us that morning as well as posts on Instagram explaining how we can unite our voices to deliver relief for not just those who were left behind by the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, but every single independent restaurant and bar impacted by the pandemic.”
Nothing says capital ‘A’ Action like an email teasing an email… Good luck out there today, folks!
The Comeback – Headline in the Seattle Times: “7 months after sexual misconduct accusations, ‘it’s time to reopen JuneBaby,’ Edouardo Jordan says.” Details via Jackie Variano: “On Friday… Jordan announced via Instagram that he is ready to reopen the Ravenna soul food eatery: ‘As someone who has been taught to stay the course through all of life’s obstacles, I’ve always kept moving, growing, and learning. I’ll continue to do just that, but with a clear lens, and renewed purpose. The future is unknown, but i do know it’s time to reopen JuneBaby — a small, Black-owned family restaurant that is my livelihood and my purpose.”
Jordan got a bunch of support for the comeback on his MLK-inspired Instagram post, but several commenters also said negative posts were being deleted. The gist of the positive notes seems to be: “No one is perfect. I’m hungry!”
The gist of the critiques is that Jordan has still never really apologized or fully dealt with the allegations (detailed here). That’s backed up by Variano in the Times, who says that after a couple attempts at lackluster apologies on social media, “By the fall, all apologies had been deleted from Jordan’s Instagram.”
Reaction from Seattle writer Naomi Tomky on Twitter: “AYFKM. Here is what we are not going to do: talk about this. Cover this. Eat here.”
Will a media/awards boycott matter? We shall see…
The Bad PR – Everyone’s struggling to figure out the best way to handle sick leave and safety with omicron, but damn some own-goals read a lot worse than others…. Shannen Joachim, service director at Gabriel Kreuther in Manhattan told the NYT’s Priya Krishna and Christina Morales “that last month, members of management encouraged several employees not to get tested, even if they had been exposed to the virus. She said the person in charge of the restaurant’s Covid protocols told her he didn’t believe the virus was real. One chef, she said, led mandatory breathing exercises on Saturdays before service in which many people were unmasked.” A spokeswoman for the restaurant denied all that, but per the NYT, “All of these allegations were corroborated by other employees.” Oof.
The Managers – In her Food Section newsletter, Hannah Raskin sorts through some new data from between March 1, 2020 and Sept. 1, 2021, and finds that (at least in Georgia), while it’s true that COVID killed more cooks than any other food service worker, the deadliest job per capita was actually “Food Service Manager,” which Raskin equates to a GM role. Obviously, it’s not a competition(!), but her math goes like this:
“173 restaurant, fast food and institutional cooks died of Covid in Georgia during the 18-month span, which works out to 24 percent of deaths in the industry statewide.” But over that same time period, 102 food service managers also died, and because “as of May 2020, there were 61,000 cooks working in Georgia… compared to 8,440 food service managers… if you were a food service manager in Georgia during these 18 months, you were four times more likely to die of Covid than if you were a cook.”
A bunch more interesting numbers and useful caveats in The Food Section here.
The Media – Tweet from (now former) Wine Enthusiast editor Layla Schlack: “I'm still enthusiastic about wine, but [Friday was] my last day at Wine Enthusiast. Starting [today], I'll be editorial director at Whetstone Magazine — my dream since before it even existed.” NB: Whetstone is making all kinds of moves lately, including launching a new suite podcasts, at least one of which topped iTunes charts last week. And its founder, Stephen Satterfield, hot off starring in the first season of Netflix’s High on the Hog, signed a “major” book deal late last year. Congrats, all!
Some Sad News – “Ed Schoenfeld, who helped open the eyes of New Yorkers to the glories of Chinese regional cuisine with a series of top-rated restaurants in the 1970s and ’80s, notably Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan, Auntie Yuan and Pig Heaven, died on Friday at his home in Newark, N.J. He was 72. The cause was liver cancer, his son Eric said.” Full, very fun obituary from William Grimes in the NYT, who says, “Mr. Schoenfeld, a Jew from Brooklyn who in his 20s looked like a roadie for the Grateful Dead, seemed an unlikely ambassador for Chinese cuisine....” Cameos from teachers and business partners Joe Ng, Jeffrey Chowdorow, David Keh, Michael Tong, Grace Chu, and more. Obituaries and tributes also from critic Adam Platt in Grubstreet, Luke Fortney in Eater NY, and others, I’m sure.
And last but least: For Design Fans – If you’re up for a trip to the architecture side of things, take a look at Wallpaper’s 2022 Best Restaurant Design award winner in Thailand, which goes by its full name, The Artisans Ayutthaya: The Women Restaurant. I usually see glass bricks used in spotty, unnecessary ways, but I like their critical mass here (they are the entire structure), at least from the outside. From the inside, feels like it might get a bit boring — and hot? Still, probably fun for staff to watch guests get lost in the relatively small grounds…
January 21st:
The Hike – Headline in Robb Report: “NYC’s Eleven Madison Park Is Reinstating Tipping. The… $335 tasting menu will no longer be inclusive of service.” Eater NY’s Luke Fortney got the news first, but RR’s Jeremy Repanich got the quotes: “‘When we reinstitute gratuities, we will be able to adjust the hourly pay of our food service team as a result of their wages being supplemented by the gratuities collected,’ restaurant spokesperson Ben Rosenthal told Robb Report. ‘Using that savings, we will increase the hourly pay of our kitchen team. Being able to pay our dining room and kitchen teams at Eleven Madison Park more competitively was our key motivation behind this adjustment.’”
Which… is exactly what EMP said they were trying to do when they eliminated tipping! Per their Friday email to customers (included in Fortney’s piece): “Like many of our peers, we originally embraced this model in an effort to ease the historic, often glaring financial stress between those that work in the kitchen and those in the dining room… After years of using this system, we learned that it does not positively provide for anyone in this new normal.”
Effectively raising prices by 20%, however… Massive positive potential all around!!!
For the Somm: The red flags – According to the latest Silicon Valley Bank report on the state of the wine industry: “In 2021, wine consumption in the U.S. did not grow. Wine lost market share to spirits, taking a nosedive into the negative for sales growth at liquor and retail stores, restaurant and bars, while spirits growth increased from 2020. Total wine sold wholesale, such as to supermarkets, also declined throughout most of the year…. That’s notable because restaurants and bars reopened last year, which should have been a boon for wine, [report author Rob McMillan said.” Story from Jess Lander in the SF Chronicle, with maybe the no-context kicker of the year so far…
“‘We’ve ridden the 65-plus-year-old for too long,’ he said. ‘There’s a saying in Texas. “When the horse is dead, get off.”’”
For the Bar: The big gig – “MGM Resorts announced [Tuesday] that Julian Cox will be stepping up as their executive director of beverage and corporate mixologist starting this month. [Cox’s] lengthy career spans projects in Chicago, Austin, and Los Angeles.... He’s worked with beloved LA restaurants like Tartine, Bestia, and Otium, as well as… Lettuce Entertain You Hospitality Group.” Details in Eater LV via Maddy Sweitzer-Lamme.
The Critics – It’s back to outdoors only for at least a handful of prominent restaurant critics, including Bill Addison at the LA Times, Soleil Ho at the SF Chronicle, and Pete Wells and Tejal Rao at the NYT. Addison, Wells, and Rao all give personal reasoning. In conversation with each other, Wells said his son has COVID (as of earlier this week), and Rao said she’s “terrified of losing my sense of smell again, among other things.” Addison says his partner “has a close family member living with a chronic illness whom he goes to see monthly.”
Ho wrote (ten days ago) that with many dining rooms closed anyway (“since the highly contagious omicron variant seems to take to indoor dining like a dolphin to water”) and lots of outdoor options still bumping, indoor info “isn’t very relevant to the public at the moment.”
Keep eyes peeled on the patios…
For Design Fans – Are we designing restaurants with COVID in mind, or are we ordering long communal tables like at the new Good Good Culture Club in SF (photospread by Patricia Chang in Eater SF)? I mean. Looks fun! Bright. Simple. Love the high school desk chairs (though maybe they could also use color?). And… Maybe there’s a fancy HVAC or something? That, or we’re placing more and more bets on a more normal new normal?
And last but not least: The Media – Eater is on a hiring spree this week, adding openings for editors in Las Vegas (full-time) and Dallas (part-time) on top of the Twin Cities (part-time) and DC (full-time) roles already out there (plus a few audience, social, and video gigs). Will keep you posted on who gets what (and what they look like)! I’ve started on my cover letter for the DC job, but so far the entirety of it is just a two-line riff on a slow service experience I had at IHOP one night:
3 in the morning, the pancake house.
I am a patient boy. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait.
We shall see.
January 25th:
The Rock and the Inflating Place – Headline in the Washington Post: “Inflation is wiping out pay increases for most Americans.” But not all Americans, according to Abha Bhattari: “The only sector where pay increases outpaced inflation last year was in the leisure and hospitality industry, where workers generally make the lowest hourly wages of any sector. Workers there saw a 14 percent average raise from about $17 an hour to more than $19.50, according to an analysis of Labor Department data.”
Great for staff! But if I’m a restaurateur hoping Congress will refill RRF, I’m wondering how to convince constituents (who are watching cable news stoke inflation fears) that they should give a big aid package to the industry with highest wage growth in the country right now…
For the Bar – A Scottish investigative reporting show is out with another round of accusations of bad behavior at BrewDog this week. The full show is currently streaming only for UK-based TV license holders (and the lying liars who steal remorselessly from the British Broadcasting Corporation), but print reporting gives me the impression we’re looking at a case of…
Not only: “BBC Scotland's Disclosure programme has been told that staff at [BrewDog’s] Ellon brewery in Aberdeenshire knew that two of its flagship products, Elvis Juice and Jet Black Heart, contained extracts which were not approved in the US… One US-based importer said they had been deceived by Brewdog. In a social media post on Wednesday, CEO James Watt admitted to ‘taking shortcuts’ with the process.”
But also: “Brewdog chief James Watt accused of inappropriate behavior.” In this case, Watt denies the allegations, which involve several different ways he purportedly made (especially female) staff uncomfortable in their workplaces in Ohio and elsewhere.
For the Somm: Some Sad News – “Nicholas Molnar, a vintner who helped pioneer fine wine in the now-famous Napa County region of Carneros, died on Jan. 11. He was 94.” Per the SF Chronicle obit from Esther Mobley, beyond moving wine country borders, Molnar was also responsible for opening minds to new cooperage terroir, bringing Hungarian Kádár barrels to CA wineries for the first time in 1993.
And Last but not Least: For TV Fans – Here comes Top Chef Season 19. Yesterday’s Bravo TV press release says the 15 contestants “ready to mess with Houston, one dish at a time” are: Ashleigh Shanti (Asheville); Buddha Lo (NYC); Damarr Brown (Chicago); Evelyn Garcia (Houston); Jackson Kalb (LA); Jae Jung (NYC); Jo Chan (Austin); Leia Gaccione (Morristown, NJ); Luke Kolpin (Seattle); Monique Feybesse (Vallejo, CA); Nick Wallace (Jackson, MS); Robert Hernandez (SF); Sam Kang (NYC); Sarah Welch (Detroit); and Stephanie Miller (Bismarck, ND). Links go to their Bravo profiles, and there’s a trailer on the main page too.
There will be the usual cameos from a lot of the usual Top Chef suspects, plus Houston flavor from “Ope Amosu, Aaron Bludorn, Irma Galvan, Greg Gatlin, Robert Del Grande, Christine Ha, Trong Nguyen, Hugo Ortega, Monica Pope, Chris Shepherd, Kiran Verma, and Chris Williams.” And on the media side: “Hunter Lewis, Editor-in-Chief of FOOD & WINE, joins the judges for the final challenge.”
Good luck, all!
And for those of you working on cookbooks, there’s also a new Jamie Oliver show coming out in the UK that “will offer budding cookbook authors a deal with a prestigious publisher as its prize… The show will be a blend of cooking challenges devised to test and judge recipes, and publishing challenges devised in part to push the contestants and, according to [Penguin managing director Louise Moore], to ‘demystify’ an industry frequently criticised for its narrowness of scope and reliance on existing networks.”
Eater’s James Hansen has details on the show, but a broader profile on Oliver’s cookbook career in The Times (paywall) has more on the business side of things. There are very big numbers — Oliver’s cookbooks have brought in over $255M in revenue so far, almost $175M more than Nigella Lawson’s haul — and very small numbers: “More than 5,000 cookery titles were released into the UK market in 2020, but only 556 sold more than 100 copies and only 48 sold more than 5,000.”
There is also a throwaway line that went viral in good faith and bad: “These days Oliver employs ‘teams of cultural appropriation specialists’ to ensure his books don’t land him in hot water.”
And then there are the critics: “Marina O’Loughlin, [The Times’s] restaurant critic, owns between 500 and 700 recipe books, despite the main dish she cooks being toast.”
January 28th:
The Hike – Breaking down Eleven Madison Park’s imminent return to tipping this week, Eater NY’s Ryan Sutton says: “The current price of dinner… is $335, or $729 after tax for two. When the tipping policy returns, that same meal, if you leave a 20 percent gratuity, will clock in at $863.” He calls it a “Stealth Hike,” and takes EMP to task for more or less hiding the new fees from guests: “Unless you drill down to the middle of the ‘frequently asked questions’ link — a document that’s about as compelling as [airline safety manuals] — you probably won’t realize that service is no longer included until after you’ve made your non-refundable, prepaid reservation.”
Meh. Most guests will be fine. What the restaurant needs to worry about are staff. EMP said very clearly in their email to customers that this change will allow them “to increase the wages for all of those in our kitchen.” Imagine my surprise when several former EMP staff messaged me this week to say some version of: “Yeah. That’s what they said last time….” Food media loves a big, verifiable promise from a restaurant with a “Best of the Best” target on its back!
The Hike Too – Obviously, price points at the fast food level are not all that informative on the mid-upper range restaurant side of things, but still worth knowing what’s lining drive-thru pockets these days: “Price increases [of about 6 percent] on Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets and other food items helped McDonald’s more than offset sharp rises in food and labor costs and propelled the company’s revenues for 2021 to the highest level since 2016. McDonald’s said in a financial report on Thursday that global revenues topped $23.2 billion last year, a 21 percent jump from 2019... Profit soared 59 percent from a year earlier, to $7.5 billion.” Details via Julie Creswell in the NYT.
The Critics – The Infatuation has rebooted their website a bit, with what EIC Hillary Reinsberg calls “a pretty solid Covid-era glow up.” That glow up includes a return to rating restaurants on a scale of 1-10, which The Infatuation paused way back in 2020 (when there was that pandemic that came and went and was forgotten by all). FYI, Reinsberg says a big ratings update is ongoing: “Every rating you see on The Infatuation today is based on or verified by a visit that happened during the past year, most of them during the second half of 2021 or later. We’re launching with well over 2,000 new ratings, with more being added daily.”
But don’t worry. If you get a bad review, there’s a chance no one will ever see it. The new site has apparently decided against a search bar?
The Critics Too – SF Chronicle critic Soleil Ho took down three big ghost kitchen concepts this week: DJ (and Benihana heir) Steve Aoki’s Pizzaoki; YouTube star Mr. Beast’s MrBeast Burger; and DJ Khaled’s Another Wing. It’s a brutal review. Sample quotes:
Re Another Wing: “I hoped that the attempts would reveal that, yes, DJ Khaled did have some talent somewhere, if not in music then perhaps in the kitchen.” Nope.
Re Pizzaoki: “It was actually insulting to have to try so hard to eat something so bad.”
Re MrBeast Burger: “The doughy burger seemed to shrink away in shame as I looked at it.”
Maybe all fish in a barrel there, but I’m interested in what wasn’t in the review: Who made (assembled?) the food. I reached out to Ho, who says all three of the places they ordered from were working out of commissaries, so no restaurants had to take the fall this time. But not hard to see a ghost kitchen’s kitchen SEO getting dragged down in the future by association with bad ingredients (“black olive that stank of aluminum”) and shoddy cooking (mangled buns and “carelessly cut” pizzas) or worse. Sell out at your own risk.
And Last but not Least – Here’s Turkey and the Wolf’s Mason Hereford on Instagram this weekend: “I have some wild and unfortunate cookbook news so bizarre that it warrants using lowercase text. I’m sorry to say the Turkey and the Wolf cookbook won’t be shipping out in February as planned. There was a container collapse on the cargo ship that contained the Turkey and the Wolf books. The good news is that there were no critical injuries, as can happen in these situations. But the bad news is the books might be in a cargo container at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”
His weren’t the only ones. NYT Food’s Melissa Clark said her Dinner in One cookbooks were also on that ship and probably lost. Releases for both books were pushed back a few months, and everyone seems to be greeting the news with a mix of sadface sympathy and fish puns, but I believe I speak for all of us when I say, buuuuuuullllshiiiiiiit. The ocean ate your homework? Your excuses are like your sandwiches, Mason; bologna.
(I’m glad no one was hurt. I hope all turns out well. I regret using the word bologna in a deeply uncool way.)
February 4th:
Tired: Bourdain Market. Wired: – “In an unexpected twist to NYC’s ever-expanding stable of food halls, restaurant industry nonprofit the James Beard Foundation is throwing its hat in the ring. The national foundation and restaurant awards machine has teamed up with Jamestown — the seasoned food hall operators behind Chelsea Market and Brooklyn’s Industry City — and Google to launch a new food hall with over a dozen vendors at Pier 57 in Chelsea, opening in fall 2022.” Scant available details via Erika Adams in Eater NY.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to reach out to JBF with questions before sending this newsletter. I have several! About the business setup (licensed name / paid consultancy?); conflicts of interest (awardees as employees again?); reputational risk (wages, tipping policies, sourcing, etc etc.?); and more. Will let you know what I hear back.
Awards Season – And speaking of the Beards… At their 2021 no-awards awards ceremony, Tanya Holland teased a possible change to future awards that might have moved us away from the “Best Chef” concept: “It is past time for the JBF awards to admit that the pinnacle culinary accomplishments are never the work of one person… Food is a collaborative medium, the James Beard Awards of the future will shine more light on everyone in the kitchen not just the person at the top.”
Now, Allecia Vermillon, vice chair for the Beards’ Restaurant and Chef Awards is out with an essay on the foundation’s site explaining that won’t happen this year: “One idea we discussed was changing our regional Best Chef awards—perhaps honoring regional restaurants rather than individual chefs. This could cast an award’s shine across all the people whose talent and effort create the runway for this recognition.” But after some objections from people in the discussions: “In the end, we decided to not rush any decision on our regional awards and will revisit the topic this summer, armed with the learnings of our first post-audit Award cycle.”
That essay about not changing just yet is incongruously titled “Change is never easy, but necessary” and begins (I kid you not): “Call it the waffle principle.”
The Suits – That group of restaurants that sued the city of Minneapolis to stop the vaccine mandates has lost round one in court. Per David Schuman and WCCO Minneapolis, “They argued that the mandate required them to hire and train new employees to check vaccine cards and tests at a time when they were already struggling to hire workers. There would also be lost profits from patrons who refused to comply with the mandate, they said. But the judge found the plaintiffs’ evidence of economic harm to be ‘speculative,’ and said in part that they are already required to check cards of patrons to confirm they are old enough to drink alcohol. ‘This is simply another card to be checked,’ the memorandum reads.”
For the Bar – “Columbia Room, one of the most ambitious and revered cocktail bars in DC and around the country, will permanently close on February 11. Taking over the Blagden Alley space is another legendary bar—New York’s Death & Co—which inspired founder Derek Brown before he opened his original drinking den 12 years ago.” Per the Washingtonian’s Jessica Sidman, as he moves away from strong drinks and bar management, “Brown is now studying positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and working as Director of Education for Spiritless, a company that produces a zero-proof bourbon called Kentucky 74. He also just released a book on no- and low-alcohol cocktails called Mindful Mixology and plans to continue educating people on that topic—in whatever form that ultimately takes. One thing he doesn’t have planned, however, is another bar.”
For Design Fans – I don’t know how it’s possible that I’ve never seen a picture of the interior of Sexy Fish in London before, but now I’ve also seen pictures of the new Sexy Fish in Miami (via Ken Hayden in Eater) and… as much as that photo of the dining room sends my Wes-Anderson-meets-The-Shining heart into a pitter patter of whimsically surreal horror warmth, the moment I saw those blue vs. pink bathrooms, the spell was broken, and I was dumped into a bad undersea version of the Rainforest Café. Even for people very-on-drugs, feels like a little subtlety could go a long way there.
Over-the-top designers, juxtaposition is your friend! Let that gorgeous, marble(?) octopus invade a less in-your-face space than that all-blue men’s piss-palace, and watch it truly take over the room!
But stick with the mermaid and pink theme in the ladies room. All ladies love pink and mermaids. Known fact.
February 8th:
The Big Picture – “Foodservice and bar employment grew by 108,000 jobs in January, but leisure and hospitality employment remained down 1.8 million, or 10.3%, since pre-pandemic February 2020, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.” Details via Ron Ruggless in Restaurant Hospitality. While nationwide unemployment remained around 4%, the Independent Restaurant Coalition’s Erika Polmar issued a statement saying the “unemployment rate for leisure and hospitality works is 8.2%,” and added: “When people working in leisure and hospitality are more than twice as likely to be unemployed, it’s hard to argue the economy is thriving.”
Meanwhile… Ian McLernon, the CEO for the Americas of Remy Cointreau (the company which partnered with IRC on its Super Bowl ad last year) told Bloomberg TV that while between 50-90k accounts (i.e. restaurants and bars) have closed in the U.S., “the average check is about 15% more than it was before the pandemic,” and the company is raising prices to meet demand again in April. He also says they’ve got a new Super Bowl ad coming this year called “Spirit of Community” aimed at “supporting the on-premise and the bartenders and the restaurateurs across the U.S.”
Woohoo?
The (International) Lists – The World’s 50 Best people are out with their first 50 Best list for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), plus a few individual awards (including an obligatory “Best Female Chef” entry). Of note off the top of my head: The top two restaurants are sushi-centric places in Dubai, one of which doesn’t serve alcohol (3 Fils), and the other of which is a Zuma. Rounding out the top 10: OCD (Tel Aviv); Trésind Studio (Dubai); Sachi (Cairo); Orfali Bros Bistro (Dubai); Fakhreldin (Amman); LPM (Dubai); George & John (Tel Aviv); and Gaia (Dubai). Almost a third of all restaurants on the list are in Dubai, and none are outside major cities (with the exception of one that’s about as far from Tel Aviv as Stone Barns is from Manhattan). 50 Best’s usual issues apply, I assume...
The Books – It’s time for the annual “SPRING COOKBOOK PREVIEW!” from Paula Forbes in the Stained Page News, and it’s a doozy (I lost count at 50)! But here’s a quick sample of (North American) restaurant and bar names I spied while skimming: Matt Horn; Kenji Lopez-Alt; Pat Martin; Adrienne Cheatham; Kevin Bludso; Jason Bangerter; Suzanne Barr; Natasha David; Sally Schmitt; Nyanyika Banda; Reem Assil; and more. And, as always, highly recommend SPN if you are considering writing (or just interested in) cookbooks.
The TV – On top of everything else he’s had going this past year, José Andrés got Ron Howard to make a documentary about World Central Kitchen? “We Feed People” will be premiering at SXSW in March before going to Disney+. Oddly enough, it was announced as part of a long Twitter thread from Disney+ that included new travel shows, nature shows, fiction shows, but… no new cooking, restaurant, or food shows? Some of you oughta pitch those guys…
And Last and Least: The Metaverse – Headline in the NYT: “How The Sims Became the Internet’s Most Exciting Place to Eat.” Story from Nikita Richardson: “In the last year, Kayla Sims [that’s her actual name] began raising her own cows and chickens. She did a bit of traveling, trying dishes like bhel puri, tuna maki rolls, beef yakisoba and feijoada for the first time. She even did some cooking; one day, she made a crown roast and baked a birthday cake shaped like a hamburger. But she didn’t need a farm or an airline ticket or a stove — just The Sims, the long-running video game that allows players to create characters, called Sims, and build a virtual life around them…”
Hm. I’m not a big scare quotes guy, but try reading all that aloud without your fingers going full Bennett Brauer on words like “raising her own cows and chickens”; “did a bit of traveling”; “trying dishes”; “did some cooking”; etc. etc. If the metaverse lives up to the hype, we’re going to need some new typography to signify the difference between eating at Noma 2.0 and “eating at” Noma Web3. This Luddite suggests “wingdings.”
February 11th:
The Opacity – I regret to inform you that I have gone back and forth several times with reps for the James Beard Foundation over the business arrangement for their upcoming NYC Food Hall and still am not entirely sure what exactly is going on there. One minute they are an “anchor tenant” and “in full control” of one kiosk in the hall, the next we are talking in third person about wages.
I’m zeroed in a bit on wages (Will any employees be paid via the tipped minimum? What will minimum wage at the JBF kiosk be?) because I think it’s fair for the restaurant industry to know what the most visible industry non-profit “pushing for new standards in the restaurant industry to create a future where all have the opportunity to thrive,” thinks is actually doable when it comes to paying staff.
If the James Beard Foundation, with its big (good!) goals and expectations, thinks the best they can do for their own food service employees is minimum wage, or that taking the tip credit is the best way to make the numbers work, I think that’s a helpful data point in the larger conversation.
To be fair, the one thing I have gotten out of them is that, much like for awards nominees, they expect each prospective tenant to sign on to this Mission and Values Alignment document. In it, they ask that tenants strive “to make the industry a more viable career choice through the furthering of sustainable wages and benefits.” And that tenants join the JBF in being “open and honest about the ever-evolving nature of creating a more equitable industry and invite others into the process.”
Open the books, fearless leaders! (Or at least give me a call...)
The Vigorish – Story from Amy McCarthy in Eater: “As part of the company’s ongoing push for growth and expansion, DoorDash announced that it’s getting into the financial services business with plans to offer cash advances to restaurants that will be automatically repaid via deductions from every DoorDash order the establishment fulfills. DoorDash Capital will offer what the company describes as ‘fair, fast and convenient financing’ which they say can help restaurant owners cover payroll and rent if revenue comes up short, to establishments that use DoorDash to handle delivery and pick-up orders.”
You can probably guess Eater’s standard take from the headline: “Attention Restaurants: DoorDash Will Eat Your Profits and Loan You Money.”
The Wizard’s Tower – Not a great sign when an article about “how far is too far to be pushed for the sake of fine dining,” begins with a trigger warning about suicide, but here we are (and that’s your warning). The restaurant in focus is LA’s Vespertine, and the head chef doing the pushing is Jordan Kahn. Re that suicide: Eater LA editor Cathy Chaplin does give a cook and friend of the deceased a chance to say that, “we can’t blame the restaurant for… whatever was going on with [Jonathan, the man who took his own life],” but that almost feels like too little too late after several paragraphs of accusations building on the way Kahn singled out and bullied Jonathan — accusations Kahn denies. I have no personal connection with Kahn or Jonathan, and this part of the story absolutely broke my heart, but to be clear: Ben, the friend, is right. You can’t lay all that on Kahn.
That said, it’s a long, detailed piece worth reading, mostly full of the kinds of accusations that will divide readers (and staff) into “Yeah, there are standards at this level, get over it” vs “This is exactly what the industry needs to leave behind,” camps. Kahn denies almost everything, but he does so via a crisis PR firm that you probably shouldn’t hire if you get called out. (Asked about Kahn’s decision to go on with service the night the staff learned of Jonathan’s death, the firm’s response was basically: “What? And make the guests sad?”)
And some of his denials feel almost laughable. One particularly tough accusation worth pulling out: “Typically, former employees say, whenever a guest was unable to scale the stairs [to the allegedly ADA-contravening rooftop], the restaurant enacted what was called the ‘rain play,’ which involved shutting down the roof for an entire seating... On October 30, 2018, the late Top Chef contestant Fatima Ali, who publicly had stage 4 cancer at the time, had an 8 p.m. reservation. She was assumed to be in a wheelchair and, according to service notes for the evening that Eater has reviewed, slated for the ‘rain play.’ Earlier that same evening, fellow Top Chef alum Mei Lin was set for the full Vespertine experience, which included appetizers, drinks, and conversation with Kahn on the rooftop deck. Kahn, several former front-of-house employees allege, directed staff to exhibit discretion to ensure that Ali didn’t catch on to the discrepancy.”
Kahn “claims that the roof was closed that night because of the weather,” but I’ve got five American dollars for the first person who can look at historical records of weather in Culver City that night and tell me how that’s true…
The Honor System – Changing gears and continents for a quick hop to London to check in on an incredibly emotional Wednesday tweet from the official account of The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall (Chuck and Cam): “Chefs Margot and Fergus Henderson both received an OBE today for services to the culinary arts. The married couple have founded a number of restaurants in London.” Is there dust in this room?
And Last but not Least: V-Day and The Big Game – No context headline in People (via Expedite): “Gwyneth Paltrow Takes a Bite Out of Her Vagina Candle in New Uber Eats Super Bowl Commercial.”
Quoth Paltrow: “This candle tastes funny. Not bad, but funny.”
February 15th:
The Festivals – Are back. “South Beach Wine & Food Festival (SOBEWFF) kicks off its 21st year on Thursday, February 24,” and per Eater Miami’s Olee Fowler, “Guests of the multi-day food and wine event can still expect all of the safety protocols enacted last year like a contactless ticketing system, temperature checks, COVID-19 sniffing dogs, capacity restrictions, cleaning, sanitization, limiting physical contact, masking requirements, and one-way traffic flow inside the events.” They’re also requiring, “attestation of either: a negative COVID-19 test no more than 72 hours prior to the event OR completed vaccination,” according to the website.
And then there’s Charleston Wine & Food, where the same vax-or-test restrictions apply, but in investigating some complaints from volunteers, fellow newsletterer Hanna Raskin found: “In an e-mail provided to [Raskin’s] The Food Section, festival representatives confirmed that mask use is optional for all festivalgoers.”
Honestly, with mask and vax requirements tumbling like dominoes across the US, I think the real question moving forward for food and wine festivals is: Can Dave Chappelle still come???
That Fast Casual $$$ – Lotta chefs get into fast casual, but this is the first non-Tosi I’ve heard of chasing dessert-based fast casual dollars. Via Holly Petre in Restaurant Hospitality: “Former ‘Top Chef’ contestant and celebrity chef Fabio Viviani is partnering with franchise development company Fransmart for his latest venture, JARS… The plan is for the fast-casual dessert concept, where everything from tiramisu to cookies is served in jars, to be in the top 60 media markets across the U.S. with the help of Fransmart, which has helped companies like The Halal Guys, Qdoba and Five Guys franchise nationally.”
To be fair, almost all dessert / ice cream shops qualify as fast-casual, so this is probably just business jargon to attract capital, but still… Jars! Who knew?! (I mean, high people, obviously. But who else?)
That Scarcity $$$ – I interviewed an international ad exec about the “metaverse” for an unrelated project yesterday, and they brought up FlyFish Club (totally unprompted) as an example of the future of metaverse utility, so I decided to check back in on that NFT-based private restaurant club from Gary Vaynerchuk, David Rodolitz, Josh Capon, and Conor Hanlon. There are some usual restaurant things going on: They just released a polished little trailer for the restaurant — a restaurant that presumably still doesn’t have a signed lease yet. And they’re having some growing pains managing expectations from members who paid top dollar for tokens but can’t bring plus-ones to one of the first events (see Rodolitz’s latest in their Discord if you’re in it).
All normal, but I was surprised to see they also ran a very public video contest for members to try to earn a spot at a Miami yacht party during SOBEWFF. That means anyone can pull up #bubbleboatffc on Twitter and meet… some characters! Enjoy.
And last and least: For TV Fans – If you like trash and/or hate watching, you’ll love the news from Jennifer Maas in Variety yesterday: “Discovery Plus has ordered ‘Serving the Hamptons,’ a docuseries following the ‘young, sexy restaurant staff’ at a hot Hamptons restaurant and all of the drama they dish up on and off the clock.… Premiering on Thursday, April 7… the show brings viewers inside 75 Main Restaurant as its staffers hook up, argue and work together to make sure the clients come back for more, per the show’s official logline.”
Woohoo! Everyone is very excited. Except maybe one Mr. or Mrs. Tushy McBumblesnazzle, who responded to one of the reality stars in the comments: “Who cares? You, all the scumbags on the show and everyone like you destroyed the place I once called home when it was regular blue collar people.”
Can’t stop progress, Tushy. Can’t stop progress.
February 18th:
The Classics – From the James Beard Foundation on Twitter Wednesday: “The James Beard Awards… is officially back! After an extensive audit of policy and procedures, we’re thrilled to kick off the 2022 [Beard Awards] cycle by announcing the six America’s Classics honorees.” And the winners are… Casa Vega (LA); Corinne’s Place (Camden); Solly’s Grille (Milwuakee); Wo Hop (NYC); The Busy Bee Café (Atlanta); and Florence’s Restaurant (Oklahoma City). Details on the official site here, but there are a lot of proud local news stories out there too. Congrats all!
Oh, and in case you were wondering, there is a lot of interesting, deep history in these places, but Eater LA’s Mona Holmes also says, “Yes, you HAVE seen Casa Vega in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” With the picture to prove it.
The Aid – And in news you can use from the JBF: “The 2022 scholarship application is now open!” I count 40 or so opportunities in the brochure, starting with Andrew Zimmern’s $10,000 “Second Chances” scholarship (applicants must submit 250 words explaining why they need a second chance and how culinary studies will help them use it), and moving on through specific programs based on demographics, subject matter, and need, all the way to thousands of dollars in tuition waivers from ICE and Johnson & Wales. If you know someone going the F&B studies route, send them to jamesbeard.org/scholarships for details.
The NRA – Headline in Restaurant Hospitality: “National Restaurant Association names Michelle Korsmo president and CEO.” Details via Holly Petre: “Previously, Korsmo served as president & CEO of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, prior to which she served as CEO of the American Land Title. Additionally, Korsmo was executive vice president at Americans for Prosperity Foundation and served in the 2001-2004 Bush Administration as deputy chief of staff to Secretary Elaine Chao.” DRAIN THE SWAMP (and use it to refill the RRF?).
The RRF – Missed this last week, but Maryland Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D) gave Roll Call’s Lindsey McPherson and Laura Weiss some helpful insights into the Restaurant Revitalization Fund refill bill he and some colleagues have been working on. Key points:
- They’re trying to attach it to the upcoming omnibus spending package, which could pass sometime next month. (Though a good rundown on the broader political situation in WaPo this week warned: “It’s still not clear there will be an omnibus.”)
- Any new money will be focused on people who applied and couldn’t get funds for whatever reason last time (“There will not be a new application process for restaurants and bars that did not apply for the last round, Cardin said.”)
- “It won’t be more than $48 billion, the amount he and [Republican Senator Roger Wicker] proposed in a bill they introduced in August to backfill the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.”
- And finally: “‘We’re not going to be asking to come back again for any additional funds,’ the Maryland Democrat said. ‘This is it.’”
Grain of salt. Knock on wood. Eggs in various baskets. Etc. etc. Good luck, all!
The Media – Tweet yesterday from erstwhile Eater writer Elazar Sontag: “In about a week I'm starting my new job as restaurant editor at Bon Appétit, where I'll write and edit stories about incredible restaurants and restaurant culture across the country. There is such a good team at BA right now and I can't wait to work w them!!” Here are Sontag’s Twitter, Instagram, and personal website for reference.
And about that team he’s excited to work with… SF Chronicle Food editor Serena Dai announced this yesterday too: “It’s time for a big dose of PERSONAL NEWS: I’m leaving the SF Chronicle and will be joining Bon Appétit as its new digital editorial director, overseeing the website.” She’s also moving back to NYC, where she worked at Eater, to join BA Exec Editor Sonia Chopra, who also worked at Eater. Bon AppetEater? (I’m so sorry. I blame Food Media.)
Not sure how this moves mastheads and organograms around at Eater and BA, but Dai’s Chronicle job is already up for the applying. If you know my friend Big Willy Hearst III, please forward this email to him as my cover letter, including this link to my official A.B.B.A. C.V. I am definitely willing to relocate. Thank you.
And Last and Least: The True Crime – Remember Sarma Melngailis and all the weirdness that happened around NYC’s Pure Food & Wine circa 2015? There was some kind of “cosmic endurance test,” an attempt at canine immortality, and alleged raw vegan embezzlement? Welp. Netflix is giving it the true crime treatment. May they present: Bad Vegan. Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. Limited series coming March 15th…
February 22nd:
Today’s Family Meal will be the long delayed and much anticipated reveal of the results of last fall’s Family Meal Reader Survey. If you don’t care about those, please navigate away from this email, and I’ll see you on Friday for next Family Meal. If you do…
Let’s get to it…
This goes, in order: Who responded; What they want from Family Meal; Fun questions. Skip around as you wish.
First, Responders – Close to 200 people filled out the form, but some skipped questions here and there. Around 54% of responders worked in and around restaurants, 20% worked in food media, and 25% don’t have jobs related to restaurants. (I don’t think that reflects actual Family Meal readership. I think that reflects Family Meal survey takers.)
Those that worked in restaurants were 57% owner or head chef; 30% management; 28% BOH; 26% FOH; 7% bar; and a handful of marketing managers, operations types, etc etc.
NB: Wherever percentages add up to more or less than 100, assume I allowed people to check multiple boxes and/or my rounding is off. It was my first survey.
Those that worked around restaurants were all over the place: Investors, tech workers, various versions of “consultant,” a restaurant bike mechanic(!), and more. But the majority were in PR, supply, design, and real estate.
88% said they read Family Meal to see things they might have missed otherwise. 66% read it for my takes on the news. And 33% read it to confirm their own cold-hearted yet improbably optimistic worldview. My soulmates.
Second, Opinions – I’ll save you a full rundown on the advice I was seeking, but: A solid majority of you like Family Meal the way it is, though many said an update of format “wouldn’t hurt” and a picture now and then would be just fine. If you were to add anything, it’d be lists of links to more headlines (working on it!). Oh, and if Family Meal were to team up with other related newsletters for some kind of bundle subscription deal, 80% of you would be into it!
Third, Based – Here come your opinions, Q by Q…
Dave Chang is…
2%: A spectacular chef who promotes a diverse leadership team in a great restaurant group and is constantly working on himself so deserves forgiveness for past issues in an industry where everyone has been doing the same bad shit forever.
6%: Just another abusive jerk who should go away.
65%: Somewhere in between but he gets too much attention either way
8%: Somewhere in between but I don't think he's overcovered
5% Going to start putting out some ridiculous video content soon and there's nothing any of us can do about it.
Sample “other”: “The overcovered option but wanted to add he was in an episode of Blues Clues for godsake!” (The other category here was mostly a mix of “That guy sucks!” and “We’re all human.” with a smattering of “New faces, please!”, so it feels like the pre-populated answers captured the zeitgeist.)
Eater is…
32%: A great source for restaurant news, and all kinds of industry / food stories!
28%: A great source for restaurant news, but beyond that not for me.
1%: The anti-capitalist, social justice food site of my dreams.
4%: The anti-capitalist, social justice food site of my nightmares.
Sample “others”: “Is Eater anti-capitalist? I must be more commie than I thought.” “As good as its editor in whatever city.” “It puts asses in seats!” (There were also a handful of somewhat accusatory comments which I can’t include here without more vetting / reporting. Sorry!)
Restaurant critics…
39%: Play a vital role in the restaurant ecosystem.
18%: Are an anachronism we can leave behind.
12%: Should stick to food.
57%: Should consider the wellbeing of staff, the politics of the chef, and beyond.
5%: Basically tousled Trump's hair and are the reason for January 6th.
One Fair Wage is…
39%: Doing God's work (and I think God is cool).
5%: Doing Beelzebub's bidding (and I don't think highly of Beelzebub).
56%: A real purgatory situation.
The James Beard Foundation is a force for…
7%: Good
78%: The James Beard Foundation
5%: Evil
10%: Jesse Tyler Ferguson
Alice Waters once told the NYT, "Younger men are my Achilles' heel." Your reaction:
11%: "A man would never get away with saying something like that!"
16%: "Mine too, sister. Mine too."
1%: "Oh. Hey. Cool cooking and stuff. Ever hear of TikTok? I'm kind of a big deal..."
12%: "Gross."
35%: "Meh."
25%: "Oh my God, Andrew, that was like four years ago. How often do you think about her?"
Name someone who got cancelled but you don't think deserved it or think they should be forgiven:
Top answer by a mile: Alison Roman.
Interesting inclusions: Johnny Iuzzini, Andrew Zimmern, Paul Qui, April Bloomfield, Chrissy Tiegen, “everyone deserves a second chance,” and “Maybe that white guy that did the pho video (for eater?)”
Name someone who hasn't been cancelled yet but should be:
For obvious reasons, I’m not going to start listing out everyone you guys thought should be cancelled, but wooo boy. It’s about 70 names long and an impressive list! There are big name chefs and restaurateurs, people from your favorite food non-profits, TV personalities, and on down to the locally infamous. One somewhat righteous food Twitter type was described as “a ticking time bomb” and different dead people were described as “recipe writing hack” and “born into privilege but insists the industry is a meritocracy.”
Are you nervous? YOU SHOULD BE.
And last and least:
How can "moist" be the worst word when "polyp" exists?
40%: GREAT QUESTION!
60%: GOOD POINT!
And that’s it for today!
Sorry I didn’t have time to put this all into some sort of fancy infographic for you all. If you made it this far, thank you so much for bearing with me and responding to the survey and generally supporting this newsletter. It is a labor of love, and I love you all. Though based on responses to the “who should be cancelled?” question, I am also VERY suspicious of some of you…
February 25th:
Beard Season – Press release Wednesday: “Today, we are announcing our 2022 Restaurant and Chef Awards semifinalists in advance of the returning James Beard Awards presented by [a credit card similar to Amex, say, or Visa].” This is the long list, with around 20 semi-finalists each in over 20 categories, so you’re better off heading straight to the source to scan them all.
Sample bellwether: Best New Restaurant. And the semifinalists are… ABACÁ (SF); Angry Egret Dinette (LA); Bacanora (Phoenix); BARDA (Detroit); Café Mamajuana (Burlington, VT); Casian Seafood (Lafayette, CO); Dhamaka (NYC); Fritai (NOLA); Gage & Tollner (NYC); Horn BBQ (Oakland); Kasama (Chicago); Kimika (NYC); Laser Wolf (Philadelphia); Leeward (Portland, ME); Lengua Madre (NOLA); MACHETE (Greensboro); Matia Kitchen & Bar (Orcas Island, WA); The Marble Table (Billings); Nani's Piri Piri Chicken (Asheville); NiHao (Baltimore); Owamni (Minneapolis); Oyster Oyster (D.C.); Pier 6 Seafood & Oyster House (San Leon, TX); República (Portland, OR); Roots Southern Table (Farmers Branch, TX); Sooper Secret Izakaya (Honolulu); Union Hmong Kitchen (Minneapolis); Ursula (NYC); Zacatlán Restaurant (Santa Fe); and Zitz Sum (Coral Gables).
I’m already seeing some names pulled out for special (not good) attention, so the Foundation’s vetting team has its work cut out for it…
Next key dates:
March 16, 2022: Restaurant and Chef nominees (finalists) announcement, plus awards ceremony (in Scottsdale?) for the Leadership Honorees, Lifetime Achievement winner, and Humanitarian of the Year winner.
April 27, 2022: Media Awards nominee announcement.
June 13, 2022: Restaurant and Chef Awards ceremony in Chicago.
No dates yet for the media ceremony, but if I am nominated, I will be there. Please take that into account — pro or con — voters!
P.S.: The Cards – I kid, but the 2022 Beards are really presented by Capital One, and there’s a good chance they’ll use this year’s awards to remind everyone that they’re taking on Amex-Resy and creating what beloved humanitarian / celebrity chef / corporate-finance shill (multitudes!) José Andrés calls: “Capital One Dining, a reservation platform… that lets cardholders book reservations at some incredible restaurants in select cities in just a few taps.” Launching next month, per his Instagram.
The Fallout – “In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organization has confirmed to Robb Report that it will no longer hold its marquee event in Moscow this summer.” A rep told Jeremy Repanich, “At this current time, we are planning on holding the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2022 in London in July.”
Awards Season – If you need to butter up some food media types, the American Society of Magazine Editors is out with finalists (and some awardees) in various digital and print categories. Quick scan of food related noms: Epicurious for “How to Serve Every Cheese,” with Anne Saxelby; The New Yorker for “How to Cook With Your Microwave,” “The Timeless Fantasy of Stanley Tucci Eating Italian Food” and “How to Get a Table at Carbone,” by Helen Rosner; SAVEUR for “Meet Manhattan’s New Guard of Wine Pros,” photographs by Paola + Murray; Eater for “Filling Up”; and probably others… Congrats, all!
(Fun fact: ASME awardees are presented with a miniature sculpture designed by renowned artist Delia Deetz.)
The Boycott – Full disclosure, I have not delved into the recent Joe Rogan stuff as much others, but after all the controversy — a supercut of him using the N word and calling a theater full of Black people “Planet of the Apes”; credence given to anti-vax types; and more — around the show, I was surprised to see chef / restaurateur Daniel Holzman promoting his new FoodIQ book on there this week. Skipping around, there’s some funny cooking chit chat; support for pro-gun, pro-Trump coffee brand Black Rifle; and around 02:12:00, a long “let’s google that” conversation where Rogan keeps floating the idea that hot sauce was invented in tropical countries to make it safe to eat tainted food. Holzman tries shutting that down several times, but if you want a sense of how Rogan’s “I’m just trying to learn things” shtick applies to food, it goes a little like this…
Rogan at 02:15:00: “Let’s just go google ‘hot peppers kill bacteria’, like spicy peppers, because I think that is what I had heard first, and I think Bourdain might have been the one who told me that.”
Maybe he’s right! Then again, maybe not? Maybe appearing on Rogan’s show will sell tons of books and the rest of food media will shrug it off and/or are not worth worrying about anyway. Then again, maybe not? Lotta potential nuance here. Do your own research, folks!
And Last and Least: For Design Fans – This may be the first ever Design Fans item without photos, but I need you to close your eyes, have someone else read this excerpt from Oliver Shah’s Sunday Times profile of London restaurateur Richard Caring to you, and imagine: “He points out where the public bar and restaurant will be, where the private members will hide, where a giant Damien Hirst sculpture of winged lovers embracing on a unicorn will float. The millionaire artist… is making four such pieces for Bacchanalia. The ceilings will be covered in Sistine Chapel-style frescoes. Caring has been buying ancient statues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s to decorate the place — ‘2,000-plus years old’.”
“When we buy real art, I don’t count that in the cost,” Caring says. “As long as you don’t buy it stupidly, you can always get your money back.”
Words to live by.
March 1st:
The Brief, Wondrous Life of LAT Food – According to art director Kay Scanlon’s Instagram stories (also shared by critic Bill Addison), this week’s print edition of the LA Times Food section was “the last stand alone issue. Food and Saturday are merging into a new section called Weekend — debuting next Saturday.” This was… not unexpected. The top of the online Food page has been stuck in early December for the last three months; the hero of the video block starts with Jenn Harris getting excited about us “coming up to the end of the year, which means some people might be preparing for dry January…”; and I have, uh, not noticed resources being deployed to improve things elsewhere.
I reached out to acting editor Alice Short for comment, but haven’t heard back yet, and will reach out to more people this week.
When LAT Food first reintroduced its standalone print section in 2019, the NYT’s Kim Severson called the move: “A rare bright spot in a season of layoffs and consolidation in American journalism.” It was also a bright spot for restaurants and food types that benefit from expanded, (somewhat) serious coverage. But in late 2020, editor Peter Meehan resigned after a series of MeToo / toxic-workplace allegations, staff reshuffled, and within a year critic Patricia Escárcega left while accusing the paper of wage disparity issues (and maybe some of her coworkers of complicity?). Since then it’s felt like a bit of a rudderless — no permanent lead editor since Meehan left! — downhill run, so here’s hoping whatever happens next is some version of better.
The NFTs – Adam Reiner, who once called Tom Colicchio irresponsible for “promoting worthless NFT pizza art,” was tapped by Eater to write about… Tom Colicchio’s NFT pizza art. His piece is a roundup of sorts of NFT projects in the food world, including some I hadn’t noticed yet. For example: Andrew Friedman apparently put out some NFT-marked bottles of his “Industry Spirits” well liquor brand this year. “Ruth McCartney, a digital media entrepreneur, and David Skinner, the chef of the 12-seat restaurant Eculent outside Houston, created Gourmet NFT to take chefs ‘from the butcher block to the blockchain’ by offering them a place to sell individual recipes directly to consumers.” And — “Following the suggestion of two American interns in the restaurant’s marketing department,” per a cited NYT piece — the team at Bros in Italy are doing an NFT of the infamous “lick the chef’s tongue” dish that sent them into viral bad review territory a few months ago.
Good luck, all! My best advice for those of you looking at NFTs: “You’ve got to trust your instincts and let go of regret. You’ve got to bet on yourself now, star. Cause that’s your best bet.” Came up with that myself.
The Critics – Speaking of bad reviews, in Grub Street yesterday, critic Adam Platt knocked James Kent and Jeff Katz’s Saga restaurant down a floor or two mostly by complaining in various ways that the restaurant didn’t offer “much that a jaded tasting-menu veteran hadn’t seen before.” There wasn’t much in that review that a jaded review veteran hadn’t read before either — notes of Ryan Sutton on TAK Room and Tejal Rao on Napa — and I didn’t think much about it until I read writer Kirsty Bosley’s viral piece last week in the UK’s Birmingham Mail: “I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it.”
The meringue stuck in my mind:
Platt on Saga: “‘We like to think of our menu as the story of how the chef got to where he is today,’ our server intoned as we took delivery of a palate-brightening creation made with a little dome of a meringuelike substance filled with yuzu foam and served with a collection of carefully tweezed microgreens in a glass bowl.”
Bosley on Adam’s in Birmingham: “A wooden box was brought to the table first with a pretty red beetroot meringue inside and some kind of little rice cracker thing on top. Precisely two mouthfuls of food. Here we go, I thought. Little dishes, big money. God, I loved them. The meringue disappeared on my tongue and gave way to goats cheese and I made a loud 'MMMM' sound in the general direction of the people sitting next to me. Wow.”
I don’t have a larger point here. Platt warns dedicated seekers of the new about the “dutifully reproduced” price-tag tastes of “stolid Wall Street burghers.” Bosley reminds some of us that the old can still be new, and the old can still be fantastic.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, etcetera etcetera.
March 4th:
The Aid of War – Not going to run through all the various ways bars and restaurants are pouring vodka out, raising money, or being held guilty by name association, but do want to highlight something I think is new in this Ukraine mess: Veselka, the Ukranian diner in NYC that has been packed lately, is publicly raising funds for not only civilians, but also combatants. Per Ryan Sutton in Eater NY: “Flyers [with QR codes on the tables] direct patrons to sites where they can support the Ukrainian army, helping supply them with lethal aid… One of the QR codes, for the non-profit Razom, leads to a link that lets folks transfer money to help Ukrainians procure ammunition. Other links are for helping citizens buy military-grade vests, helmets, and tactical medical backpacks.”
Trying to remember this happening in any other recent conflict and coming up blank?
I also saw that World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook tweeted pictures of armed men in Ukrainian uniforms holding bags of food with the caption: “In Kyiv, WCK restaurant partner Mafia has been cooking meals for shelters, hospitals & medical battalion.” I assume WCK as a humanitarian organization is not directly supporting combat troops alongside medical battalions, but they obviously can’t control what the restaurants they are working with are doing either…
Fair enough! I have a tiny lil’ hunch this is not the first time an American restaurant has given money to foreign combatants, and it’s definitely not the first time an aid group has had to work with people who might not adhere to the same humanitarian neutrality standards they do. But… It’s not nothing either. Not to be too dramatic, but… the US restaurant industry has entered the war?
Beard (Edits) Season – “A Chicago chef was left off the list of James Beard Award semifinalists that was released last week due to a clerical error. Jason Vincent of Giant was added to the outstanding chef category on the James Beard Foundation’s website yesterday, six days after the list of nominations was originally released.” Eater Chicago’s Aimee Levitt says, “A spokeswoman for the foundation confirmed the addition in an email, saying, ‘That is all the information we have to share at this juncture.’” (That phrase is a serious contender to replace the JBF’s “transparency” values statement lately.)
NB: Some other names were also taken out of contention due to last minute restaurant closures and role changes, including Peter Prime of Cane in DC, “Luis Young of Penrose Room in Colorado Springs and Ben Welch of Botanica in [St. Louis].” Details on those via Stephanie Carter in Eater DC.
Top Chef Season – The big show returned this week, and so did discussions of last season’s winner, Gabe Erales. Somehow, host Tom Colicchio seemed almost caught off guard by that cloud in a written interview with Daily Beast journalist Matt Wilstein. There is a lot that people will pick on here (variations on “That’s in the past,” “He’s a great chef and he won so whatever,” and “We’re not talking rape here,” will be fan favorites), but my problem is that Tom doesn’t seem to care at all. He doesn’t make a case for or against Erales keeping the title because he — the face of the number one chef show in America — says he hasn’t even bothered to spend the $1 USD I just paid to read the details of his winner’s case on Austin Statesman dot com. It’s all very politician-running-away-from-shouted-questions with “Sorry, I haven’t read the report that everyone is talking about everywhere.”
It goes like this, Tom: According to his own admissions to the Statesman (July, 2021!), Erales had a consensual sexual relationship with a member of his staff. Then he went to film your show (and won). When he came back, he says the physical stuff stopped, but he “continued communicating with her in an unprofessional manner.” He also cut that staff member’s hours due to what he called poor performance. He was fired for this before your show aired. He told the Statesman, “After I returned from ‘Top Chef,’ I made some business decisions as a manager that affected this employee and were found to be discriminatory and I realized that those were bad decisions.”
Maybe that’s not bad enough to strip him of his title or whatever! Fine! But at least have the guts to read the facts and defend your argument. Need to borrow a buck?
The End of an Era – Headline on AL.com: “James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dolester Miles, an Alabama treasure, retires.” Details in an appropriately long bio/goodbye by Bob Carlton: “Dolester Miles was one of the first people Frank Stitt hired when the celebrated Birmingham chef opened Highlands Bar and Grill, his French restaurant with a Southern soul, in 1982…. Now, after nearly 40 years —working alongside Stitt and his wife, Pardis, in their four Birmingham restaurants Highlands, Chez Fonfon, Bottegga and Bottega Café — the self-taught pastry chef… quietly retired at the end of December.”
The Media – On Twitter yesterday, Washington DC’s Laura Hayes wrote, “Today is my last day [at Washington City Paper] after 5.5 years… I'm headed to a new career adventure I hope to announce soon.” The replies to the original tweet and the quote tweets around it speak volumes, heaping praise from food media and DC industry types alike. As someone who reads restaurant news from time to time, I can tell you DC food media, the alt-weekly restaurant beat writ-national, and my weekly reading lists are all lesser today. Ugh.
And Last but not Least – Since I know you’ve been following this story closely, an update on CityBeat from Vince Grzegorek in Cincinnati this week: “Frank Capri, a former mobster turned government witness turned developer who scammed The Banks with a Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill-branded restaurant, was sentenced last week to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and tax evasion.” Reminder from the Enquirer’s Randy Tucker: “Frank Capri… was a former soldier in New York's Lucchese Crime Family who was released from prison in 1999 after agreeing to testify against fellow mobsters, according to a years-long investigation by The Arizona Republic. His real name was Frank Gioia Jr.”
March 8th:
The Aid of War – Not going to run through all the various ways bars and restaurants are pouring vodka out, raising money, or being held guilty by name association, but do want to highlight something I think is new in this Ukraine mess: Veselka, the Ukranian diner in NYC that has been packed lately, is publicly raising funds for not only civilians, but also combatants. Per Ryan Sutton in Eater NY: “Flyers [with QR codes on the tables] direct patrons to sites where they can support the Ukrainian army, helping supply them with lethal aid… One of the QR codes, for the non-profit Razom, leads to a link that lets folks transfer money to help Ukrainians procure ammunition. Other links are for helping citizens buy military-grade vests, helmets, and tactical medical backpacks.”
Trying to remember this happening in any other recent conflict and coming up blank?
I also saw that World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook tweeted pictures of armed men in Ukrainian uniforms holding bags of food with the caption: “In Kyiv, WCK restaurant partner Mafia has been cooking meals for shelters, hospitals & medical battalion.” I assume WCK as a humanitarian organization is not directly supporting combat troops alongside medical battalions, but they obviously can’t control what the restaurants they are working with are doing either…
Fair enough! I have a tiny lil’ hunch this is not the first time an American restaurant has given money to foreign combatants, and it’s definitely not the first time an aid group has had to work with people who might not adhere to the same humanitarian neutrality standards they do. But… It’s not nothing either. Not to be too dramatic, but… the US restaurant industry has entered the war?
Beard (Edits) Season – “A Chicago chef was left off the list of James Beard Award semifinalists that was released last week due to a clerical error. Jason Vincent of Giant was added to the outstanding chef category on the James Beard Foundation’s website yesterday, six days after the list of nominations was originally released.” Eater Chicago’s Aimee Levitt says, “A spokeswoman for the foundation confirmed the addition in an email, saying, ‘That is all the information we have to share at this juncture.’” (That phrase is a serious contender to replace the JBF’s “transparency” values statement lately.)
NB: Some other names were also taken out of contention due to last minute restaurant closures and role changes, including Peter Prime of Cane in DC, “Luis Young of Penrose Room in Colorado Springs and Ben Welch of Botanica in [St. Louis].” Details on those via Stephanie Carter in Eater DC.
Top Chef Season – The big show returned this week, and so did discussions of last season’s winner, Gabe Erales. Somehow, host Tom Colicchio seemed almost caught off guard by that cloud in a written interview with Daily Beast journalist Matt Wilstein. There is a lot that people will pick on here (variations on “That’s in the past,” “He’s a great chef and he won so whatever,” and “We’re not talking rape here,” will be fan favorites), but my problem is that Tom doesn’t seem to care at all. He doesn’t make a case for or against Erales keeping the title because he — the face of the number one chef show in America — says he hasn’t even bothered to spend the $1 USD I just paid to read the details of his winner’s case on Austin Statesman dot com. It’s all very politician-running-away-from-shouted-questions with “Sorry, I haven’t read the report that everyone is talking about everywhere.”
It goes like this, Tom: According to his own admissions to the Statesman (July, 2021!), Erales had a consensual sexual relationship with a member of his staff. Then he went to film your show (and won). When he came back, he says the physical stuff stopped, but he “continued communicating with her in an unprofessional manner.” He also cut that staff member’s hours due to what he called poor performance. He was fired for this before your show aired. He told the Statesman, “After I returned from ‘Top Chef,’ I made some business decisions as a manager that affected this employee and were found to be discriminatory and I realized that those were bad decisions.”
Maybe that’s not bad enough to strip him of his title or whatever! Fine! But at least have the guts to read the facts and defend your argument. Need to borrow a buck?
The End of an Era – Headline on AL.com: “James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dolester Miles, an Alabama treasure, retires.” Details in an appropriately long bio/goodbye by Bob Carlton: “Dolester Miles was one of the first people Frank Stitt hired when the celebrated Birmingham chef opened Highlands Bar and Grill, his French restaurant with a Southern soul, in 1982…. Now, after nearly 40 years —working alongside Stitt and his wife, Pardis, in their four Birmingham restaurants Highlands, Chez Fonfon, Bottegga and Bottega Café — the self-taught pastry chef… quietly retired at the end of December.”
The Media – On Twitter yesterday, Washington DC’s Laura Hayes wrote, “Today is my last day [at Washington City Paper] after 5.5 years… I'm headed to a new career adventure I hope to announce soon.” The replies to the original tweet and the quote tweets around it speak volumes, heaping praise from food media and DC industry types alike. As someone who reads restaurant news from time to time, I can tell you DC food media, the alt-weekly restaurant beat writ-national, and my weekly reading lists are all lesser today. Ugh.
And Last but not Least – Since I know you’ve been following this story closely, an update on CityBeat from Vince Grzegorek in Cincinnati this week: “Frank Capri, a former mobster turned government witness turned developer who scammed The Banks with a Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill-branded restaurant, was sentenced last week to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and tax evasion.” Reminder from the Enquirer’s Randy Tucker: “Frank Capri… was a former soldier in New York's Lucchese Crime Family who was released from prison in 1999 after agreeing to testify against fellow mobsters, according to a years-long investigation by The Arizona Republic. His real name was Frank Gioia Jr.”
March 11th:
The Porky Pig – Tuesday night email from Independent Restaurant Coalition Exec Director Erika Polmar: “Friend, This is the news I hoped I would never have to share: the massive government spending proposal from Congress and the Biden administration will not include additional money for the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF).” Italics mine.
That’s all, folks.
Restaurant Hospitality’s Joanna Fantozzi reports D’s are blaming R’s, and some senators might try to get more funding through in a separate bill, but I don’t think you need to be a Hill insider to imagine just how unlikely that is these days.
Asked what this news meant for the thousands of restaurateurs buried under immeasurable COVID debt, an imaginary congressional spokesperson told me: “If you have debt after all this, that is your debt. It is not the debt of a grateful nation that asked you to endlessly pivot and pull back and close your small business in time of global and American need. It is your debt. Hopefully the economy makes up for it. A rising, non-inflationary tide lifts all boats. Sorry yours has so many holes. Try plugging them with bootstraps?”
P.S. – In an article about how NYC’s Masa has upped the floor for its cheapest dining option to $1000 per guest, Eater NY’s Ryan Sutton notes Masa “received a maximum grant of $5 million from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund last spring, a pandemic-era program that most New York culinary establishments were shut out from.”
The Suits – Deja vu: “Alphabet Inc's Google has been making unauthorized pages for restaurants and using them to take a cut of fees from delivery orders through sites like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, according to a lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco federal court… The lawsuit says… in some cases delivery sites pay Google to divert users to them.” Wonder where they learned that behavior? Google says they “do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations” through their “Order Online” feature and promises to defend itself “vigorously.” Details via Blake Brittain in Reuters.
The End of an Era – “Chowhound, the website that began 25 years ago as a digital gathering place for obsessive food lovers, will close down on March 21, the site announced on Monday.” The NYT’s Eric Asimov gives Chowhound a full obituary treatment, including this great last quote from co-founder Jim Leff: “‘Before I wrote about food, I was making finds and no one cared,’ he said. ‘Then I became a writer, and people cared. Then Chowhound, and they cared a lot. Now I continue to make great finds and nobody cares. From my perspective, it’s all been a comfortable straight line. I’m a chowhound to my core.’”
For the Somm: The Court – WaPo’s Dave McIntyre has an update on what the Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas is doing to “restore its reputation after being plagued by scandals.” First up is a more “classic nonprofit structure” under former P&G brand manager Julie Cohen Theobald and a new group of non-industry board members. On top of diversity goals and HR standards, “the new board is also moving away from the celebrity somm to emphasize professionalism.” Sorry to everyone who watched Somm and thought that could be them!
NB: The Americas Court is not to be confused with the European Court, whose board still looks like this.
Some Sad News – Sorry to do this to you, but the front page of NYT Food looks a bit like an obituary section today, so… The ledes:
Writer: “Fred Ferretti, who covered a panoply of breaking news events for New York City newspapers before becoming best known for his prolific writing on cuisine, comestibles and cooking for The New York Times and then Gourmet magazine, died on Monday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 90.” Obituary via Sam Roberts.
Vintner: “Alain Graillot, who had never made a drop of wine when he arrived in the Crozes-Hermitage region of the Northern Rhône Valley in France in 1985 but became one of its leading producers, raising the reputation of its wines internationally, died on Friday at a hospital in Grenoble. He was 77.” Obit from Erik Asimov.
Baker: “Charles E. Entenmann, the last of three brothers who, with their mother, ran a Long Island bakery as it became one of the nation’s best-known producers of baked-goods, died on Feb. 24 in Hialeah, Fla. He was 92.” Story by James Barron. (I was a powdered donuts kid. RIP.)
And Chef: “Sally Schmitt, who with her husband, Don, opened the French Laundry, the now famous restaurant in the Napa Valley of California, in 1978, and in doing so helped solidify the valley as a food-and-wine destination and start a culinary movement built on seasonal local ingredients, died on Saturday at her home in Philo, Calif. She was 90.” Neil Genzlinger has her obituary for the Times, and the SF Chronicle has the local paper version via Janelle Bitker.
For Design Fans – Check out the restraint from Tao Group on Lavo in LA. Photos from Wonho Frank Lee in Eater LA, and it looks… not idiotic! I love that we’ve officially moved on from mid-century modern atomic lighting to the white shaded side of art deco. (For variety’s sake. Your ball and pipe pendants are fine!) The choice of crazy bright art against beige and muted seems to work pretty well. And the curtains on that archway are both obvious and perfect. That produce pedestal… maybe a bit much. But hey, they can’t all be 16-foot neon bodhisattvas!
March 15th:
The End of an Era – In San Francisco, “Daniel Patterson’s acclaimed fine dining restaurant Coi has permanently closed, marking the end of chef’s reign in the Bay Area.” Per Janelle Bitker in the Chronicle: “The restaurant hasn’t served diners since the pandemic began. In a statement on Instagram, Patterson claimed lenders refused to let him reopen. ‘I proposed a remodel and to reopen with a fresh vibe, but they still said no,’ he said. ‘It breaks my heart to lose a restaurant I put so much love and so much of my life into.’”
Thus ends one of the strangest restaurant group runs of the last several years, a mix of star chasing (Coi), b-corp celeb chef collab failure (Locol), and radical inclusion and/or POC tokenism depending your perspective (Kaya, Dyafa, Besharam). A wild ride.
(Fun fact: After leaving Coi for the Bocuse d’Or in 2019, Matthew Kirkley moved to Hong Kong and is cooking at Belon here these days. I think.)
And speaking of Bay Area lenders… Headline in Eater SF: “Charles Phan’s Whiskey Bar Hard Water Hit with Eviction Notice for $400,000 in Unpaid Rent.”
The Ghosts – “Reef Technology and The One Group — parent to STK and Kona Grill — have partnered for a delivery-only operation in Austin, Texas, The One Group announced during its fourth quarter earnings call on Monday. This seems to be ghost-kitchen specialist Reef’s first fine-dining collaboration.” NRN’s Holly Petre reports One Group CEO Emanuel N. P. Hilario downplayed the move as a “test” and “not part of our core strategy” which “is still capturing the 200 opportunities plus for STK and 200-plus for Kona Grill.”
In other words: One if by land. Two if by ghost. Get ready for an STK/
Kona land-grab one way or another!
The Configuration – In the NYT, Melissa Clark makes “The Case for Induction Cooking.” It’s mostly geared toward home cooks, but if you’re willing to take some commentary from the comfort of Eric Ripert’s homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons, there is some industry food for thought here: “‘It’s so much more precise than watching a flame. You can really focus on your cooking and pay attention to what’s inside the pan, not what’s underneath it,’ [Ripert said.] He hasn’t yet converted his restaurant kitchens,” at least in part because they just installed new gas stoves last year. “‘But, if the gas stove broke, I’d consider it,’ he said, adding that he thought his cooks would adapt quickly. ‘After a few days, they’d all love it.’”
Per Clark, “That is just what happened with the chef Justin Lee of Fat Choy n Manhattan, although he wasn’t expecting it. Mr. Lee discovered other advantages over the summer: His kitchen did not get as ferociously hot as it would have with a gas stove, and the absence of open flames also led to a decrease in burns.”
Thoughts?
And last but not least: For Design Fans – Check out the color choice at “Bottle Club Pub, San Francisco’s New Throwback Homage to American Whiskey” from the Future Bars group. Eater’s Lauren Saria calls it “bold neon green accents,” but from what I can see in Patricia Chang’s photospread, “accent” is an understatement. And I’m… kind of into it? I mean, maybe I’d get sick of it after a year, but at least they deserve some points for going with a green other than emerald.
Not that there’s anything wrong with emerald.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day (Thursday)!
March 18th:
Beard Season – The nominees for the 2022 James Beard Awards (Restaurant & Chef editions) are out! Full list here.
And the nominees (in some sample categories) are…
Outstanding Restaurateur: Ashok Bajaj (DC); Chris Bianco (Phoenix); Kevin Gillespie (Atlanta); Akkapong "Earl" Ninsom (Portland, OR); Chris Williams (Houston); and Ellen Yin (Philadelphia).
Outstanding Chef : Reem Assil (Reem's, Bay Area); Mashama Bailey (The Grey, Savannah); Peter Chang (Peter Chang, VA/MD); Jason Vincent (Giant, Chicago); and Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi (Joule, Seattle).
Outstanding Restaurant: Brennan's (New Orleans); Butcher & Bee (Charleston); Chai Pani (Asheville); Parachute (Chicago); and The Walrus and the Carpenter (Seattle).
Best New Restaurant: Angry Egret Dinette (Los Angeles); Bacanora (Phoenix); BARDA (Detroit); Dhamaka (NYC); Horn BBQ (Oakland); Kasama (Chicago); Leeward (Portland, ME); Owamni (Minneapolis); Oyster Oyster (DC); Roots Southern Table (Dallas); and Ursula (NYC).
Sample Twitter takes:
Keith Pandolfi in Cincinnati on regional dominance: “Dear, JBF. Please, please, please give Chicago its own category. Four out of five finalists for Best Chef Great Lakes is simply ridiculous.”
Devita Davison in Detroit on planting seeds: “Warda Bouguettaya being nominated for Outstanding Pastry Chef hits different! Six years ago she was awarded $700 by [Davison’s nonprofit FoodLab] to help get her bakery started out of a church kitchen.”
Eater LA (via Mona Holmes) with a sigh: “Welp: There are only four James Beard Award finalists for Los Angeles this year.”
And SF’s Pim Techamuanvivit with some Thai pride: “What a day to be Thai chefs/restaurateurs in the US! Four of us are finalists in the Beard Awards. Congratulations ยินดีด้วยค่ะ! I’ve always believed that a cuisine is properly recognized when there’s not just one chef or one restaurant that is the one face of us.”
Takes elsewhere seem mostly positive or mild, but I read Houston Chronicle critic Alison Cook’s piece and winced a bit to see diversity and a decline in quality lumped together in the same paragraph like this:
“Steve McHugh — and I can’t believe I lived long enough to write this — is the token White male chef up for the Best Chef Texas title. I’m teasing, but only a little. The JBF reforms in the voting and nominating processes have indeed produced a wildly diverse slate of finalists. I did notice, glancing over the long semifinalist slate, that it seems less tied to consistent culinary excellence than it once was. My eyebrow shot up a few times. Good works and community outreach factor in now, too. If a deemphasis on consistent, soaring quality is the price of disrupting an awards system that was too tilted towards a culinary in-crowd, then so be it.”
The full piece is behind a paywall, and in it Cook does celebrate a lot of the new list, and says she fought in the past for people outside the “culinary in-crowd.” And she caveats any complaints with a disclaimer that she resigned from the awards committees twice!
But… I still winced. Flirting with “forced diversity drops quality,” requires some big caveats — not least: did anything else drop quality before…? — preferably in the immediate vicinity of the flirting.
Beard Season Too – Also announced were the Beards’ 2022 Humanitarian of the Year Grace Young, and Lifetime Achievement Award winner Martin Yan, as well as Leadership Award honorees Mónica Ramírez of Justice for Migrant Women; Irene Li of Mei Mei Dumplings and Prepshift; Erika Allen of the Urban Growers Collective; Mavis-Jay Sanders of Drive Change; and the “Emerging Leadership” of Oakland’s Understory.
Congrats, all!
Lists I like – It’s time for Eater’s useful “Most Anticipated Restaurants” lists yet again. Spring editions now out in: Atlanta; the Bay Area; Chicago; Houston; Las Vegas; London; Los Angeles (check out the curvy-brutalism™ of Workshop!); New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; Portland, OR; and more out or coming soon, I’m anticipating.
Oh, and the SF Chronicle jumped in with their own Bay Area version too, FYI.
The Media – Tweet from Bettina Makalintal on Tuesday: “Some news. This is my last week at Bon Appétit. On Monday, I'm joining Eater as a senior reporter.” For now, you can find her on: Twitter; Instagram (selfie central for the host stand); and TikTok. Personal site / bio here.
Some Sad News – In New York, “Domenico DeMarco, who founded Di Fara Pizza in 1965, has died. He was a link between the cooking of Southern Italy and the city’s corner-slice culture.” DeMarco gets the rare Pete Wells NYT obituary treatment, with lines like: “If Mr. DeMarco could use a gas oven to bake pizza that made you see the sun glinting off the Bay of Naples, then so could other cooks. They probably wouldn’t equal Mr. DeMarco’s stolid fastidiousness, but they could try.”
And last but not least: No Love Lost – I think it’s safe to say that the collapse of talks around the Restaurant Revitalization Fund also means the end of the vague lobbying alliance between the National Restaurant Association and the Independent Restaurant Coalition.
The NRA tweets: “Spending package to fund the government through 2022 fails to help 177,000 restaurants who were approved for but never received grants last year from the [RRF].”
IRC’s Tom Colicchio replies: “Thanks for nothing, as an organization you have worked against funding for independent restaurants.”
And just like that, a restaurant industry lobbying group rivalry is out in the open. Congrats to K Street.
March 22nd:
The Suits – Last night, Washington DC’s Attorney General Karl Racine announced on Twitter that the District is joining several other cities in going after big delivery in court: “We're suing Grubhub for misleading District residents and taking advantage of local restaurants to boost its own profits. Grubhub charges hidden fees and uses bait-and-switch tactics, all while pretending to help local businesses during the pandemic.” Racine alleges Grubhub is: “Failing to disclose when it charges higher prices than restaurants; Impersonating DC restaurants to get more business for Grubhub; [and] Advertising ‘free’ services that aren’t actually free.” The suit also echoes complaints Chicago has made about Grubhub’s “Supper for Support” pandemic promotion, where Grubhub offered discounts but passed those costs onto restaurants. Full complaint here.
Grubhub’s response sounds at least a little like an admission of some kind of skeeze: “Our practices have always complied with DC law, and in any event, many of the practices at issue have been discontinued.”
The Suits Too – Per Reuters’s Daniel Weissner, another US court has ruled mandatory service charges in restaurants do not have to be treated as tips, and can be used to cover base wages instead: “An 18% service charge added to customers' bills at an upscale Miami steakhouse owned by the celebrity chef known as ‘Salt Bae’ was not a tip, and the restaurant properly used the money to pay workers' hourly wages, a U.S. appeals court said on Friday. Ruling on an issue of first impression, a panel of the 11th Circuit said the key feature of a tip is that it is entirely within a customer's discretion, but the fee charged by Nusr-Et Steakhouse was mandatory…. The ruling is in line with a 2020 4th Circuit decision that said a restaurant's automatic 20% gratuity for large parties did not qualify as a tip.” Food & Wine also has a good explainer here.
The Media – Longtime Eater DC associate editor Tierney Plumb is now the full time editor of Eater DC. These links will take you to her Twitter and Instagram.
And speaking of DC, former Washington City Paper food editor Laura Hayes has a new job you should know about... She tweets: “Proud to be joining the incredible team at World Central Kitchen as the Chef Relief Network manager. My focus will be on growing an engaged network of culinary professionals who are committed to the organization's mission and will be prepared to help when needed. I start April 4.”
P.S. NB NYC: Forgot to mention last week that the NYT has a new “Where To Eat: New York City” newsletter coming out for subscribers starting today. It’s supposed to have senior staff editor “Nikita Richardson’s restaurant recommendations, from new places to beloved classics,” so if you’ve got a place in the city, you should probably be following Richardson’s socials too: Twitter here; Instagram here. Definitely not anonymous.
And Last and Least: The Heist – Via Laine Doss in the New Times: “This past Saturday afternoon, Kevin Aoki was preparing to ship some of his most treasured family heirlooms from Miami to Hawaii. The second-generation restaurateur, son of the late Hiroaki ‘Rocky’ Aoki, founder of the Benihana restaurant empire, packed most of the items into the 40-foot shipping container himself; the precious cargo included handmade furniture and priceless artifacts and memorabilia handed down to him from his father.” It was supposed to help fill a new Aoki restaurant on Oahu, but in the middle of the night someone pulled up a semi, hitched it to the trailer, and just… drove away into the night.
The true crime podcast writes itself. (Or I’d be glad to do it, for a fee…)
March 25th:
The Unforgiven – Headline in Restaurant Hospitality: “BLT Steak owner files for bankruptcy after being unable to pay back PPP loans. BLT Restaurant Group filed for bankruptcy after it received a PPP loan but was unable to ‘restart and engage’ its locations and entice employees to come back.” Details via Joanna Fantozzi: “40% of the company’s Paycheck Protection Program loan ($1.3 million of $3.3 million) was not forgiven by the federal government… During 2020, BLT Restaurant Group suffered a $7.6 million loss of income.”
The company says it “was unable to convince many employees to return to work in order to comply with the terms of the PPP loan.” Presumably, that means they spent money on something other than labor in the hopes future cash flow could be shuffled around to cover the cost? And there are bound to be a lot of other restaurants in that same situation. Last month, the Dallas Morning News reported: “While the vast majority of the 5.14 million PPP loans approved in 2020 have been forgiven — and many borrowers had a smooth process — as of early January [2022], there were 349,372 unforgiven loans and another 380,000 that were partially forgiven.”
At the time, unforgiven PPP loans totaled $28B. And those are just the nice, low-interest government loans…
The NFTs – Looks like mint day for Tom Colicchio and Spike Mendelson’s “CHFTY” NFT project went… OK? At time of writing, folks in their Discord are saying about 2,000 of 2,777 pizza-themed NFTs have been sold on day one. At 0.07 ETH a pop, that’s closing in on half a million USD in day one revenue. Looking at NFT marketplace OpenSea, it may be that a lot of people bought multiple CHFTYs, and some chefs involved in the project are either bullish or propping it up or both (Rocco DiSpirito bought at least a dozen and Jennifer Carroll is in for a few). But… very early days! We shall see, we shall see, how goeth the NFTs.
The TikTokkers – Speaking of brave new(ish) F&B revenue models, I love how easy Brandon Skier makes things sound in this Eater interview: “How I Got My Job: Becoming a TikTok Star After Being a Line Cook.” Skier says: “I had downloaded TikTok just to pass the time and I kept seeing food videos. I was like, ‘I can do that.’ So I just posted a video and said, ‘Hey, I’m a cook. If I started posting food videos, would anybody be interested in watching?’ And I think that video got over a million views in a day, so I just started posting short little videos of recipes and cooking hacks from a restaurant worker and it blew up.”
Results may vary, but… Also this week, the Chronicle’s Jess Lander reports wine influencers are getting huge on TikTok too: “As of March 1, hashtags like #winetok and #winetiktok had nearly 200 million views on the app, while #wine was approaching 6 billion.” Headline: Why TikTok — not Instagram — is a rising platform for winemakers desperate to lure Millennials.”
And the NYT’s Becky Hughes is out with a story on how some food businesses are having a hard time adjusting to moves made by Instagram earlier this year. You’ll never guess their solution: ”One newly favored way for a company to end reliance on Instagram’s algorithm: Move to another platform. PJ Monte, the founder of Monte’s Fine Foods, turned his attention away from Instagram and toward TikTok. ‘With basically no followers on TikTok, I’ve had two videos gain a few million views,’ Mr. Monte said.”
Love to jump from one gorilla’s back to another! Good luck, all!
Michelin Season – On Wednesday, Michelin did its new pre-Bib tease in Chicago, with “23 additions to the MICHELIN Guide Chicago selection. These establishments are highlighted as… new discoveries before the annual announcement of Bib Gourmands and Stars.” Ashok Selvam has a breakdown in Eater Chicago here. Full list on the official site here.
And last but not least: The Raises – Ukraine charity efforts are giving us a fun glimpse into revenue numbers at some of Keith McNally’s NYC places this week. Tuesday night totals (possibly influenced by the charity promotion) per McNally on Instagram: $28,106 at Morandi; $28,045 at Minetta Tavern; and $65,197 at Balthazar. Not bad early week takes… And all will be matched by a Balthazar regular and sent to UNICEF.
Side note 1: Interesting that McNally chose not to donate the money to food world favorite World Central Kitchen, whose leader José Andrés is currently implying on Twitter that UNICEF is missing in action in Ukraine…
Side note 2: McNally’s total for one full night in three Manhattan restaurants was $121k (without the match), which is great and generous(!), but still less than Ruth Reichl and Nancy Silverton raised in one night at Silverton’s house a couple weeks ago (menu here). Their total was $150k.
Not that it’s a competition or anything.
As in politics, a big base of small donors is great, but it pays to have rich friends! (Silverton and Reichl’s take went to WCK.)
April 5th:
The Relief – Did I say the Restaurant Revitalization Fund was dead? Turns out our friend is slightly alive… Roll Call’s Lindsey McPherson reported Friday: “The House might vote [this week] on a small-business pandemic aid package that would provide $42 billion for additional restaurant relief and $13 billion for other ‘hard hit’ industries. The Rules Committee is scheduled to meet on the revised bill Tuesday [today] afternoon, which indicates floor action soon after.”
I still wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet, especially given there’s another $10B COVID “preparedness” bill they’re also trying to rally bipartisan support for, and a lot of this seems to hinge on whether the costs can be “be offset by ‘all funds rescinded, seized, reclaimed, or otherwise returned’ from various programs in prior pandemic relief laws.”
But still, a tad more hope this week than last? And Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman says even Republican Democrat Joe Manchin is “supportive” of at least one of those COVID packages, so maybe that’s something? (I dunno. He could be blaving.)
The Suits – “A power struggle is emerging between a pair of investors behind some of Chicago’s buzziest restaurants.” Per Eater Chicago’s Ashok Selvam, “The co-owners of Maple & Ash and Etta — the flashy Gold Coast steakhouse and neighborhood hangout, respectively — met Friday, April 1 in Cook County circuit court over what co-founder David Pisor is calling an ‘illegal coup.’ Pisor, a co-founder of What If Syndicate, the group that owns the two restaurants, has filed a lawsuit claiming that he’s been banned from the restaurants as co-founder Jim Lasky attempts to oust him from their company. The complaint alleges Lasky has ‘repeatedly threatened to air Pisor’s “dirty laundry,”’ in regards to ‘alleged conduct that happened years ago… unless Pisor agreed to accept a below-market buyout from Lasky.’ Lasky is listed as the sole defendant.”
Selvam details police reports and allegations (characterized for the purposes of the business dispute as “unverified banter”) of Pisor being an “absentee owner” and harassing the marketing director around the time he thought he was being ousted from the company, but the only thing I feel pretty clear on right now is what’s at stake:
“Revenue for What If has climbed from $35 million in 2019 to a projected $180 to $200 million for 2022.”
The End of an Era – In NYC, “Forlini’s, one of Manhattan’s last remaining red sauce joints that first opened in 1956, has officially closed, owner Joe Forlini confirmed to Eater in an interview. The building that houses [the restaurant] has also been sold.” Emma Orlow has the details, but I’m still busy re-reading Alex Vadukul’s 2018 NYT piece about how a surge of Vogue trend types made the back room a sudden scene (with loads of great photos from Amy Lombard for contrast).
As Jason Diamond said in his Grubstreet tribute this week (edited for non New Yorkers): “The best of [Any City’s] classic institutions don’t reinvent themselves for new generations; they are reinvented by the city itself.”
The Geopolitics – In February, 50 Best took a bold stance on Ukraine by not mentioning anything about it at all in a standalone tweet that read only: “At this current time, we are planning on holding The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2022 in London in July.” (The awards had been planned for Moscow.) Last week, they came out with their big Asia list, and having apparently learned sensitive political lessons, did a bit of the ol’: Congrats to the restaurants in Taipei, Taiwan! Uh. Actually. Congrats to all the restaurants in Taipei, Greater China! Ah. Well. You see. So. Congrats to all the restaurants in Taipei! Now, only cities are listed for all entries, because who even knows which government rules what these days, really... (Kathy Cheng has a twitter thread detailing the edits from the, uh, Taipei perspective.)
And last but not least: The Media – Lots of big moves happening in food media while I was traveling:
In CA, both the LA Times and the SF Chronicle food sections got new editors, with the LA Times finally naming a permanent editor almost two years after Peter Meehan’s infamous departure. Laurie Ochoa will take over as General Manager of LAT Food, and Daniel Hernandez will move into the editor role. They are both pretty known quantities at this point, but Eater LA’s Mona Holmes has a good rundown on backgrounds and history if you need it. Can’t wait to see what they do.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle has replaced editor Serena Dai (who moved on to be Bon Appétit’s digital editorial director in February) with reporter Janelle Bitker, who has been at the section since 2019. Bitker says she’s delighted, but: “Most importantly, I'll be hiring for a deputy editor and a reporter ASAP, so I'd love to hear from you!” (By which she means me, folks.)
And at Eater, once-EIC Amanda Kludt has fully succumbed to Vox corporate’s freelancer-skin chairs and is now officially known as “Group Publisher of Eater, POPSUGAR, Punch, and Thrillist.” She is handing her From The Editor newsletter / column duties over to new executive editor Stephanie Wu. Kludt will be very much missed! But will Wu find the keys to that mothballed Eater Digest podcast in her old desk? TBD…
Oh, and if I’m in PR or at the host stand for any new or up-and-coming restaurants, I’m keeping my eyes out for new Bon Appétit restaurant editor Elazar Sontag, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds show man flying quickly around the country (in Chicago today?), eating (at least) five meals in a day, and musing about the trials of dining alone. Sounds a lot like a big glossy list in the making to me…
Plus, P.S. – Writer Esther Tseng says DoorDash is approaching potential contributors for a new print magazine…?
I will write for it as long as DoorDash promises: 1) I can write in pig latin and 2) No one at DoorDash understands pig latin.
April 8th:
The Relief – Headline in Roll Call: “House passes $55B aid package for restaurants, other businesses.” Reality check from CNN’s Manu Raju on Twitter: “It faces tough sledding in the Senate amid opposition from Republicans concerned about the costs.”
Raju says Republican Senator John Thune immediately “threw cold water on GOP support for an aid bill to restaurants after the House passed the $55B bill,” mostly because no one wants to spend more money right now. There is a lot of Republican skepticism about the plan to fund the bill with cash recovered from pandemic grant fraud investigations, and even if that money does exist, Restaurant Revitalization Fund sponsor Senator Ben Cardin (D) told Roll Call’s Aidan Quigley, David Lerman, and Laura Weiss in a separate article that a different, $10B COVID “preparedness” bill may get first dibs.
Oh, and also the House version of this aid bill is different than the Senate’s version, so there’s that to iron out. And none of this will be done in the next couple weeks at least, and probably none of it will matter at all without Republican support.
And that doesn’t even get to the part about border security horse trading around the $10B package, and the Senate’s schedule being clogged by other standard and wild card commitments, so…
I’m not saying you shouldn’t call your senator, but my hopes remain low.
That Planned Community $$$ – Headline in the Houston Chronicle: “Howard Hughes Corp. buys stake in Jean-Georges Restaurants.” Hughes, which invested $55M in the restaurant group, is the company behind the redevelopment of a good chunk of Manhattan’s South Street Seaport district, now anchored in part by JGV’s Fulton (the restaurant boasting my favorite duck/man mural of all time). Vongerichten already has restaurants in resorts and country club type settings, but this partnership is interesting because Hughes is mostly focused on massive planned communities in suburban (and exurban) areas. Maybe JGV will be franchise neighbors with Wolfgang Puck at some new desert golf / tract housing project soon?
P.S. – If you’re interested in the sheer scale and style of some of these Big Bluth developments, I regretfully recommend this promo video. It includes a bonus cameo from chefs Kwame Onwuachi and Edward Lee, who pop up at the 3:06 mark, right when the CEO says “diversity” in an otherwise not so diverse video…
The Festival Circuit – Speaking of diversity… Missed this big rundown on changes at Charleston Wine & Food from Clyde McGrady in WaPo last week: “A food festival accused of ignoring Black history is trying to change.” McGrady has some big numbers to back up claims of change: “In 2020, Black, Indigenous or other people of color made up 16 percent of the festival’s chefs, beverage professionals, winemakers and musicians. This year they account for about 34 percent, according to spokeswoman Alyssa Maute Smith.” Not sure how many of those ID’d as Black, but “Shellene Johnson, 50, has been to the festival more than 10 times and said this is the Blackest it’s ever been.” In a city like Charleston, that’s not nothing.
Michelin Season –Michelin Chicago’s full list came out Tuesday, and “included four newcomers, awarded one star each: Kasama in West Town, Claudia in Bucktown, and Esme and Galit, both in Lincoln Park. A grand total of 23 Chicago restaurants earned stars — one fewer than last year.” Eater’s Naomi Waxman has a breakdown on the rest, plus all the pandemic-year closures and pauses that knocked others off and kept some out.
And last but not least: The Corrections – I did the silly DC thing where I googled “Ketanji Brown Jackson restaurants” and (attention District industry types), this is what I found out:
First, Justice Jackson is not afraid to send stuff back. One of her friends told WaPo’s Marc Fisher, Ann E. Marimow, and Lori Rozsa: “I was raised to keep your head down, don’t make noise. You don’t want them to think this or that because you’re a Black person. But Ketanji would say small things. In a restaurant, she’d say, ‘My order is not correct,’ whereas I had this fear and I’d take it as it came.”
And second, there is a woman named Clare Cushman who serves as “the Supreme Court Historical Society’s director of publications,” and wrote a book called Table for 9: Supreme Court Food Traditions & Recipes. In an LAT piece about how bad the food at the court is — “Judges in general are not foodies” — she told Joel Stein, “It turns out the newest justice on the court has to sit on the cafeteria committee. ‘It’s like hazing,’ Cushman explained. ‘Though Elena Kagan put in the new frozen yogurt machine and it made her a lot of friends.’”
One word, Justice Jackson: conveyerbeltsushisystem.
April 12th:
The Defenestration – Haven’t been including the ongoing London restaurant investment drama behind Jeremy King’s ousting from his group (the Wolseley, the Delaunay, Bellanger, Colbert, Fischer’s and Zédel), but it got the NYT treatment from Mark Landler this week, so if you want the particulars of a blockbuster business divorce, here you go. King’s camp says he didn’t want to ruin his reputation by building a bunch of restaurants overseas, including Saudi Arbia, “because of the Saudi government’s human rights abuses,” so “Minor International, which bought 74 percent of Mr. King’s company, Corbin & King, for 58 million pounds ($75 million) in 2017,” called in a big loan and forced the group into bankruptcy. Then it scooped up the entire company at court-mandated auction, and King was done.
Minor’s chairman William E. Heinecke has another side of the story, I’m sure, but I couldn’t stop laughing at his strategy of just straight crapping on King in the (American) paper of record. Said Heinecke: “All creative people are unique but in Jeremy’s case, he began to believe his P.R.” and, “Heinecke called Mr. King a ‘very nice fixture,’ but pointed out that he was not the chef at his restaurants.” FOH must’ve loved that one.
The Tip Credit – Lest we forget, the Biden Administration is all in on ending tip credits. Not sure there’s much they can do about it, so Restaurant Hospitality’s Holly Petre reports they sent Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su to symbolically wait tables at a One Fair Wage event “at Baodega in New York’s Flatiron District, [that] was meant to shine a light on the plight of servers who work for a subminimum wage and promote the elimination of it entirely — a position that Su and the Biden administration support.” Video and write up here.
The End of an Era Profile Treatment – You have probably read at least one or two people mourning the loss of NYC’s Angel’s Share cocktail bar, but, per a Robert Simonson long read in the NYT, “In all of these lamentations, there was almost no mention of Tony Yoshida, the owner.... Despite its outsize importance as a trailblazer in the craft cocktail movement, few, in this age of celebrity restaurateurs and bar owners, seemed to know who was behind the place; or that he was the same person who owned a string of Japanese-oriented businesses on the short, angled section of Stuyvesant Street... Over the past 50 years, Tadao Yoshida, known as Tony, the mystery mogul of the East Village, has built a food-and-drink empire that few of his generation can rival. It all started in the early 1970s with the humble vegetarian-friendly joint Dojo and has expanded to include, most recently, the sprawling Japan Village food court in Industry City, Brooklyn. Mr. Yoshida helped teach New York that it couldn’t live without an authentic izakaya (something like a Japanese pub). And the cocktail revival of the aughts can be traced directly to Angel’s Share.”
Some Sad News – “Tony May, a visionary New York restaurateur and an international champion of authentic Italian cuisine, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.” Florence Fabricant a full obit in the NYT. “In Manhattan, Mr. May worked at Delmonico, Orsini, the ‘21’ Club and then, in 1968, the Rainbow Room as maître d’hôtel [and eventually GM and owner-operator],” before opening San Domenico, where chefs included Paul Bartolotta, “Andrew Carmellini, Scott Conant and, from Brescia, Italy, Odette Fada, who held the executive chef position starting in 1996, the rare female chef in a top-flight New York kitchen.”
And Last but not Least: The ICYMI Mob – Do you feel like you missed the big profile on “Mob Chef David Ruggerio” by Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair a few weeks ago? I know I did, because when I finally saw a link for it in Josh Gee’s excellent Snack Cart newsletter, I knew there was no way I could have read and then forgotten the part where Ruggerio — PBS star! Chef to presidents! Head of heyday La Caravelle, Maxim’s, and Le Chantilly! — confesses to helping murder his friend because a boss didn’t like the fact that the friend was wearing his own foreskin on a necklace at a meet up in a burnt out building in Queens. No. Way.
April 15th:
That Virtual $$$ – You already know the answer to this Eater NY headline asking “Why Is [Brooklyn’s] Kellogg’s Diner Selling Food Under 18 Different Restaurant Names on Delivery Apps?” but I got roped into reading it by the subhead: “Welcome to the wonderfully convoluted, incredibly lucrative world of ‘virtual restaurants’” Italics mine, because… Incredibly lucrative? Sort of. Like most things, the virtual kitchen game looks like a bonanza for the people selling the systems at scale, and a marginal win for restaurants actually making the food. A tale of two maths from Luke Fortney:
“[Kellogg’s owner Irene Siderakis partnered with [virtual kitchen company] Profit Cookers in February, running 18 of the company’s virtual brands out of the 24-hour diner. Since signing on, she’s already posted around $40,000 in additional sales, according to [Profit Cookers founder Kirk Mauriello].” That’s not nothing, but Siderakis only calls it, “revenue that we need to survive right now.”
Meanwhile, “Profit Cookers is already working with 46 restaurants across 10 states, with each business posting an average of $20,000 in sales from the virtual brands, [Mauriello] claims.” They take a 10% cut of those sales, and presumably can just keep adding restaurants, so… Profit cookers?
The Media – Note from Kate Cox, editor of non-profit food media site The Counter, on Thursday: “Dear Reader, I’m writing with news I hoped I’d never have to report. After nearly seven years publishing some of the most provocative and memorable food stories in journalism, The Counter will cease publication on May 20.” The Counter (previously known as The New Food Economy) was initially funded by hedge fund manager S. Donald Sussman, but his and other donations appear to have dried up. Ugh.
The Critics – FYI: SF Chronicle critic Soleil Ho has a new side-gig. Ho said on Twitter yesterday, “OK, I've finally been talked into it: I'm writing a book! (the first of many, I hope.) this one's a collab with sweet angel baby Chef Tu David Phu.” The attached Publisher’s Marketplace blurb says Memories of Taste is going to chef Bryant Terry’s 4 Color Books and will be “an exploration through stories and recipes of Vietnamese cuisine and the refugee experience in America.”
And last and least: The Stain – Fret not, Bon Appétit video team! Brad Leone’s latest pastrami no-recipe recipe may be generating negative headlines everywhere from the SF Chronicle (“Why Bon Appétit’s latest cooking video is being called ‘extremely dangerous’”) to Gawker (“Bon Appétit Wants to Give You Botulism”) to the NY Post (“Bon Appétit chef Brad Leone defends ‘atrocious’ recipe: ‘Sorry for your diarrhea’”), but cancellation isn’t real!
Except… at least a little bit when, like, four years after your big call out, your new gig is announced publicly via something like this headline in Eater: “Hip LA Chefs Tap Disgraced Ex-Estela Restaurateur Thomas Carter for New West Village Restaurant,” and your new employers feel obliged to remind the press that, while you will be cashing their checks in exchange for your business acumen, “Thomas will not be present on the floor day-to-day.”
April 22nd:
The Runner – Headline in Eater Austin: “Downtown Greek Restaurant Owner Escapes the Country, Leaving Workers and Rent Unpaid.” Doesn’t sound like that wild a story, really, until you realize that reporter Erin Russell actually got the owner to talk… George Theodosiou went with the ole Restaurateur Burnout Defense: “‘I was mad. My whole world collapsed,’ says Theodosiou. ‘I spent three years there building this restaurant, and Monday I would have [been] left with nothing. So for my own sake, and my own personal health, I’d rather walk out and take the keys, than stay there and be the idiot standing outside my restaurant with nothing.’”
He says he wants to make staff whole, and “acknowledges that he looks bad in this situation,” but then goes on to imply anyone chasing money should also be looking at previously unnamed / unknown partners, one of whom apparently owns the building the restaurant, Simi, owes rent to?
Recommend the whole article, and stick around for the kicker: “He also claims to be working with investors for different restaurant projects for his next venture somewhere.”
Good luck, all!
The Riders –Yesterday, NYC mayor Eric Adams “announced new protections for third-party delivery workers, including letting them choose routes and getting more information about deliveries... The new rules go into effect Friday [today].” Restaurant Hospitality’s Ron Ruggless reports that alongside new guidelines on pay and who gets what equipment, the apps must now: “Allow food delivery workers to set limitations on distances they will travel from restaurants and which bridges or tunnels they are unwilling to use, and provide upfront disclosure to food delivery workers about route, pay, and gratuities.” Not yet clear what this means for restaurants and customers in or near “bad areas”…
The Critics – Two new critics on the beat this month. In Dallas, Brian Reinhart tweets: “Last week, I started a new day job: dining critic at D Magazine.” His first column is a bit of a self-introduction if you don’t know him already: “I’ve been writing about and reviewing Dallas restaurants for six years now, first at the Dallas Observer as its food critic, then as a columnist for the Dallas Morning News… Now the folks at D have asked me to report on and assess our city’s food full-time, taking the place of longtime (and award-winning) dining critic Eve Hill-Agnus.” NB: He is not anonymous (past employers posted headshots).
And at the top of two new reviews last week, Chicago Magazine notes: “Now that things are stabilizing and places are opening (and reopening), we think diners can use help making sense of the new landscape. Enter John Kessler… He went to culinary school and worked as a cook and chef in Washington, D.C., and Denver before becoming a writer… He served as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s dining critic for 18 years. Since moving to Chicago in 2015, he has regularly contributed to this magazine. (You may remember him as the guy who drew much ire for his 2018 essay, “The Party Is Over,” about how the local restaurant scene had lost its luster.)” His photo is at the top of his first reviews.
P.S. The Media – Eater Nashville is looking for a part-time Nashville editor, and I can’t do it.
Some Sad News – Back in Chicago, “Bob Chinn, whose Bob Chinn’s Crab House on Milwaukee Avenue in Wheeling brought droves of customers to the northwest suburbs and became one of the nation’s highest-grossing restaurants, died Friday at 99.” Katie Anthony has a full obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Mr. Chinn was the third of seven children and the son of Chinese immigrants. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and his family moved to Chicago when he was 8… Mr. Chinn started delivering Chinese food on foot at 14 and dropped out of high school to join the Army during World War II… The Wheeling restaurant took in $24 million a year in food sales alone and was named by Forbes magazine as the highest-grossing restaurant in the nation in 2012. It had 700 seats and served 2,500 meals a day.”
And last and least: Ms. Manners – In “To Tip or Not to Tip” a big article about “tipping fatigue” this week, the NYT’s Christina Morales goes to a classic for norms: “The Emily Post Institute, which offers guidelines on etiquette, advises that tipping in a sit-down restaurant is expected. But faced with a tip jar, or the technology that replaces that, customers should consider tipping to be discretionary. ‘I see that situation as no different as to whether you’re going to pocket your change or put it in the tip jar,’ said Lizzie Post, the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, and the institute’s co-president.”
FOH at fast casual? Deli? Coffee? You can have a dime, time to time. As a treat.
April 27th:
Beard Season – Quick reminder to be gentle with your food media friends and useful contacts today, as the James Beard Foundation will announce “all category nominees for Book, Broadcast Media, and Journalism” this morning at 9:30AM EST via live tweeting from NYC.
Awards are stupid, and I definitely didn’t put Family Meal forward for this round, unless it is nominated, in which case, awards are a nuanced good, and there is no shame in putting yourself forward for them. Good luck, all!
The Fashion – In the LAT, Stephanie Breijo has a good, long rundown of all the ways fashion and food are collaborating with (and profiting off of) each other in LA. Sample list: “Designer and sneaker head Jon Buscemi partnered with longtime friend and fashion marketing expert Paulie James to launch sandwich shop, Uncle Paulie’s (now with [3] locations), where the snapbacks, tees and sweatshirts draw long lines and inspire Pete Davidson and other celebrity customers. DTLA chef Josef Centeno of Orsa & Winston and Bar Amá hand-dyes fabrics using rhubarb, gardenia fruit and other natural ingredients for his small-batch clothing line, Prospect Pine... One year, Evan Funke’s Venice trattoria Felix linked with the Hundreds to produce a five-panel cap that centered the restaurant’s signature ‘F’ in the brand’s iconic bomb logo. Another year, Blondie Beach designed a tee for Dulan’s sporting an image of the restaurant’s soul-food plate, labeled with the precision of an anatomy textbook.”
Reading it, I flailed between “Kinda cool!” and “Remember when people cared about ‘selling out’?” and nothing captured both of those quite like seeing so much about The Hundreds’s Family Style food / fashion festival, which the article did not mention is sponsored by DoorDash (and Crocs).
The Credit – Headline in Eater: “This Restaurant’s Menu Shows It’s Not Just One Chef in Charge. Dirt Candy is synonymous with chef and owner Amanda Cohen. Now, other chefs behind the scenes will get some of the spotlight.” The piece gave me the impression Cohen was going to tell Bettina Makalinatal that she’s finally letting the public know which team members have been helping create Dirt Candy dishes all along, but when I got to the interview part, what I actually read was: Fourteen Years After Opening, Chef Finally Allows Sous to Contribute Dishes to Menu (Within Specific Guidelines).
Makalinatal: “What was your menu development process like before [you started giving credit to others on the menu], and how was it different this time?”
Cohen: “In general, I would do most of it on my own: come up with the ideas and the vegetables that I wanted to use and test a lot of it by myself. Sometimes people would come up with things to add on to it or we’d go back and forth, but the initial idea and the initial testing started with me. This time, I knew what vegetables we were going to use for spring, and I had a general idea of what I wanted the dishes to be. I told each of my sous chefs [to choose] a vegetable/dish, gave them a general outline, and they ran with it. There was a lot of back-and-forth because it’s still Dirt Candy-style so it all has to be of a piece, but they did most of the testing and they came up with a lot of the ideas. Whereas before I would say 95 percent of each dish was me, this time I would say [it was] more like 50-50.”
But, like, 51-49 if lawyers are asking.
Michelin Season – Not sure what to make of this new Michelin system of dribbling out information throughout the year. For Washington, DC’s 2022 book, they teased a few new inclusions back in December, and then another batch a few weeks ago. Then on Monday, they put out the news that four of those previously released new inclusions will be Bib Gourmands, dashing dreams of stars for restaurants that had already been told they’d made the book on some level. (All links go to Eater DC explainers about each tease.)
Eater quoted international guides director Gwendal Poullenac as saying, “By revealing some of the new additions made by our inspectors throughout the year, we enhance our digital tools to further strengthen the ties that bind us to food lovers.” But I feel like all this haphazard teasing just highlights the guide’s weaknesses in a digital age? Holding back a restaurant’s final ranking for a book that won’t come out for several months is obviously an odd game to play these days, but if they release ratings piecemeal throughout the year, would it all be just a bit too regular-old-newspaper-stars? I’d bet we’d find out the answer to that sooner if tourism boards weren’t paying for print…
(Side note: Congrats to Instanbul’s tourism board!)
And last and least – News that Just Eat Takeaway is exploring a sale of Grubhub has been popping up again over the last week or so, but I haven’t included it here because key investors have been calling for this since at least last fall. That said, you can read a good rundown on the potential sale from Ryan Browne on CNBC, and with Elon Musk buying Twitter this week, I would like to put this out there too:
Danny Meyer stop launching fast casual brands and buy Grubhub, you coward.
April 29th:
Beard Season – Nominations for the 2022 James Beard Media Awards came out Wednesday morning. The full list of publishers, editors, producers, podcasters, and writers you can butter up is available on the official site, and Eater has all this year’s Restaurant, Chef, and Media nominees on one helpful page here. Way too many media types to highlight in a newsletter, but congrats, all!
Some quick takeaways on the industry side:
For bar folk, the Beverage with Recipes books nominees are: Death & Co Welcome Home: A Cocktail Recipe Book by Alex Day, Nick Fauchald, and David Kaplan with Devon Tarby and Tyson Buhler (Penguin Random House); The Japanese Art of the Cocktail by Masahiro Urushido and Michael Anstendig (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); The Way of the Cocktail: Japanese Traditions, Techniques, and Recipes by Julia Momosé with Emma Janzen (Penguin Random House).
And for restaurant folk, the Restaurant and Professional list this year goes: Mister Jiu's in Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food by Brandon Jew and Tienlon Ho (Ten Speed Press); Modernist Pizza by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya (The Cooking Lab); and Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food by Missy Robbins and Talia Baiocchi (Ten Speed Press).
A bunch of other chefs and industry types were nominated elsewhere too, including Marcus Samuelsson for his book The Rise (with writer Osayi Endolyn); Gregory Gourdet for Everyone’s Table (with JJ Goode); Kwame Onwuachi for a Food & Wine “three-part video series” that somehow counts as a column (with Joshua David Stein); and David Chang for his microwave cookbook (with Priya Krishna).
That last one is especially interesting because also nominated this year is the December 2020 Eater essay by Hannah Selinger headlined “Life Was Not a Peach” wherein, after reading Chang’s memoir, former Momofuku employee Selinger decides: “While Chang believes that he has learned from his errors, he appears to have missed the full lesson: He was abusive — at the time, unapologetically so — to his staff.”
If the Beards are now vetting nominees the way they say they are, it seems they have come down on the side of: Chang has — by this time, apologetically so — changed.
Full disclosure: I put Family Meal up for a “Columns and Newsletters” Beard and it did not make the list. In fact, no newsletters made the list, which begs the question: How does that committee sleep at night?
That (Dropping) Delivery $$$ – Yesterday, while turning over what Kristen Hawley’s Expedite newsletter was saying about a post-ghost kitchen world — “Delivery isn’t just a utility for existing restaurants, it’s a platform on which others are building platforms and still others are injecting themselves in order to pull a percentage of the profit.” — I clicked the link to a Rob Wile NBC story that rang my opening bell (sorry). Headline: “Food-delivery apps lose steam as people return to in-person dining.” Results in the market: “After hitting a high of $246 in November, DoorDash shares have plunged 62 percent to $89 a share. Over the same period, Uber shares have fallen 29 percent, from $45 to about $31.” Ouch.
Want to see a graph of a pandemic profiteer?
That Food Truck $$$ – In Texas, D Magazine’s Brian Reinhart tweets, “The biggest Dallas food news of the year is here: Dallas has finally freed the market on food trucks, trailers, & carts.” Reinhart’s explainer thread links to a fully reported piece on the changes where his colleague, Matt Goodman says, “Dallas was in the Dark Ages when it came to regulating what it has termed ‘mobile food units.’” Food carts had to pay more in fees than trailers or trucks, and trailers had to get a new permit for every event. “Food entrepreneurs couldn’t convert a trailer or a vehicle; they had to buy one that was commercially manufactured to serve food. The city blocked trailers from operating anywhere other than a permitted temporary event. It even regulated what type of food could be cooked and how. Fish and chicken had to be breaded and go directly from the freezer to the deep fryer… None of it made sense.”
Both Reinhart and Goodman clearly have their eyes on an Austin model, where Goodman notes, “Distant Relatives was nominated for a James Beard award—and it operated out of a trailer next to a brewery. Dallas’ previous code basically prevented that sort of innovation and achievement from happening here.” And Reinhart says, “Maybe we'll finally begin to grow an Austin- or Portland-like street food scene... Here we go. A revolution is about to take place… This law has effectively legalized street food. Truly historic.”
Good luck, all!
Some Sad News – Headline in the SF Chronicle: “Adam Richey, longtime bartender at Original Joe’s and North Beach fixture, dies at 51.” Full obit from Sam Whiting, including this great sendoff: “‘Nobody that young should die, and nobody who lived that well should die that young,’ said former Mayor Willie Brown. ‘You’ve got to assume that the Lord was looking for a maitre d’.’”
May 3rd:
Awards (Vetting) Season – Flashing warning lights for the James Beard Awards in Chicago via the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Jean Banchet Awards. Per Naomi Waxman and Ashok Selvam in Eater: “After a group of Chicago diners reached out to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation alleging they were racially profiled while dining at S.K.Y., the chic and Asian-inspired upscale restaurant in [the Pilsen neighborhood], the foundation has revoked the restaurant’s sommelier’s nomination for a prestigious Jean Banchet Award.” There is a lot of back and forth in the accusations, and I tried and failed to understand the totality of what actually happened via Instagram posts from people involved.
But what I do know is that the incident took place on April 24th, the Banchets were scheduled for May 1st, and this Eater article came out on April 29th. Quite a pressure cooker for the awards, but hard to believe they conducted any kind of honest investigation if what the owner of S.K.Y. says is true: “He says he believes the decision to rescind the nomination was a rash conclusion given that the Banchets did not contact him, the somm, or any of the other parties involved, who have different accounts of the incident.”
Makes me wonder what the Beards might do with last minute allegations? Like if an anonymous accuser leveled serious allegations against everyone nominated in the “columns and newsletters” category the day before the awards, they’d have to go to runners-up, right? Right?
Cookbook Season – On Saturday, Paula Forbes released part one of her two-part summer cookbook preview at Stained Page News. It’s only half of what’s coming, but it’s still a lot. If you’re in or entering or entertaining the idea of the cookbook market for any reason, there’s the landscape. Of note if you remember that wild shipping debacle a few months ago: “Hey look, one of the cookbooks at the bottom of the ocean has returned for a delayed-but-delightful June release date! Turkey and the Wolf … by Mason Hereford with JJ Goode will be out, for real for real (knock on wood), on June 21. Ten Speed.”
That (declining) Delivery $$$ – In Restaurant Hospitality this week, Joanna Fantozzi has two stories that made me realize (belatedly) that restaurants and big delivery apps have come up with the same solution to the shared problem: Diversifying revenue streams because long-term commitment to delivery as-is won’t make them enough money.
First, on Friday: “Grubhub announced this week… that the third-party delivery service would soon launch its first-ever virtual restaurant concept.” That’ll be in partnership with TV show MasterChef and its alumni chefs. Details here.
And second, yesterday: “DoorDash announced Monday the launch of a delivery-focused food hall-like concept in Brooklyn. DoorDash Kitchens Brooklyn will be the first DoorDash Kitchens location to offer permanent, indoor seating within the ghost kitchen network that launched two years ago.” Details here.
For the Somm: Some Sad News – “Jack Cakebread, a vintner and pioneer of California’s modern wine industry, died on April 26 of natural causes. He was 92. An auto shop repairman and photographer, Cakebread co-founded Cakebread Cellars 50 years ago with Dolores, his high school sweetheart who became his wife. It was a pivotal time in Napa Valley’s wine history, and Cakebread played an integral role in the renaissance that transformed the region into the epicenter of American wine.” Full obituary in the SF Chronicle from Jess Lander.
And last but not least: Festival Season – I do not mean to diminish either the importance of agriculture or the (partly tragic) history of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, but if this headline is true — “Asparagus Festival Organizers Announce Plans to Save Gilroy Garlic Festival, Gilroy Organizers Call Claims ‘Malicious’” — I would like to be a part of the writing team that handles the screenplay. Asparagus Barbarians at the Gate. Thank you.
May 6th:
Michelin Season – After a long, slow trickle of revelations, DC’s stars are officially out. Albi (from chef Michael Rafidi and team), Imperfecto (Enrique Limardo), Oyster Oyster (Rob Rubba), and Reverie (Johnny Spero) are the big new entries, all at the one star level. Any removals seem to have to do with pandemic pivots and closures. Washingtonian’s Anna Spiegel has a good rundown on all the moves here.
That Delivery $$$ – After I said on Tuesday (see below) that DoorDash appeared to be diversifying its business with new food hall / ghost kitchen concepts, Expedite’s Kristen Hawley wrote back to tell me I was wrong. In her own newsletter this week, Hawley says the DoorDash Kitchens locations “feel more like a marketing opportunity and less like a growth strategy. They likely don’t suggest some huge repositioning for DoorDash; opening four brick-and-mortar locations over a few years hardly moves the needle on a strategy shift.” And adds, “If this was going to scale, it would have happened already.”
Makes sense(!), especially after reading her list out all the ways DoorDash is not actually handling very much of the operations at the “kitchens” with its name on their doors: “On Monday, DoorDash announced a new location of DoorDash Kitchens in downtown Brooklyn. It features both local favorites — Pies ‘n’ Thighs, Domodomo — and nationally recognized brands — Milk Bar and… Little Caesars among them. The restaurants provide the staff that makes the food. DoorDash handles restaurant partnerships, ordering, and delivery; its partner, local ghost kitchen company Nimbus — once described in Grubstreet as ‘a ghost kitchen with… a human touch’ — manages the facility.”
Restaurant partnerships, ordering, and delivery sounds an awful lot like… what DoorDash already does.
And last but not least: The Manifesto – Trying the new NYT “gift an article” feature to share this one with you so you can read it whether you subscribe to them or not: “When a Restaurant Is a Work of Art”. It’s about a restaurant in Stockholm run by the artist Carsten Höller, best known for immersive art like slides for adults and psychedelic-reindeer-piss Russian roulette. Laura Rysman’s “restaurant as art” piece reads mostly like a profile of any chef putting his ideas into food, but what makes it fun is that the artist’s idea here isn’t “seasonal ingredients” or “telling the story of my childhood in Brooklyn” or whatever, it’s… Brutalism — like, minimalist concrete buildings Brutalism. And “Brutalisten (‘the Brutalist’ in Swedish)” even comes with a new cuisine manifesto, part of which I quote here, because I love everything about it:
“THE BRUTALIST KITCHEN MANIFESTO
- Brutalist kitchen is a dogma kitchen where certain rules apply.
- Brutalist kitchen is titled in reference to Brutalist architecture, renowned for its linear and blockish appearance.
- The main rule is the following: ingredients are used alone for a certain dish; only water and salt may be added.
– In Orthodox Brutalist Cuisine, neither water (nor salt) is added. Generally speaking, the Brutalist Kitchen is less about recipes and more about finding and preparing ingredients.
– We are born as Brutalist eaters, as mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist.”
Mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist.
May 10th:
The Trial – Molto Mario Batali is in court this week, and per Kim Severson in the NYT: “The woman who has accused the celebrity chef of groping her at a Boston bar in April 2017 spent several contentious hours testifying on Monday, the opening day of his criminal trial on charges of indecent battery and assault… If convicted, Mr. Batali faces up to two and a half years in the Suffolk County House of Correction and would be required to register as a sex offender.”
The accuser was questioned about (maybe) jokey texts she wrote about a potential financial settlement, and why she would go to a Batali restaurant (Eataly) after the incident if associations with him were so traumatic. The Washington Post’s Tim Carman, who also wrote about the case, said on Twitter that he heard CourtTV pundits say the accuser “didn’t do well on the stand.” (The trial is being streamed live on CourtTV.)
It’s unclear if Batali will testify himself, but Severson quotes his attorney as saying: “The defense in this case is very simple. It didn’t happen. She’s not being truthful. This was fabricated for money and for fun.”
Nothing about this trial sounds fun. But based on some quick reading about day one — and a total lack of legal expertise or inside knowledge here — it does sound like there is a decent chance of a reasonable doubt ruling so far. (Batali waved his right to a jury and is leaving the decision up to the judge.) Thoughts?
The Trial Too – On the CBS wires in CA, “A federal judge found Thursday that a disabled plaintiff's testimony was ‘not credible’ and dismissed his lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act after he had sued a Redwood City restaurant because its outdoor dining tables were not accessible for someone in a wheelchair. The case has potentially broad-reaching implications because Brian Whitaker, a prolific ADA plaintiff, has filed more than a thousand lawsuits in the Bay Area against small business owners alleging that their stores or restaurants are not accessible.”
Basically, this ruling boils down to whether or not Whitaker in particular was ever actually going to go to the restaurant in question (in other words, whether he had legal standing to sue), so it won’t be a silver bullet against other “drive-by” ADA suits. But it does come within a month of District Attorneys in SF and LA suing Whitaker’s law firm, Potter Handy, for “bombarding California’s small businesses with abusive, boilerplate lawsuits.” Bob Egelko has news on that case in the SF Chronicle here.
NB: For some nuance on the backlash to these kinds of ADA suits, I highly recommend this Lauren Markham NYT longread from last summer: “The Man Who Filed More Than 180 Disability Lawsuits; Is it profiteering, or justice?” Remembering it while looking at pictures of the place Whitaker sued, I thought: “Lawsuits suck, but… Come on, guys. Did all those tables have to be high tops?”
The Relief – If you’re drowning in COVID-time debt, you may want to skip this one…. A quick check-in on some restaurant owners who actually got a Restaurant Revitalization Fund grant last year (after the SBA was sued into rescinding offers to what were previously “priority” groups): In DC, “After closing [Penn Social] in November 2020 due to the pandemic, the downtown sports bar’s owners landed a $2.8 million [RRF] grant in August that allowed them to reopen and retool. The grant paid for a high-quality sound system to create a performance venue on Penn Social’s lower level, add a podcast studio, and turn part of the first floor into a coffeeshop.” So… that’s how the other half reopens! Elliot C. Williams has details in DCist.
And last but not least: The Profile Treatment – In the Washington Post this week, Aaron Hutcherson has a big profile of Pinky Cole, the founder of the Slutty Vegan (Impossible burger) burger chain that just announced a $25M funding round from a group that includes Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality Investments. There’s some established personal history in there — “Cole grew up without her father, who on the day she was born was sentenced to life in prison for running a cocaine-distribution ring.” — and some of the usual VC clichés around the investment — “I’m a big believer that you invest in people and leaders and founders as much as the idea itself,” Meyer says — but I died laughing at this new take on the labor shortage:
“The biggest hurdle has been finding staff who believe in her mission and aren’t in it just for a paycheck. The main qualification needed is ‘Big Slut Energy.’”
Reporter: What do you think is causing the labor shortage? Do people just not want to work anymore? Is it wages? Is it COVID?
Restaurateur: [deep sigh]. Slut energy’s too low.
May 13th:
The Relief – The Independent Restaurant Coalition was tweeting with siren emojis on Tuesday: “BREAKING. We just got word from Senator Schumer that the Senate will vote next week on refilling the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF).” Which could be true! But by Wednesday, Roll Call’s Lindsey McPherson was reporting the IRC might have gotten a bit out over its skis: “Schumer's spokesman did not directly dispute the coalition’s claim but said they needed to work through the scheduling of the House-passed Ukraine aid bill first. Senators in both parties are optimistic the Senate will clear that measure on Thursday [yesterday].”
Unfortunately, Politico reported that last night, Senator Rand Paul “blocked a speedy vote on the massive military and humanitarian aid package” for Ukraine, so… the RRF vote schedule may not work out as planned.
And even if it does, McPherson says Senate sponsors “Small Business Chairman Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., and Mississippi GOP Sen. Roger Wicker... have waxed optimistic for weeks about their ability to get 60 votes for the measure. But they both acknowledged Wednesday they’re still not yet there and probably won’t be able to firm up whip counts until Schumer officially schedules the bill for floor action.”
You don’t need my long, uninformed take on this, so I’ll just say my hopes remain low. Not you-should-give-up-trying low, but still… low.
The Trial – As sort of expected in the NYT this week: “Mario Batali Found Not Guilty in Sexual Assault Trial.” Story from Kim Severson. In announcing his verdict, the judge said, “‘It’s an understatement to say that Mr. Batali did not cover himself in glory on the night in question.’ But he added that [the accuser] ‘has significant credibility issues.’”
Does Batali take a victory lap, write a Substack, and start a comment-free YouTube channel this summer? I don’t think so? He still has some other legal issues to deal with, and I think Bourdain’s advice when Batali first floated a comeback in 2018 still holds: “Retire and count yourself lucky.” BUT I also think journalists should be careful about citing celebrity net worth dot com and imagining that any number of millions means an ambitious person will go quietly into early retirement… We shall see. The guy has not always been known to cover himself in glory.
P.S. The Zeitgeist – I don’t know how — or enough — to write about this, so take what you need from this screenshot for a quick check-in on another end of the cancel culture spectrum and the food world:
The Suits – Headline in Eater NY: “Ex-Workers Sue Social Media Star Frank Prisinzano, Owner of Popular East Village Italian Restaurants”. Feels like a bog standard wage theft allegation — with the important aside from reporter Luke Fortney that this “marks the fifth time Prisinzano has been sued over allegations of wage theft since 2009” — but what caught my eye here was the “social media star” side of things. Prisinzano is almost not being sued as a restaurateur (which is where the staff work), but as a celebrity. Here’s how the suit describes him in paragraph one:
“Plaintiffs worked in the three restaurants owned and made famous by Frank Prisinzano, a social media celebrity who boasts 185,000 followers on Instagram, 23,000 followers on TikTok, and 11,000 followers on YouTube.” (Footnoted in the suit with the great GrubStreet headline: “Making Sauce With Instagram's Mildly Furious, Exceedingly Horny Italian Uncle.”)
You have the right to remain under the radar. Any followers you may accrue can and will be used against you in a court of law.
The Suits Too – All is not at peace in the land of ghosts. Per Restaurant Business’s Joe Guszkowski, “JLL, a large real-estate services company, is accusing [ghost kitchen company] Reef of only partially paying or ignoring invoices starting in October of last year, leaving the tech company with an overdue balance of more than $3.5 million. It’s the latest problem for Miami-based Reef, which has faced a series of regulatory issues related to its delivery-only food trailers and last week said it was laying off 5% of its staff.” When they pitch tractor-trailer kitchens to VCs, do they mention razor thin margins?
The Media (opportunity) – FYI: If you know anyone interested in making the move into the get-rich-quick world of food media, Vox is accepting applications for a writer’s workshop that includes mentorship from people at Eater like EIC Amanda Kludt. “The workshop is specifically designed for people historically underrepresented in media and is focused on reaching people entering the industry.” Deadline: May 22.
And last but not least: The Inflation – If you play around with the NYT’s new (simple) “personal inflation calculator” you’ll find that when it comes to the food question, eating out at restaurants lowers your personal rate of inflation vs eating at home. Food prices rising quicker than menu prices is not news (or necessarily good!), but when the Independent Restaurant Coalition finally makes its pivot to general restaurant PR firm (“Got Restaurant?”), their job should be to spin this stuff into headlines like:
How To Beat Inflation? Drive Less, Fly Less, Eat Out More.
May 17th:
Michelin Season – ATTN Florida: Per the Miami Herald’s Carlos Frías, “A Michelin spokesperson said the announcement for the new Florida guide will come during a live ceremony June 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes.” As a reminder, back in November, Visit Florida “partnered with local tourism boards in Miami, Orlando and Tampa to have the cities included in the new guide. Each pitched in to pay Michelin as much as $1.5 million over the next three years to produce a Florida guide.” Now to reap what they hath sewn… (stars).
Namesake Awards Season – With The Julia Child Challenge on the Food Network and the serialized biopic Julia on HBO, there has been a lot of public considering / reconsidering of Julia Child lately. Maybe the most interesting was the recent “Pinkwashing Julia Child” issue of writer John Birdsall’s new newsletter, Shifting the Food Narrative. In it, Birdsall sheds light on some unpleasant, less public parts of Child’s life (homophobia), just as he did with James Beard in his The Man Who Ate Too Much biography. All of this is to say that naming awards after human beings who lived human lives is bound to end in mixed emotions (at minimum), and that’s how I plan to transition this paragraph seamlessly into Florence Fabricant’s announcement in the NYT that…
“This year the cookbook author Grace Young is the recipient of the annual Julia Child Award… over the last two years, with the rise of anti-Asian incidents, Ms. Young has become an activist. She supports Chinatowns across the country, especially New York’s Chinatown in Manhattan… She will receive a $50,000 grant from the foundation at a ceremony in Washington on Oct. 13, and said she plans to use it to support Chinatowns and their traditional restaurants.”
The Token Hospitality – Something for the NFT-curious tomorrow: “Launching on May 18, Front of House (FOH) is a marketplace for NFTs of digital collectibles and experiences for independent restaurants. Co-founders Phil Toronto (VaynerFund), Colin Camac (former restaurateur), and Alex Ostroff (Saint Urbain) represent a mix of people with backgrounds in digital technology, advertising, and the hospitality industries. Initial clients include Wildair and Dame, with upcoming partners such as Rosella, Niche Niche, and Tokyo Record Bar.” Details from Allen Weiner in The Spoon.
Whether you’re a skeptic or believer, it’ll be interesting to see what this stuff actually looks like, what privileges ownership may promise, and if any of it helps the industry....
For Cookbook Fans – Part 2 of Paula Forbes’s excellent Stained Page News Summer 2022 Cookbook Preview is out. With a quick glance on the restaurant side of things, I see books from “Pastry chef Brian Levy [who] worked under legend Gina DePalma at NYC restaurant Babbo”; Red Truck Bakery phenom Brian Noyes; Alan Sánchez of Gracias Madre in LA; Vishwesh Bhatt from Oxford MS’s Snackbar; Houston chef Anita Jaisinghani of Pondicheri; and more!
Plus, “Acclaimed chef Clare Smyth gets her big Phaidon chef’s book in Core, named after her three Michelin starred restaurant in London,” and “New York chef Danny Bowien is back, this time with co-author JJ Goode, in Mission Vegan.” (Restaurant scandal watchers will note this means that just over a year after Grub Street’s Chris Crowley described “The Nightmare Inside Mission Chinese Food,” both Bowien and Angela Dimayuga will have published cookbooks with major co-authors / publishers. Cancel culture!)
The Breakup – Headline in Eater NY: “Hit-Making Duo Behind Crown Shy and Saga to Part Ways.” Details via Luke Fortney: “Roughly three years after James Kent and Jeff Katz opened Crown Shy, a stylish Michelin-starred restaurant in the Financial District, the acclaimed restaurateurs are parting ways. Terms of the split are still being negotiated… ‘It’s not particularly dramatic, to be honest,’ Katz said in a statement to Eater.” Big missed opportunity for feud media, guys.
May 20th:
First, The End – There will be no Restaurant Revitalization Fund round two. “Deficit-concerned senators blocked the Senate from considering a $48 billion aid package for restaurants and other small businesses Thursday, likely dealing a fatal blow to a monthslong effort to provide a final round of relief for industries that suffered major revenue losses during the pandemic.” Lindsey McPherson has a great rundown on the political side of things in Roll Call. Even some late amendment horse-trading couldn’t get the bill over the necessary 60 yea mark.
Final tally: 52 in favor, 43 opposed. “The only Republicans to vote for cloture on the motion to proceed were [Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska], Susan Collins of Maine, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.”
Reasons given for voting against the bill were the aforementioned worries about deficit spending (only $5B of the cost was covered by COVID funds on hand), plus new fretting over inflation. Oh, and Rand Paul threw in the fact that $500M would’ve gone to minor league baseball teams for good, pork-barrel measure.
Definitely recommend reading the full article, but the clear-eyed consensus is this is officially the end: “Restaurant and small business aid backers will likely continue to push for relief in other must-pass vehicles, like a stalled $10 billion COVID-19 supplemental… But without more offsets, any effort to spend billions more on pandemic relief — after Congress already appropriated more than $5 trillion toward the effort since 2020 — will be met with GOP resistance.”
RRF champion Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) said: “I’ll look for any opportunity we can get, but I don't want to mislead people. This was our best shot.”
P.S. – In an emailed statement, the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which was created for legislation like this and spent at least $360k on lobbying over the course of the pandemic so far, said: “Despite today’s outcome, the IRC will continue to engage inclusively, collaborate generously, educate tirelessly, and advocate loudly to build a sustainable future for independent restaurateurs, employees, and the communities we support.”
Not sure anyone knows what that’ll look like yet, but I see that IRC has finally gotten its 501(c)6 tax exempt status, which will allow it to operate as a “Business League” (chamber of commerce type operation), going forward.
The Big Comp – Headline, May 12, NY Post: “NYC restaurants yawn at Grubhub’s citywide ‘free lunch’ promotion.” Headline, May 17, The Guardian: “‘This can’t be real’: Grubhub promotion turns New York City restaurants into a ‘war zone.’”
Grubhub claims it emailed restaurants in advance to let them know that it would be covering $15 worth of lunch for all New Yorkers on Tuesday, but not everyone got the memo, and even those that did didn’t quite grasp the implications of such a specific, time-bound window —11am to 2pm, one day only. The Guardian’s Wilfred Chan reports Grubhub was also surprised. A spokesman said “the platform was averaging up to 6,000 orders a minute, which ‘absolutely blew away all expectations [and] initially caused a temporary delay in our system and some users experienced an error message with their code.’”
Buzzfeed’s Kelsey Weekman has a good collection of social media responses to the mess for context, but bad “war zone” analogies aside, the real context here is the delivery wars, where Grubhub is still trying to wean New Yorkers off the Seamless brand (which Grubhub owns), and Grubhub parent company JET is trying to pump up Grubhub’s numbers enough to sell it.
I learned most of that context from Kristen Hawley, who, in her Expedite newsletter this week would like to remind NYC-centric media of another little bit of context: DoorDash was down for like three hours during prime time West Coast dinner late last week! Not a banner May for big delivery…
Anyway, back to using Seamless! And don’t buy Grubhub!
The Big Comp Too – Headline in the NYT (edited for context): “[As First Reported by the Inimitable Family Meal Twitter Account] Noma Chef Won’t Attend Brooklyn Dinner Series. So the Meals Are Free.” Seems Rene Redzepi got COVID (apparently his third time?!), and couldn’t make it to NYC for a fancy, five-night popup. His team still went on with the show, but without the promised star, dinner sponsor American Express had to refund $700pp tickets for all 250 paid guests. Florence Fabricant says diners still got quite the meal, and were all “sent home with a gift bag containing a small bowl by the ceramist Katrine Binzer.”
The Media – Press Release: “Amanda Kludt, group publisher of Eater, Popsugar, Punch, and Thrillist and Eater’s founding editor-in-chief, today announced that Stephanie Wu will be Eater’s new editor-in-chief.” Not a big surprise given Wu has been serving as executive editor since the beginning of the year (while Kludt moved further into parent company roles), but an official changing of the guard nonetheless!
Also at Eater, Janna Karel is taking over Eater Las Vegas after six years at the LV Review-Journal. She goes by jannainprogress on Twitter and Instagram (where there are plenty of selfies and headshots for hosts).
And speaking of changing of the guard, longtime Food and Wine turned Bloomberg food editor Kate Krader is leaving NYC for London to take over some form of Richard Vines’s old Bloomberg UK role there.
May 24th:
The High Ground – This newsletter is too pithy to fully wrestle with the question of what it means to open a restaurant in an area run by an oppressive government, but I do think this Lexis-Olivier Ray LA Taco piece about restaurants doing pop-ups (and maybe more) in Saudi is worth a read. “Jon & Vinny’s, Petit Trois, Chi Spacca, Joans on Third, Avra, and The Palm have all done popups in Saudi Arabia’s capital recently or are planning to. But you will find little to no mention of that on their social media accounts or official websites.” That could be for various reasons, but it is definitely difficult to avoid negative associations in some places. During one recent pop-up, “While serving hundreds of meals by night, members of Jon & Vinny’s staff and one of the owners stayed at the five-starred Ritz Carlton for at least part of the time. ‘Last day of service,’ [one employee] posted a selfie of himself in the blue marble pool at the Ritz, where rooms start at several hundred dollars per night and where four years prior, wealthy Saudi royals accused of corruption were infamously detained.
“The hotel is commonly used to house guests of Saudi leaders.”
The Hikes – In the top 1% of the American restaurant scene, critic / price-tracker Ryan Sutton says the road to high prices is paved in relatively small, constant increments. Sample numbers from a longer rundown in Eater NY: “In late 2019, Le Bernardin asked $168 for its four-course menu, $198 for a seven-course tasting, and $228 for an eight-course menu, with a three-course lunch running $93. Now, following a series of small increases over the past two years — sometimes as little as $5 at a time — the shortest menu is $195, while the tasting is $295. Lunch is $120…. Gramercy Tavern charged $148 for its tasting menu last summer, before jumping up to $158 and now, to $165. Daniel Boulud’s Le Pavillon, in turn, has pushed up its three-course menu by $10 to $135, and its tasting by the same amount to $205.”
For TV Fans – Somehow, lost in the swirl of tens of millions of dollars they were spending to hold on to Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay, I missed the fact that the Food Network has let Alton Brown go (though not in the firing sense, as far as I know). His move to Netflix’s new Iron Chef reboot means he’s no longer with his old network of 20 years, according to Entertainment Weekly’s Gerrad Hall. Maybe that means all the zero sum budgeting is zeroed out on the two big F’s, or maybe there’s suddenly room for someone… new / different? Call your agents, folks!
Meanwhile, on that Iron Chef front, competitors were announced last week. Per People’s Antonia DeBianchi: “Among the five returning Iron Chefs are Michelin-starred TV chef Curtis Stone, celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, cookbook author Gabriela Camara, Emmy Award-winning chef Ming Tsai and multi-Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn. And their competition is fierce. From restaurateurs to award-winning chefs and former Top Chef contestants, the Challenger Chefs include Mason Hereford, Curtis Duffy, Claudette Zepeda, Esther Choi, Gregory Gourdet, Mei Lin and Yia Vang.”
Congrats, all!
P.S. – Sign of the times: Brown spends a bunch of that Entertainment Weekly interview talking about how a big part of this new Iron Chef show is going to be co-host Kristen Kish honing in on the personal stories of participants. Sometimes I forget a lot of that is still new. Here’s Brown: “I think that what the audience is going to get from this is that any anyone who's ever been an Iron Chef fan is going to realize, Oh my gosh, there are real human beings doing this, there are real human beings making this food, and this is a very human enterprise that's going on here.”
Oh my gosh!
And last and least: For TV Fans Too – Back on the Food Network front… drama. Headline in Variety: “‘90 Day Fiancé’ Team Sets Food Network, Discovery+ Show Following Restaurateur Couples Trying to Avoid Divorce.” Jennifer Maas reports, “Per its official description, ‘Me or the Menu’ shines a spotlight on some of the reasons that approximately 60% of restaurants fail and nearly 50% of marriages end in divorce… Balancing a stressful restaurant start-up and the needs of a significant other may prove to be the ultimate test.”
Participants include: Kathleen Murray and Nate Albert (Lombard, IL); Randi Lee and Jeanette Zinno (Brooklyn); James Martin and Jessica Neal (Chicago); and Nicole Baldwin and Alan Yuhanna (Houston).
You will be shocked to learn that financial strains are a top issue in descriptions of each relationship. Sounds like… fun TV?
May 27th:
The Non-Fungible Rug Pull – Are there any good restaurant NFT projects right now? Writing in Expedite, Nom Wah’s Barb Leung says she bought restaurant world non-fungible tokens from three sources: “Shirley Chung’s Dumpling Mafia; Tom Colicchio and Spike Mendelsohn’s CHFTY Pizzas; and Dominique Ansel’s Cronut Anniversary LTD Edition NFTs.” While it’s still hard for me to appreciate the artwork behind any of these projects, Leung says two out of three ain’t bad! Dumpling Mafia mostly lived up to its promise of trying to raise money / awareness for worthy causes, and CHFTY Pizzas has been active / responsive in trying to keep buyers involved longer term (even as the dollar value of their NFTs has gone down). Ansel’s Cronuts, on the other hand, are mostly defined by onerous legal restrictions (you don’t actually own any rights to the NFT or artwork?) and a total lack of follow-up.
“Us holders have seemingly been cast aside post-mint,” Leung says. Oof.
The Graduate – I’m sure the awards you’ve earned are very nice, but high school dropout José Andrés — whose new Ron Howard documentary comes out today — just got an honorary doctorate degree from Harvard? (Watch till the end if you love food-pun dad-joke cringe!)
The Big Show – Doesn’t look like there’s much to report from the 2022 National Restaurant Show in Chicago this week. Only thing that really stood out to me in this NRN slideshow from Lisa Jennings was the “Solo Cargo EV, a delivery-ready, three-wheeled electric vehicle that drives like a car but produces zero emissions. The solo has a range of about 100 miles and can go up to 80 miles an hour.[It] has a 12-cubic-foot cargo hold that can be modified with a warming element.” A $24,500 vehicle for our times! The problem is that in urban settings, while “classified as a motorcycle,” it sure looks like it parks like a car... (Also, imagine Urkel drove for DoorDash. He’d drive this.)
For the Somm: The Coastal Elite – There’s a new AVA in town. Per Esther Mobley in the SF Chronicle, “Wineries in the far-coastal stretches of Sonoma County just got a big win: They can soon print ‘West Sonoma Coast’ on their labels, the culmination of a decade-long battle to gain recognition for their region. The West Sonoma Coast [became] California’s newest American Viticultural Area (AVA) on Monday, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has announced, and the 19th AVA within Sonoma County.” The West Sonoma Coast joins the San Luis Obispo Coast as the two regions to get their own AVAs so far this year.
“Try America’s newest recognized wine region!” sounds like a solid tableside sales pitch to me, and I assume the markup’s not bad either…. (I see wine rater James Suckling sells WSC’s Littorai 2017 Pinot Noir for about $40USD a glass here in Hong Kong.)
P.S. - Learned a lot of fun facts going down the AVA rabbit hole this morning, but my favorite by far is that the first recognized AVA in America, created 8 months before Napa in 1980, was none other than… Augusta, Missouri.
And last but not least: For Design Fans – “Bask in French Decadence at Lincoln Carson’s New Hollywood Restaurant,” with a photospread by Wonho Frank Lee in Eater LA. I can’t quite put my finger on why those bistro chairs feel like a missed opportunity — Maybe something with a bit more back would help an early hours, half-empty room look less empty? Is rattan too trendy? — but want to hone in on one detail I think I love (from this distance): That little poof of fabric upholstery on top of the leather booths. There’s probably a name for it? Banquette bouffant?
June 3rd:
The Dark Truths – Headline yesterday in the Financial Times: “Fine Dining Faces Its Dark Truths in Copenhagen.” What reporter Imogen West-Knights means there is that Copenhagen finally has its very own accusation aggregator on Instagram. Lisa Lind Dunbar has taken on that lonely role, documenting industry “abuse of all forms: One person wrote in about a chef who used to throw his staff’s phones in the deep-fat fryer, another about her experience of being sexually assaulted by a prominent sommelier, another about a chef who kept a gun in his drawer at work to shoot rats in the restaurant elevator, reams and reams of accusations...”
But despite some mentions of Noma as an original sinner in stage abuse, not many accusers have felt comfortable naming more names. West-Knights does note that court docs might point more public fingers soon: “A famous Danish chef that one source asked me not to identify because he wants to bring legal proceedings against him, kneed student chefs ‘in the dick’ in his kitchen.” But for now, it looks like this’ll stay mostly anonymous on all sides, which might give bad actors a chance to change! Or might not change much. (The piece includes some depressing fatalism around Willows Inn and Blaine Wetzel apparently surviving their NYT exposé.)
That said, some baby steps: “As I was reporting this story, Noma announced that this year’s stagiaires would be paid for the first time.”
The NFTs – Weird that this seems to be becoming a regular item, but… Restaurant NFT adoption continues apace! I’ll try to round up some worth noting quick:
At the high end, Eater’s Lauren Saria reports there’s a new, big money NFT-based membership club headed to SF, this time via what the Shō Group’s website calls “a dynamic synergy” between “Chef Shotaro ‘Sho’ Kamio [and] entrepreneur and food and technology industry veteran, Josh Sigel.” They seem to be doing basically the same thing Gary Vaynerchuk, David Rodolitz, and Josh Capon’s FlyFish Club is doing in NYC — the NFTs are the membership cards — except that Shō has a space and design renderings, while FlyFish Club still hasn’t announced a location (but promised token holders they’d sign a lease somewhere before the end of the month).
Meanwhile, Flyfish Club, which, again, still doesn’t have a space, is selling $80 hoodies to the people who presumably already paid thousands of dollars for memberships, and just sold out of a 100 pair run of Flyfish-logo-covered Air Jordans at $500 a pop. Add that to the $14M they raised when they sold their first batch of NFTs, plus the 10% cut they’re getting of the over $500k in turnover those tokens have been doing on NFT market OpenSea each month, and… If I’m a landlord and the FlyFish guys walk in, my terms just got rich.
On the slightly more affordable end of the spectrum, a new restaurant NFT shop called FOH just launched its first collections this week, with initial offerings from NYC restaurants Wildair and Dame. Dame is keeping it pretty simple with just twenty NFTs available, each of which gives the holder the ability to book a held table at the restaurant once a week through the end of 2022 (if another NFT holder doesn’t get the time slot first!). Those are priced at $1k a pop. Wildair has gone the now classic NFT route and created “Donut Friends” with pictures of sentient donuts in various flavors — shoutout to whoever bought “plain hole” — that give holders a somewhat vague promise of “Early access to limited drops, merch and IRL donut-related events.”
Neither appear to be flying off the shelves yet, but we shall see. Early days and still a lot of fair skepticism about these projects (including from me), but one person involved in this stuff told me they were mostly just “Trying to steer some of this Internet money to some restaurants,” and as long as that’s all above board… Why not? Recent crypto headlines not withstanding, there is still a lot of Internet money.
The Suits – NYC’s Major Food Group is being sued down south. “The owner of Carbone’s Fine Food and Wine in Dallas has filed a 34-page lawsuit… against new restaurant Carbone, saying Carbone’s trademark has been infringed upon, and that their similar-sounding names are confusing North Texas diners.” Trademark details, relevant opening dates, histories, etc. all reported by Sarah Blaskovich in the Dallas Morning News. Sounds to me like Carbone’s FF&W has a case, but in a kind of sad twist, the confusion being caused doesn’t seem to be resulting in lost business for Carbone’s, so much as it’s annoying them because the new Carbone is so popular. MFG wouldn’t say what, if anything was happening on their end, but at Carbone’s:
“The company has received more than 1,400 phone calls from people asking about Carbone…. ‘It takes up our staff’s time,’ [owner Julian Barsotti] says. At least 20 people have walked into Carbone’s thinking it’s Carbone... Carbone’s also has received bills from the city of Dallas and shipments of food from their produce vendor that were supposed to go to the other restaurant.” And maybe worst of all, a grocery store used the Carbone’s logo to promote a shelf full of Carbone red sauce. “Barsotti learned of the error when an investor contacted him, seemingly thrilled that Carbone’s had bottled its sauce and made a deal with Central Market [which is owned by massive Texas grocery chain H-E-B]. They hadn’t.”
Ouch.
For the Bar: Awards Season – The Tales of the Cocktail Foundation’s Spirited Awards nominations are out. With ten nominees per category, there are way too many names to include in this newsletter, but here who’s up for “Best U.S. Restaurant Bar” this year, as a taste: Café La Trova, Miami; Cleaver, Las Vegas; Crown Shy, NYC; Gramercy Tavern, NYC; Jewel of the South, New Orleans; Kimball House, Decatur, GA; Kumiko, Chicago; L’Oursin, Seattle; Republique, LA; and Spoon and Stable in Minneapolis.
Winners will be announced “during the Tales of the Cocktail conference, which is returning for an in-person celebration in New Orleans from July 25-29, 2022.”
Good luck, all!
The Opportunity – Applications for the Beard Foundation’s latest Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (WEL) program — an “advanced educational, training, and networking program for business owners in all areas of the hospitality industry” — are now open. Details here. Women or non-binary people who own at least one F&B business are welcome to apply. FYI from JBF: “This application should take no longer than one (1) hour to complete.... You will need up to two (2) professional references. We also ask for revenue and net profit numbers for 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 and total number of full-time and part-time staff. We may request to see a copy of your P&Ls for verification.”
Easy peasy.
The Media – Tough times in some corners of food media this week. While employees at Vox (Eater) are bargaining for their next union contract, Food52 editor Margaret Eby says her company laid off another 21 people this week, while also cutting editorial staff hours and pay. And over at The Infatuation / Zagat, editor Chris Mohney has been emailing freelancers to let them know that he will “be leaving Zagat/Infatuation as of Monday June 6, and [restaurant content site] Zagat Stories will be winding down publication.”
On a brighter note, new LA Times Food editor Daniel Hernandez tweeted a “JOBS ALERT” thread on Tuesday, with openings for a Deputy Editor, an Assistant Editor / Writer / Food guide mapmaker, a food Photo Editor, and an Audience Engagement Editor.
And I see some Eater cities resharing calls / guides for pitches (Atlanta and Vegas popped up this week), which means the iron is hot in some places (cc PR, etc)…
For Design Fans – Picture Matty Matheson. Big guy. Big personality. Covered in tattoos. You might describe his sartorial style as job site casual. Now gaze upon his new Toronto restaurant Prime Seafood Palace in this Architectural Digest feature from Rachel Davies and Adrian Ozimek. It’s… not at all what I pictured when I read writer Jason Diamond tweet: “I follow two kinds of people: people obsessed with Matty Matheson’s restaurant and those that haven’t seen pictures of it yet.”
I think I’m going with: Minimalist, millennial light-pink, arched lobster trap with a bathroom from Severance 2? Which is fine!
Bonus for design fans: There’s also a video walk-through with Matheson and designer Omar Gandhi, who Matheson says he chose because he didn’t want someone who designs restaurants. “I wanted to work with someone who doesn’t know where the booths go, [or] exactly how service stations work.” Good luck, staff!
And Last But Not Least: The Menu – I assume most of you have seen it, but if you haven’t, here’s the trailer for what Deadline’s Matt Grobar calls the new “darkly comic horror film” The Menu, starring Ralph Feinnes (and John Leguizamo!). “The film… sees a couple travel to a coastal island to eat at an exclusive restaurant [Hawthorne] where Chef Slowik (Fiennes) has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises… While it’s not been explicitly stated what ‘shocking surprises’ await… it seems probable that cannibalism plays some role in this tale.”
With absolutely no insider knowledge on this movie whatsoever, I’m going to lay my marker down here: It’s not cannibalism. It’s monsters. Or maybe Michael Pollan consulted and it’s Vespertine on mushrooms and all a hallucination plot?
Dominique Crenn said on Instagram that she helped on the film somehow? Someone please ask her if it’s mushrooms and let me know.
I hope it’s mushrooms.
June 7th:
Award Season – After a couple years of weird, the James Beard Awards are finally ready for their full return this weekend. Media awards are this Saturday, June 11th; restaurant awards are Monday in Chicago. There are also some panel discussions scheduled now, including one moderated by awards committee chair and Philadelphia Inquirer food editor Jamila Robinson that “will discuss what it takes to transition from the kitchen to food media, including translating your culinary skills into content.” Let me know how they go! And good luck, all!
Weekend schedule and (still available) tickets here.
The Wage Watch – Also happening in Chicago relatively soon… “The ‘sub-minimum’ hourly wage for tipped workers at small businesses (4-20 employees) will increase to $8.70; at large businesses (21 or more employees), it will rise to $9.24... Wages for non-tipped employees at larger businesses will land at $15.40, while those at smaller businesses can expect $14.50.” Eater Chicago’s Naomi Waxman and Aimee Levitt report, “City officials will on that same date implement regular enhancements per its Fair Workweek Ordinance, requiring employers in specific industries such as hotels and restaurants to post work schedules at least two weeks in advance (previous rules called for only 10 days notice).”
NB: Chicago’s tipped minimum was $6.40 back in 2019, so while it’s not the “End Tipping” result some wage activists want, this bump means a 21% increase in the tipped minimum wage over three years in a major American city… Not nothing?!
Supply Chain Issues – Per Billy Penn’s Lizzy McLellan Ravitch back in early May, “The family behind Martin’s potato bread has put itself behind Doug Mastriano, a South Central Pa. state senator who rose to prominence as a Trump-supporting election denier, and espouses what some define as Christian nationalist rhetoric. He is also the front-running Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor. Potato roll magnate Jim Martin has given Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign well over $100k. That’s causing some worry among Philly restaurateurs that serve Martin’s products.”
The worry’s spreading. This week, the SF Chronicle’s Soliel Ho has a story headlined, “Bay Area chefs are ditching their favorite burger buns over the maker’s extreme right-wing politics,” in which Ho, like Ravitch, gets no comment from one of Martin’s biggest customers, Shake Shack.
No comment may work! But then again, here’s what the other side is thinking over on NewsMax: “In the era of cancel culture, having ties to conservative politicians can get you targeted, and New York-based Shake Shack might become the latest victim – unless conservatives counter like they have with the ‘Let's Go Brandon’ and ‘ultra MAGA’ rally cries.”
Good luck with all that, Danny Meyer!
The Reputations – Speaking of cancel culture… some places where consequences are sticking: First, from Ho’s colleague Shwanika Narayan in CA: “Wine Country restaurateur accused of sexual harassment denied liquor license but still plotting return…. Lowell Sheldon, who previously co-owned Sebastopol restaurants Fern Bar, Handline, Khom Loi and the now-closed Lowell’s, had applied to open a Georgian-inspired wine bar and restaurant called Piala.” But he can’t serve booze because “opponents told Sebastopol city officials he lacks the ‘professional and moral character.’”
And second, in a widely shared Twitter thread about how reporter Adam Davidson “knows stuff about Jeffrey Epstein and can’t publish it,” Davidson calls out a short list of men who “were — at best — witnesses to the almost certain rape of children.” That named list is limited to “Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Gates, and Richardson. Ehud Barak. George Mitchell. George Church, Ito--and a lot of others at MIT and Harvard.” And Epstein’s personal chef Adam Perry Lang. It’s not a new accusation — Davidson covered Lang in his podcast about Epstein — but that came out almost two years ago, and even though Lang said he was cooperating with investigators, it’s viral again (and somehow sounds worse?).
Some Sad News – I skipped obituaries over the past few weeks and have missed some important ones, especially out in California. A few to note: Jess Lander has obituaries for longtime Chez Panisse wine director Jonathan Waters, who died at 60 on May 28th, as well as “Ken Tominaga, a trailblazer in the Bay Area’s Japanese restaurant scene and an inspiration to many of the area’s top chefs [who died] Monday after a short battle with cancer. He was 61.”
On the winemaking side of things, Esther Mobley says, “When Sean Thackrey died on Monday [May 30th] of cancer, the California wine industry lost one of its most influential iconoclasts…. He was 79.”
And in LA, Lupe Liang, “Yening ‘Lupe’ Liang, the chef and co-owner of Hop Woo BBQ & Seafood… who is credited with being the first restaurateur in Chinatown to offer his menus in Spanish, died [May 1st] at the age of 61, his family announced.” Throughout last month tributes rolled in for Liang, including that full obit from Stephanie Breijo, plus a long LA Times goodbye piece from Liang’s friend, food writer Eddie Lin, and a short, posthumous profile from Susan Orlean in the New Yorker.
And last and definitely least: An observation — I love that Eater’s Valerie Li Stack says baijiu cocktails are trending in U.S. restaurants, because for me, baijiu has always been one of those things about which native consumers will always tell foreigners, “You probably won’t like this.” Any baijiu drinker I’ve ever met talks to me about it the way an adult talks to a tween about tequila. So, kudos to you, baijiu reps of America! You got all the kids hooked on the strong stuff.
June 10th:
Michelin Season – Florida’s first-ever standalone Michelin guide came out last night. Official list here. No three star spots, and only one two star: L’Atelier de Jöel Robuchon in Miami. Coming in at one star in Miami were: Ariete; Boia De; Cote; The Den at Sushi Azabu; Elcielo; Hiden; Le Jardinier; Los Félix; Stubborn Seed; and Thomas Keller’s Surf Club. At one star in Orlando: Capa; Soseki; Kadence; and Knife & Spoon. Congrats, all!
NB: Per the Miami Herald’s Carlos Frías, “Visit Florida, the state tourism and marketing agency, and local tourism agencies in Miami, Orlando and Tampa are paying the Michelin Guide an estimated $1.5 million over the next three years to rate Florida’s restaurants.” So far, all Tampa has gotten out of that deal is zero stars and three Bib Gourmands…. Money well spent?
That (Long Distance) Delivery $$$ – Expedite’s Kristen Hawley reports, “This week, Uber Eats announced a new product for (some) restaurants: the ability to box up and ship food across the country. To start, 15 restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami signed onto the project.” Eats joins Goldbelly and DoorDash on this particular delivery wars battlefield, with FedEx flying its fighters. (In this metaphor, the hard deck is break-even, and Dara Khosrowshahi is a sexy volleyball pilot who doesn’t respect the rules.)
The Revolving ServSafe Door – In California, a new “Responsible Beverage Service Training Act, will require bartenders, waitstaff and their managers at establishments licensed to serve alcohol to undergo a three- to four-hour training on how alcohol affects the body, the consequences of over-serving, basic laws regulating alcohol, and intervention techniques for dealing with inebriated customers.”
Fine, but the LA Times’s Suhauna Hussain and Stephanie Breijo report that while “using private companies for health and safety certifications is not unusual in the food industry… [this new law] has created a cottage industry of new companies specifically providing the California training.” It’s such a lucrative little gig that Jerry Jolly (real name), “a 31-year veteran of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Department who served as its director before retiring in 2006… [has] come out of retirement to launch a training company, Jerry R Jolly & Associates, prompted by the passage of the law.”
Hm. What did you know and when did you know it, JERRY JOLLY?
The Media (ATTN: PR.) – Depending on negotiations with parent company Vox, by this time Monday, Eater staffers may be on strike. Deadline’s David Robb reports union leadership “unanimously authorized a strike on Tuesday, and the bargaining unit is scheduled to take a strike authorization vote as soon as Friday.” (NB: Although Grub Street is also owned by Vox, they work with a different union and therefore won’t be joining this potential Vox strike next week.) Before you pitch your restaurant news this weekend, check to make sure someone’s actually checking emails via the Vox Media Union Twitter account here.
The Media (Moves) – Lil’ scoop: Word in my inbox is Eater NY editor Bao Ong is leaving the site in July to take over a new role at the Houston Chronicle. I tried to message Ong for more on the Chronicle job (assume it’s on the food desk?), but haven’t heard back yet. Eater also announced internally that Ong’s current colleague Erika Adams was leaving Eater too, but I was able to get her comments in time, and she tells me that’s changed; she’ll be sticking around for a while.
The search for a new Eater NY editor will begin in due course. I am the frontrunner.
The Buns of Summer – Subhed on Eater (details in Tuesday’s FM below): “With calls to boycott Martin’s potato rolls over contributions to a far-right politician, King’s Hawaiian rolls are about to become the hot buns of the summer.” And…. maybe. But I googled “buns of summer” and am here to report the results were…. unexpected:
Some sad news – Back to Miami, where Carlos Frías reports restaurateur “Nino Pernetti died May 31 after an 18-month struggle with the aftereffects of COVID-19, his older daughter, Tatiana Pernetti, said. He was 76. His family detailed Pernetti’s long fight in a January 2022 Miami Herald story, which described lasting damage to his lungs from the disease.”
For Design Fans – I’ve said this before, but after a very long period of seeing nonstop atomic-style lighting in restaurants, I am a current fan of overhead heft. Which is probably why I think these layered wicker shades were the right choice for this space at the new Amal Coconut Grove (just one picture, by Maxine Bocken in Eater).
And last but not least: Good luck to everyone in Chicago for the James Beard Awards this weekend. Eater has a handy new list of takeovers and side events here, and as mentioned Tuesday, the Beard Foundation has added a whole bunch of panels, etc. too. If you’ve got on the ground observations or gossip there, or just have thoughts on how it all shakes out, please send them my way! I’m very good at keeping secrets, and will keep everything confidential unless otherwise agreed…
June 14th:
Beard Season – The broken, controversial, rebuilding, and rebuilt James Beard Awards came back this weekend, and… everyone’s happy? I asked a few people who were there what the weekend feeling was, and got back: “Jubilant” “Emotional” and “Festive.” One person said parties after the media awards were kind of “sad and muted,” but someone else said the only time they were better (or even existed, really) was back when Lucky Peach was around. Another told me attendees’ clothes this year were much improved.
Eater has the full list of chef and restaurant award winners here. And media awards winners here.
Quick sample of the national stuff on the restaurant side:
Outstanding Chef: Mashama Bailey, The Grey (Savannah); Outstanding Restaurant: Chai Pani (Asheville); Outstanding Restaurateur: Chris Bianco (Phoenix); and Best New Restaurant: Owamni (Minneapolis).
Based on recent Beards history, there has been / will be some dissecting of diversity this year. Example: In a (paywalled) Chicago Tribune piece from Josh Noel on Friday, he says the team behind Outstanding Bar Program nominee Nobody’s Darling recognizes that their addition to the Beard short list after less than a year in business (and a relatively lower key setting / menu than other nominees) may have had more to do with their role in the community than might have been usual in the past. (WaPo’s Richard Morgan called Nobody’s Darling, “iconoclastic, not just for being Black-owned or queer-owned or women-owned — let alone all three — but for being women-centered, as well” back in December.)
“But [co-owner Angela Barnes] is also perfectly fine with the idea that who Nobody’s Darling [serves] has become as relevant as the cocktails Nobody’s Darling serves…. Barnes said she wouldn’t want to be a finalist solely for the community the bar has fostered… but if the bar’s social and cultural role appealed to Beard judges, so be it.”
So be it! (And the award went to Julep in Houston anyway, so Barnes and crew have time to build on that appeal.)
Meanwhile, if you’ve been living in my content bubble and were wondering if we’d done away with — or added more public nuance to — the “food will bring us together” trope, it sure didn’t sound that way from everything almost everyone was saying on stage at the restaurant awards last night!
Over at the media awards, host Lisa Ling bookended the night with her version of a “lunchbox moment” story (deconstructed a bit last year by Jaya Saxena, among others), unfortunately ending the night’s live feed with: “The cultural split ends with me. In fact, my daughters, they love Asian food so much and want to take it to school everyday. I mean, they would take kimchi to school if I let them. But I’m like, no no no no no. That smell is not quite right.” Oof.
Probably a slip of tone / phrasing Ling meant to play a different way? But if you’re presenting at media awards, maybe don’t just read the room, read what the room writes…
Oh, and PS: The weather chipped in for a bit of chaos! Tornado warnings sent reporters at the restaurant and chef awards running up and down stairs to escape press room windows and find wifi, and the associated storm knocked out power at Best Chef: Great Lakes winner Erick Williams’s after party at Virtue.
The Drop – If you’ve been following along with the f&b NFT scene and seeing dollar signs swirling round your screen, NB: NFT sellers are watching crypto swirl the drain. Feels like all things finance are down right now, and inflation isn’t exactly helping cash holdings either, but at time of writing, Ethereum (ETH, the dominant currency of NFTs) has lost nearly 70% of its value since NYC’s Flyfish Club first minted (launched) their membership collection in mid-December. The VCR Group restaurateurs raised the equivalent of $14M in those initial, heady days, and have made a ton more on commissions since. They shouldn’t be broke by any means, but if they never cashed in any of that first haul of ETH, it’s worth less than $5M now. HODL?
The Tips – In Eater NY, critic Ryan Sutton reports, “The beleaguered no tipping movement continues to sputter as more and more New York restaurants drop the policy. Momofuku Ko in the East Village, David Chang’s expensive chef’s counter spot, will nix its four-year-old effort at service-included pricing on July 1.” Ko is keeping topline prices the same, “a move that will effectively hike up the cost of dinner by 20 percent.” VP of operations at Momofuku tells Sutton that “Ko’s front-of-the-house hiring has been the ‘most challenging’ of any Momofuku restaurant, and that service staff turned over completely when no tipping went into effect in 2018.”
And on the change-tipping-via-laws track in DC: “Opponents of a ballot initiative that would slowly phase out the subminimum wage that is paid to workers who collect tips have filed a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court seeking to reverse a recent ruling by the D.C. Board of Elections that put the measure on the November ballot.” Details via Martin Austermuhle in DCist.
The Full Circle – Seven years after it appeared an argument over Trump’s ideas on immigration caused José Andrés to back out of running a restaurant in what was then Trump’s Old Post Office hotel in downtown DC, Trump is out of both the District and that building, and Emily Heil reports in WaPo: “A location of the Bazaar, Andrés’ globe-spanning concept, will open later this year under the hotel’s new management, a Miami investment fund called CGI Merchant Group that will operate it as a Waldorf Astoria. Andrés is no mere tenant in the deal; he also owns an undisclosed share of the fund.”
I would be careful about calling this a “last laugh” scenario though. When CGI bought the hotel from Trump, the AP said, “Sources close to the deal demanding anonymity… have said that the price was $375 million, handing the Trump family business perhaps as much as $100 million in profit.” So, more of a, “Chuckle, chuckle, sigh,” maybe.
And last but not least: TV Season(s) – Remember when the Family Meal reader survey came out last year, and one option for the “David Chang is…” prompt was “David Chang is… going to start putting out some ridiculous video content soon and there's nothing any of us can do about it.” Welp, the 5% of you who chose that answer were correct. Per Lynette Rice in Dealbook late last week: “Hulu Originals announced four food series from Vox Media Studios and David Chang’s Majordomo Media, including one from Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka.”
Dave asks you to email him directly if you’d like to be a part of:
Drag Me To Dinner, in which “two new pairs of visionary Queens go wig-to-wig in a competition to throw the coolest themed dinner party on a dime.”
Secret Chef, a cooking competition where “ten chefs anonymously rank each other’s food through a series of blind tastings. With their true identities concealed, everything will be hidden except the one thing that matters most… the food.”
Burning Men, a “bracket-style competition series [where they] pit pepper growers against one another in a fight to prove whose creation is hottest.”
Or Chefs vs. Wild: “In each episode of the show, two different world class chefs will be dropped into the wilderness where they’ll embark on a grueling and unprecedented mission – survive and forage enough wild ingredients to create a restaurant worthy, five-star meal.”
Guess “Dave Chang’s Microwaves of Madness” didn’t make the cut?
June 17th:
The Lists – Some food media content calendars were a bit overshadowed by the Beards this week, so you may have missed Food & Wine releasing a big “Game Changers” package, and Robb Report putting out its 10 Best New Restaurants roundup. Both lists have helpful profiles of the listed, at the links:
Sample “Game Changers”: Chintan Pandya and Roni Mazumdar of Dhamaka (NYC); World Central Kitchen (World); Jenny Dorsey of Studio ATAO and more; Stephen Satterfield (your Netflix, mailbox, closet, ears, etc.); Ghetto Gastro (Everywhere and Tokyo); BentoBox (www); Momofuku (Target); Dwyane Wade (NBA cellar); Alexis Nicole Nelson (TikTok forests and meadows); and Yannick Benjamin of Contento (NYC).
Robb’s “Best New Restaurants” (ordered 1-10): San Ho Won (SF); March (Houston); Kasama (Chicago); Les Trois Cheveaux (NYC); Meridian (Dallas); Horses (LA); Audrey (Nashville); Tomo (Seattle); Mena (NYC); and Callie in San Diego.
Oh, and the Michelin Guide: California did that thing this week where they tease us with new additions to the next guide without saying whether those additions will be stars or bibs. 17 new names here.
Congrats, all!
The Critics – Heads up in Pittsburgh: Familiar face (Twitter, Instagram, some interview on Youtube) Hal B. Klein posted a disappearing Instagram story this week saying he is moving to the Post-Gazette to become senior food writer and dining critic on June 20.
And in NYC: After 22 years in the job, Adam Platt is stepping down from his restaurant critic role at New York Magazine. His farewell essay, “I’m Full,” is a meditation on the job itself, ending with some parting notes for future critics (“You’ll quickly grow weary of uni and caviar”; “You’ll never be a regular”), and a quick list of superlatives and fun facts. One review he might reconsider: Masa. “I think my initial review was filled with endless adjectives of praise, but it turned out this style of restaurant opened the door to all sorts of regrettable trends, like sushi-bro culture and the denuding of the oceans, to name a few. I’ve since gone back to Masa as a private citizen with well-to-do friends, and you just feel like you’re being mercilessly ripped off.”
As for Platt and his old desk, he says: “I’ll be staying on at Grub Street and New York as a writer and resident crank, and I will wait along with everyone else to see who is next chosen to challenge orthodoxies and complain bitterly about the quality of the gumbo soup, or the xiao long bao, or the overly pricey vegan tasting menu in their own particular way.”
The Critics Too – After Platt announced his departure, The Washingtonian’s Jessica Sidman got ahold of Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema and wound up with this headline: “Veteran Restaurant Critics Are Stepping Down. Not Tom Sietsema.” Says the critic: “I realize, every day, I’m a white male waking up, and there are a lot of people who think they might do a better job with the position, or why has he been in there so long?” Then he slaps himself in the face three times, looks in the mirror, and says, “YOU GOT THIS, BIG TOM!” (That part is not in the article, but clearly implied.)
The Overly Pricey Vegan Tasting Menu – Having some conflicted feelings about this week’s Business Insider exposé of Daniel Humm and Eleven Madison Park. Nobody in the industry will be surprised (sadly) by most of the staff issues of burnout and low pay (“While the vegan tasting menu cost $335, [one employee] was paid $15 an hour as a commis”), and the allegations of food waste aren’t great (“Three former Eleven Madison Park employees said bins of food were trashed daily instead of being donated to [Humm’s charity Rethink Foods] or composted.”). But I bristled at Baldor being used as a bogeyman (“In reality, most vegetables were sourced from delivery services like Baldor...”), even if Humm implied he was buying straight from farms. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of sourcing vegetables with wholesalers (who work with… farms), or even running around Whole Foods last minute looking for peppers, doesn’t quite conjure the same betrayal of Costco chickens pretending to be Lummi Island natives at the Willows Inn?
And yeah, sure sounds like the guy should get back in the kitchen and win back the respect of his staff (ASAP!), but I’m not sure I understand pinging him for personally coddling VIPs or speaking at the UN on climate change?
Bah. I don’t have any connection to Humm or personal feeling toward EMP, and I am not vegan, but... Maybe what’s bothering me is there seems to be a little anti-vegan clickbait at work here? Business Insider’s headline is: “Eleven Madison Park Went Vegan, Then Things Fell Apart.” But in an article based on employee interviews, we learn at least a couple of times that: “Former employees don't blame the vegan menu for Eleven Madison Park's struggles.”
The article makes good points! Humm deserves his lumps! Staff deserve fair working conditions! But… Does “switched to a vegan menu” deserve all this conflation with Daniel Humm’s ego? (More to say on this from the other side too, where Humm seems to have failed some vegan purity tests? Some other time….)
The Wonder – I still find it impossible to imagine that a business model built on “finishing” pre-prepped meals in sprinter vans parked in people’s driveways is somehow either sustainable or attractive, but per the Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer, “New York-based Wonder closed a $350 million funding round last month, according to company officials, bringing the total amount raised in debt and equity to $900 million. The latest funding values the company at roughly $3.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Previously it was valued at $1.4 billion, the people said.”
They’ve got an impressive list of restaurants from around the country — this year’s winner of the Beard for Most Outstanding Restaurant, Asheville’s Chani Pani, is on Wonder — “delivering” to only a handful of New Jersey suburbs (for now), so maybe best to think of it a bit like ready-to-eat GoldBelly?
The Argument – Really enjoyed being a fly on the wall for this Pan Con Podcast conversation between Lee Schrager (best known for running the South Beach Wine and Food Festival) and Miami chef / restaurateur Michael Beltran this week. There are some fun stopping points along the way (Schrager says the number “going around” for Sexy Fish’s restaurant buildout in Miami is $35M?!), but the going gets good around the 56 minute mark, when Beltran starts pushing Schrager on what SOBEWFF — and by extension most food festivals — actually do for their communities.
Schrager at 1:00:20: “We have changed a lot of things… I mean, we started compensating. It’s bullshit: $500 or $750. I get it. It’s almost insulting. But if you paid every chef who participated or every restaurant $2500, yes it would mean that the festival would make less money… Uh, it’s probably the right thing to do. I’m not disagreeing. But you also open doors that can never get shut.”
And even if they did pay more, Schrager says only about 40% of chefs and restaurants who could invoice SOBEWFF for their time actually do?
After that they disagree over who owes whom what around COVID grants and gratitude, they bicker about what creative control means when it goes against a sponsor’s wishes, and on and on and… All this is to say, I haven’t heard a food podcast where the host actually disagrees with a guest for a long time and I would like more of them, please!
Schrager: “Do you think there are more people that hate us than like us?”
Beltran: “In the community? For sure.”
Open those doors that can never get shut, podcasters!
June 24th:
Beard Season – is not quite over… We’ve still got some James Beard Awards debriefing to do.
I’m not exactly sure what to, or how to, or even if I should quote at all from this wild John Tesar rant on Facebook, but think it’s safe to say it is the extreme, quiet-part-out-loud (“forced inclusion”) version of a conversation that is going on in some parts of the Beard watching world right now. (Including parts where straight-faced people yell at each other about “a world of shopping mall restaurants, stoner food, hipster attitudes and frankly a world of mediocrity!” like a Bluth at a Klimpy’s.)
Through / underneath it all, Tesar has one, very pointed question: Who the hell are these judges, and what gives them the right? He knows at least one judge, because the rant is in response to Dallas critic Brian Reinhart’s recent article, in which Reinhart outs himself as a Texas region voter and goes through his own ballot thinking for readers. Reinhart also writes: “My role as a judge is set to be disclosed by the [James Beard Foundation] with the final results.”
That I hadn’t heard before, but after three judges and an awards committee member confirmed it for me, the Beard Foundation’s Tamar Simpson replied to an emailed question to say: “Per the Awards audit recommendations, the 2022 James Beard Award judges will be made public after the Awards cycle concludes in the coming weeks. Their names will be published, not the program they judged.”
Looking forward to it! But condolences in advance to the judges from cities that didn’t get Beards. Going to be rough going at home. Maybe you can start a Substack or something.
The Real Estate Game – In the New Yorker this month, Anna Weiner follows the rise and stumble of SF’s Tartine, its founders Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, and its unionizing staff. The story begins in a mythical-sounding “pre-Yelp, pre-iPhone, pre-cronut era,” when the dot com bubble had just burst and SF’s “median rent for a two-bedroom apartment had fallen from three thousand dollars a month to just under two thousand.” Weiner then brings us from there to this: “During the past two decades, other businesses associated with the same era had taken on private investment and morphed into national brands. Roberta’s, the punkish pizzeria that opened in Bushwick, in 2008, now has a supermarket line of frozen pies and upscaled locations in the U.S. and Singapore; Stumptown Coffee… is now owned by JAB Holding Company, the German conglomerate behind Panera and Krispy Kreme…. An investment vehicle co-founded by Stephen Ross, the chairman of the real-estate firm Related Companies, has a minority stake in David Chang’s Momofuku Holdings.” Etc.
Tartine’s own “Coffee Manufactory’s production and packaging is now under the purview of J. Gursey, a wholesale roaster headquartered in Las Vegas that partners with casinos, hotels, and the band Korn.”
It’s a familiar ride (minus Korn), and an easy one for knee-jerk “Sell out!” reactions from some, but the sheer scale of CIM, the developer Tartine has gotten involved with, and the scope of CIM’s corporate / cultural invasion into company leadership are impressive. “For a few months, Gary Schweikert, an executive at CIM, was the company’s interim CEO. (Dar Vasseghi, the former CEO of Yoshinoya USA, a Japanese fast-food chain, recently took over.) [CIM founder] Richard Ressler’s daughter Jillian, a former CIM employee, is now Tartine’s vice-president of brand.”
It feels like such a total takeover that even though the piece talks about the usual deals where developers provide favorable leases for concepts that might bring cache to their projects, reading it permanently changed my general perspective from: “Commercial real estate types desperately need cool F&B vibes for their buildings!” to “Commercial real estate types own the vibes.” Maybe I’m late to that party, but still a bit of a “shifting of the vibes” for me, to coin a phrase.
The Numbers – The Washington Post’s Tim Carman tried to sift through the doomsayers, propagandists, and data mavericks to come up with an actual number of restaurants that closed specifically because of COVID-19. His tally: “based on numbers crunched by The Post… in 2020, about 72,700 more restaurants and bars than normal closed, apparently due to the pandemic, a 95 percent jump over the average annual [closure] rate.” That’s not close to what some predicted, and it’s still complicated. Carman also said on Twitter that they debated whether to include openings too, “but it sort of muddies the effect of the pandemic. For example: there are more bars and restaurants now in the US vs pre-pandemic, which makes it sound like the pandemic had little effect. Which no one believes.”
And of course none of that accounts for everyone drowning in debt. Tom Colicchio tells Carman “he owes ‘close to a million dollars’ to one landlord alone.” He also owes me three nickels. He knows why.
The Suits – In a first, “A New Orleans restaurant prevailed against Underwriters at Lloyd’s for insurance coverage of pandemic-related losses, after a Louisiana appellate court found that the coronavirus physically contaminated the eatery’s property.” Bloomberg’s Daphne Zhang reports Oceana Grill’s policy with Lloyd’s did not include a virus exclusion clause. And NB: Chief judge Terri Love said that the many “other federal and state court rulings in favor of insurance companies are not binding to the Louisiana court,” which sounds sort of hopeful, but presumably cuts both ways if you’re trying to cite this one as precedence?
For TV Fans – There’s a new scripted restaurant show on Hulu that I will definitely watch if you send me your login. It’s based in Chicago, where Chicago Magazine’s Pearse Anderson says: “Billed as a half-hour comedy, this new series about young fine-dining chef Carmen Berzatto (played by Shameless’s Jeremy Allen White) inheriting his family’s beef place can feel more like a tense, grimy race: quick shots, a rush of pissed-off characters, and the constant bleed of money that owning a restaurant can entail. Call it the Uncut Gems of the food world and you’re not off to a bad start.” Hulu calls it: “The Bear. A hot kitchen, family, Chicago, and the occasional searing burn.” Trailer here.
And last but not least: The Critics – After temporary banishment during the pandemic, star ratings have officially returned to the NYT in the form of Pete Wells handing three stars to La Piraña, a one man show of a Puerto Rican style lechonera in a small trailer “supported by its tires and two pilings of boards and cinder blocks” in a parking lot in the Bronx. A quick look at the comments section says people reading it so far are some version of A) Hell yeah! Fine dining is not the be all end all! B) John Tesar shouting, “Stars for a trailer? Come on!” or C) Vegetarian.
Me, I’m just over here enjoying the quiet precision of the Noise Level note: “The salsa music is never loud enough to inhibit anybody from taking part in three conversations at once.”
Perfect.
June 28th:
The Judges – I said on Friday that the James Beard Foundation would be publicly listing judges soon, and as if by magic, the foundation immediately sent a note to judges to let them know their names “will be added to our website by Wednesday, June 29.” So… tomorrow! Please send all your knee-jerk complaints, reactions, and questions to the JBF’s unofficial vice president of town-gown relations: andrew@thisfamilymeal.com.
The Critics – Headline in Business Insider: “Leaked document reveals Eleven Madison Park knew it paid its workers 'too little.'” Kate Taylor reports they got hold of a draft op-ed that Daniel Humm was planning to try to get published, and — sorry to quote a summary; blame it on travel — Eater’s Emma Orlow says, “According to the publication, in September 2021, the restaurant commissioned a ghostwriter to pen an op-ed announcing that EMP was increasing employee wages by 33 percent, with $20 per hour as the new minimum hourly wage… But after a negative review from the New York Times’ Pete Wells of the newly meatless restaurant, the restaurant reportedly scrapped plans to pitch the op-ed — which they hoped to publish in the Times — and [decided not to] enact the wage increase, according to Business Insider.”
So… Alt headline: “Local business planned to do right thing, and take steps to publicly acknowledge past wrongs, but expected downturn in revenue caused freeze in wages.” (Still can / should do the thing? Maybe!)
The Useful Lists – Eater’s “Most Anticipated Restaurants of Summer 2022” lists have been trickling out over the past few weeks. Good for keeping tabs on what the media is keeping tabs on around the country, and so far I see: Chicago; Seattle; Atlanta; New Orleans and London. More to come, I’m sure.
The Media – In CA, “The San Francisco Chronicle has a new Assistant Food & Wine Editor: Caleb Pershan, a reporter and editor who started covering the San Francisco food scene in 2013.” His new boss Janelle Bitker has an intro here, plus a big helpful head shot if you need it. He goes by @calaesthetic on Twitter and Instagram.
And in VA, Julia Bainbridge tweeted yesterday that someone from Northern Virginia Magazine is looking to hire a “Food Critic / Editor,” but they are also “are also open to the idea of hiring Food/Lifestyle Editor if we aren’t able to find a full-time Food Critic.” Details in the thread.
The Stages – Quick recommendation to follow along with Copenhagen-based Lisa Abend’s look at the history of stagiaire systems on her Bord Substack this week. She’s thinking through that big Financial Times story on the Copenhagen restaurant world’s worker issues (here ICYMI) by looking back at how we got here. Fun fact I did not know: Back in the day, “at elBulli, the stagiaires even had to pay to attend the staff Christmas dinner that the restaurant held to celebrate the end of the season.”
For TV fans – I’m seeing lots of very positive reviews out for that new Hulu / FX restaurant show The Bear, but if you want a solid behind the scenes rundown on the culinary stuff, the LA Times has a good piece on where / how everyone involved prepped for their roles. Per Stephanie Breijo, “While Lionel Boyce, who plays Marcus, [the restaurant’s] bread baker turned pastry head, staged at Copenhagen’s Hart Bageri, [lead actor Jeremy White] enrolled in a two-week crash course in Pasadena’s Institute of Culinary Education along with Ayo Edebiri, who plays the pedigreed and driven newcomer Sydney Adamu.” After that, White tried a stint at Republique, but “He immediately felt overwhelmed by the size and the scope of it. He lasted one day.” White did better at Pasjoli, and also “also worked with Chanterelle’s David Waltuck in New York and spent a weekend at Kumiko in Chicago.”
And I didn’t realize Matty Matheson both acted in and co-produced the series, and the creator’s sister, “Courtney Storer — former chef of Jon & Vinny’s — served as a culinary producer.”
And last but not least – Headline in Restaurant Business: “These Restaurant Companies Will Pay For Employees To Travel For Abortions. Starbucks, DoorDash, Grubhub and Yelp introduced the policies leading up to the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade.” I know these big corporate moves are getting mixed reviews on line, not least because they shouldn’t be necessary, but seems worth knowing nonetheless. (I know there are a ton of independent restaurants (and independent people) doing things too, and will see if there’s a good way to round that up too.)
Oh, and if you’re angry about the news AND you love batshit crazy absurdist cooking content, Dennis Lee is offering a free year-long subscription to his Food is Stupid newsletter with any donation to the Chicago Abortion Fund, which “provides logistics, emotional care, and financial help to those who need it here, as well as the rest of the Midwest” (and beyond).
That call to action is attached to a step by step making of “brat-bingsu” (Lee’s Wisconsin bratwurst version of the classic Korean shaved ice dessert). Sample quote: “I dumped some beans, brat chunks, and mochi on top and drizzled some sweetened condensed milk over the frozen beer. Fuck, this stuff melts quickly.”
And that’s it for today! I put the final touches on this in our hotel room, and now my seven year-old and I are off to the Maxwell Food Centre for dinner. Chicken rice? No. On the way in from the airport, our cab driver told us chicken rice is off the menu in Singapore now that Malaysia has banned poultry exports to the city. He told me we shouldn’t order it even if we see it, because without fresh chickens, cooks are using frozen imports, and that stuff “smells terrible.”
Noodles it is.
July 1st:
The Gentrification – In LA, chef Brian Dunsmoor (Hatchet Hall) and Whole Cluster Hospitality opened Dunsmoor this week, and the neighborhood welcomed it with… graffiti and protests. Eater LA’s Cathy Chaplin and Mona Holmes report, “Approximately 50 demonstrators included immediate neighbors, nearby residents from Highland Park, and members of the LA Tenants Union (Northeast Local Chapter) and Street Watch Los Angeles, organizations dedicated to tenant rights. The restaurant’s large wraparound windows gave diners a full view of sign-holding demonstrators throughout service. Haphazardly scrawled banners read ‘Dunsmoor displaces,’ ‘No queremos restaurante caros aqui’ (we don’t want expensive restaurants here), and simply ‘fuera’ (out), as diners tucked into grilled oysters, pork rillettes, and country ham.”
The most interesting part of this incident / article for me was the take-no-prisoners attitude of some of the protestors. There’s not much mention of anyone looking for a dialog on menu prices or achieving more in-neighborhood hiring or whatever. But there is this, from a spokesperson for the LA Tenants Union: “In my experience of dealing with people like this, there is no rationalizing. This [restaurant] stands as a symbol to invite other people not from around here with a lot of money to come into our neighborhoods and displace us… Our message is literally ‘get out’ because this is going to bring harm to us. We’ve got to draw a line.”
Something to add to the THREATS column in your next new restaurant SWOT analysis…
The End of an Era – Headline in Grub Street: “The Mission Chinese Era Will Come to an End in New York. Danny Bowien’s Brooklyn restaurant will close in July.” Reporter Rachel Sugar includes a link to the announcement. Details are scant. Doesn’t seem like there’s anything at work here beyond usual restaurant economics (now including COVID), but I think journalists are doing a disservice to this closure by not drawing a direct line to it from one of the biggest pre-pandemic restaurant scandals of all time: That time Bowein got paid to put Arizona Iced Tea into the menu. The 99c nail in the coffin. No further questions.
The REIT Roulette – “Two of David Chang’s Restaurants Have Abruptly Closed on the Las Vegas Strip.” Per Eater LV’s Janna Karel, “The Venetian did not provide an explanation for why the restaurants have closed,” but…. “Majordomo and Moon Palace mark the first restaurant closures at the hotel following the $4 billion acquisition of it by real estate investment trust VICI Properties in February.”
Some Sad News – In Seattle, “On June 17, the Mukilteo police department reported that a diver had gone missing in the waters near Lighthouse Park in Mukilteo. [On Monday], the diver was identified as Hans Korompis, the director of Shubert Ho’s Market restaurants, a 33-year-old chef who Ho and co-workers say had a profound effect on the restaurant community in Seattle.” Details via Jade Yamazaki Stewart in Eater.
And Last But Not Least: The Judgement – As promised, the James Beard Awards publicly listed their 2022 judges this week. The list, over 400 names in alphabetical order, is exactly as the Beard Foundation’s 2021 audit (pdf here) intended — “Name only, and not which program they judged” — but… still feels like a bit of a cop out. How is this supposed to provide real scrutiny of the judging process if there’s not even separation between restaurant / chef awards judges and the media / journalism side?
I’ll see how much time I can devote to parsing this list over the next few weeks, but meantime: In the note they sent to judges about the impending disclosure, the Foundation said they plan to remove these names from their site sometime in the fall, when the 2023 judging cycle begins. So here, for posterity, is the 409 member strong publicly listed James Beard Award 2022 voting body. Happy scrolling (or, alternatively: sorry):
Inez Adams; MJ Adams; Gary Adcock; Bill Addison; Lenore Adkins; Michael Adno; Nkechi Ahaiwe; Ken Albala; Nico Albert; Gabriela Martinez Alvarez; Nick Akira Amano-Dolan; Judy Amster; Omar Anani; Kendra Anderson; Dominic Armato; Nyesha Arrington; Nadia Arumugam; Reem Assil; Charleen Badman; Melody Baetens; Natasha Bailey; Michiel Bakker; Courtney Balestier; Liz Balmaseda; Emma Balter; Megan Bannister; Christina Barber-Just; Cathy Barrow; Bill Baskin; Debra Bass; Arthur Bell; Rosalind Bentley; Jeanne Besser; Vishwesh Bhatt; Rupa Bhattacharya; Chris Bierlein; Janelle Bitker; Jane Black; Neal Bodenheimer; Darcie Boschee; Cheree Boteler; Joe Bowie; Carrie Boyd; Taren Bradley; Chelsea Brasted; Kathleen Brennan; Katie Brigham; Raphael Brion; Karen Brooks; Tashi Brown; Tracy Brown; Melanie Brown; Kristen Browning-Blas; Addie Broyles; Stacey Brugeman; Erik Bruner-Yang; Tatiana Bruno; Nancy Bruns; Nikki Buchanan; Angela Burke; Maria Burke; Jamie Burke Previch; Nathan Burkhart; Steph Burnette; Rebecca Burns; Lillia Callum-Penso; Janet Cam; Monti Carlo; Noelle Carter; Amaris Castillo; Lisa Cericola; Chris Chamberlain; Sue Chan; Jennifer Chandler; Momo Chang; Justin Chapple; Bridget Charters; Jodie Chase; Adrienne Cheatham; Jon Cheng; Ariel Cheung; Grace Choi; Sonia Chopra; Gina Christman; Brandon Chuang; Joan Cirillo; Julia Clancy; Thera Clark; Patricia Cobe; Adahlia Cole; Emme Collins; Beverly Colston; Phaedra Cook; Dara Cooper; Reesha Cosby; Nayada Cowherd; Anita Verna Crofts; Caitlin Cullen; James Cury; Serena Dai; Richard Dargan; Jenn De La Vega; Rob DeBorde; Liza DeGuia; Erin DeJesus; Dr. Jonathan Deutsch; Debra DeVaughn; Caitlin Dewey; William Dissen; Fernando Divina; Marlene Divina; Michael Dizon; Dr. Ietef DJ Cavem Vita; Steve Dolinsky; Darby Doyle; Nathalie Dupree; Sonal Dutt; Roberta Duyff; Nancy Easton; Benjy Egel; Scott Eklund; Debbie Elliott; Taffy Elrod; Angela Hansberger English; Adam Erace; Valerie Erwin; Rafael Espinal; Jessica Evans; Patrick Evans-Hylton; Jacqueline Farmer; Abby Farmmartino; Marcie Ferris; Tom Finkel; Kathleen Flinn; Clay Fong; Paula Forbes; Cole Ford; Kim Foster; Anestes Fotiades; Tara Fougner; Clare Fox; Carlos Frias; Gale Gand; Jorge Gaviria; John Gennari; Takera Gholson; Michael Giberson; Anagha Godbole; Maria Godoy; Darra Goldstien; Alex Gonzalez; Anika Goss-Foster; Joe Gray; Lyndsay Green; Dr. Cynthia Greenlee; Irina Groushevaia; Kathy Gunst; Sandra Gutierrez; Pat Hager; Melissa Booth Hall; Irene Hamburger; Lara Hamilton; Adante Hart; Kristen Hartley; Erik Harvey; Joanne Lamb Hayes; Brian Hayes; Hannah Hayes; Laura Hayes; Kate Heddings; Zehorit Helicher; Keith Herndon; Craig Hetherington; Alana Higgins; Jimmy Ho; Peter Hoffman; Melissa Hom; Sandra Hu; Aaron Hutcherson; Elinor Hutton; Giovanna Huyke; Katherine Hysmith; Imaeyen Ibanga; Elyse Inamine; Arthur Ircink; Michelle Jensen; Ben Johnson; JJ Johnson; Michael Jordan; Alice Julier; Dalia Jurgensen; Dorothy Kalins; Kaui Kanakaole; Faiyaz Kara; Jonathan Kauffman; Janet Keeler; Katherine Kehrli; Ali Khan; Scott Ki; Ann Kim; Nick Kindelsperger; Devon Klatell; Hal B. Klein; Ian Knauer; Stephanie Kochlin; Daniel Krohmer; Julie Kunen; Mark Kurlyanchik; Matt Lardie; Megan Larmer; Mary Beth Lasseter; Susan Laughlin; Frank Lee; Jean Lee; Yoonsoo Lee; David Leftwich; Ari Levaux; Marquita Levy; Drew Lewis; Pauline Lewis; Sydney Lewis; Jill Lightner; Chelsea Lin; Joanna Lin; Don Lindgren; Christine Liu; Nichole Livengood; Monique Llamas; Vikki Locke; Charles Lohman; Vallery Lomas; Ronni Lundy; Jenita Lyons; Tim Ma; Sarah Maiellano; Kristi Maier; Pooja Makhijani; Omar Mamoon; Ron Mardsen; Dan Marek; Grant Marek; Shauntrice Martin; Suzanne Masri; Keia Mastrianni; Angie Maxwell; David McCumber; Nancie McDermott; Dr. Shaka McGlotten; Matt McIntyre; Alice McLean; Nicolette Medina; Kate Medley; Adan Medrano; Maura Milan; Marti Miller; Ben Mims; Bill Minkowitz; Samantha Mitchell; Shane Mitchell; Kiano Moju; Paul Montoya; Leah Moss; Sukanta Nag; Kevin Nashan; June Naylor; Nycci Nellis; Therese Nelson; Liz Neumark; Catherine Neville; Barbara Taylor Nevins; Andrea Nguyen; Tien Nguyen; Annette Nielsen; Ron Nurwisah; Sharon O'Connor; Kim O'Donnell; Carolyn O'Neil; Leah Ollman; Steve Olson; Laurie Oue; Sarahlynn Pablo; MM Pack; Zella Palmer; Kae Lani Palmisano; Kevin Pang; Anne Marie Panoringan; Catherine Pantsios; Michael Park; Raj Patel; Monica Perales; Maureen Petrosky; Donna Battle Pierce; Sarah Pierre; Justin Pioche; Fred Plotkin; Mary Pols; Beth Price; Adana Prototentis; Rogelio Puente; Jeremy Pugh; Christine Ra; Nargis Rahman; Azucena Raisilla; José Ralat; Izzie Ramirez; Amanda Rankine; Sonia Rao; Krishnendu Ray; Brian Reinhart; Christina Ricci; Eric Riddle; Andrew Rigie; Rosanna Rivero; Keli Rivers; Dana Rizer; Salvatore Rizzo; Jamila Robinson; Jenna Robinson; Kat Robinson; Matt Rodbard; Rick Rodriguez; Krista Ruane; Miriam Rubin; Gabe Sachs; Farideh Sadeghin; Rosin Saez; Marisel Salazar; Sharon Salomon; Ricardo Salvador; Eric Sandler; Jaya Saxena; Lucinda Scala-Quinn; Jack Schramm; Matthew Sedacca; Ashok Selvam; Samantha Seneviratne; Tucker Shaw; Paula Shoyer; Anthony Shu; Marnie Shure; Jennifer Shutek; Ted Sickler; Greg Silverman; Cole Sisson; Dawn Smith; Michael Smith; Lora Smith; Shannon Smith; Jennifer Snyder; Alex Springer; Cory Starr; Adina Steiman; Tambra Raye Stevenson, MPH; Stewart Stoltz; Lesley Stracks-Mullem; Cara Strickland; Mike Sula; Jackie Summers; Quincy Surasmith; Mike Sutter; Ellen Sweets; Herschell Taghap; Ruth Tam; Naama Tamir; Wilson Tang; Emily Teel; Tyler Thomas; Edmund Tijerina; Naomi Tomky; Christian Tonsgard; Poppy Tooker; Dana Tough; Jackie Tran; Shary Tran; Margo True; Luke Tsai; Moonlynn Tsai; Esther Tseng; Philip Tzeng; Eloise Valadez; Charli Valdez; Tan Vinh; Amy Vogler; Brigid Washington; Karen Washington; Bram Weinstein; Randi Weintein; Joanne Weir; Shannon Wianecki; Lora Wiley-Lennartz; Ennion Williams; Sheree Williams; Psyche Williams-Forson; Virginia Willis; Maya Wilson; Scott Wink; Alice Wong; Candice Woo; Will Wornom; Johnathan Wright; Jessica Yadegaran; Malik Yakini; John Yearwood; Emerald Yeh; Laura Young; Stephanie Zarpas; Kathleen Zelman; David Zivan; and Jennifer Zyman.
July 8th:
The Fable — Headline in Eater: “Chef’s Fable. Blue Hill at Stone Barns’ alluring story — that a fine dining restaurant could be a model for changing the world — seduced diners, would-be employees, and thought leaders alike. But former employees say that narrative often obscured a more complicated reality.” This is part one of a three part investigative series by Meghan McCarron, with the other two focused on the Stone Barns farm, and the Stone Barns Foundation (and their relationships with Blue Hill). I only had a chance to skim those, so can’t comment much, but did try to get into the Chef’s Fable piece as much as possible and…
Sorry to disappoint everyone, but my gut is telling me to all-sides the shit out of this thing.
To disappoint the Toxic Work Environment focused: I have serious sympathy for people with bad bosses, and always try to frame my writing here in a way that makes that clear and hopes for a better future. But…. to say workers were “dismayed” or somehow surprised to learn the Blue Hill kitchen might be a tough / shouty environment, and then a few paragraphs later list all the times Barber has publicly said some version of “I have a terrible temper! It comes out at work! It is bad!” feels like a bit of a stretch. This is victim blaming, I know, and is not to excuse Blue Hill management’s behavior. I just can’t find a way around it in my reading of the article.
To disappoint the Blue Hill supporters: No matter how you read this, including factoring in the many denials — “a statement about the butter… totaled nearly 1,000 words and began with the sentence, ‘We want to further explain our butter.’”(!) — it is very hard to get around the fact that the truth was being stretched an awful lot in some places at Blue Hill. And I think McCarron’s main point here: That fake-it-till-you-make-it doesn’t quite work if your stated goal is telling people how to make it, is fair.
To disappoint the media: I reached out to McCarron — very last minute — to ask how all this reporting got started, and she told me, “In terms of reporting, I am not able to comment at this time.” I really hope “at this time” is a short-term stipulation, because journalists refusing to talk to the media about their own work is… chef’s kiss?
And finally, to disappoint HR pros (and Monday morning HR QBs): I really have no idea how the company should have properly handled that rape allegation (especially based on the disputed accounts of how it was handled in the story). Genuinely would love to hear from people who do know, with the idea that I could share a best practice here at some point. andrew@thisfamilymeal.com if you have thoughts.
More (hopefully more thoughtful) thoughts from me when I have them. Link to the piece again here.
Meanwhile… – Eater NY’s Ryan Sutton says that after a recent cornucopia of bad press, Eleven Madison Park is raising prices. “A spokesperson for Eleven Madison says the price increase will allow for a 7.5 percent hourly pay increase on average before the onset of August dinner service. ‘This will be our third wage increase for culinary employees within the last 14 months – a 21 percent pay increase overall,’ the spokesperson said.” Sounds like a fact-checkable promise to me!
And on the other side of this spectrum… – The SF Chronicle’s Elena Kadvany dove into the books at SF’s Good Good Culture Club, where prep cooks make $28.56 an hour(!), but they’re having trouble recruiting servers because of a no-tipping policy and shared BOH side-work (servers mopping, taking out trash, etc.). One thing that stuck out to me here: When I read that using QR codes makes servers less busy, what I hear is, “We are using technology to lower labor costs.” Always sounds like the double edged sword of: Lower headcount, higher wages.
Some Sad News – A few people sent me news from the Twin Cities, where chef Justin Sutherland was in a bad boating accident over the weekend, and his friends are organizing a GoFundMe to help pay the bills. Justine Jones has details in Eater. “Sutherland, a celebrity chef and Iron Chef America winner, is known locally (and much loved) for his elegant, Southern-style restaurant Handsome Hog, [and] his close involvement with the Twin Cities restaurant community… Like so many in the restaurant industry, he had no health insurance at the time of the accident.”
Friends please note, per the GoFundMe: “While he would love to talk to everyone as he is recuperating, his jaw is currently wired shut, so don’t take it personally if he can’t call you back just yet.”
The Media (Opportunities) – “Boston magazine… is seeking a Food Editor to oversee food and dining coverage in print, online, and at events.” Details here.
And last but not least: That Delivery $$$ – Per Adam Satriano in the NYT, “Financial turmoil in the food-delivery industry is presenting new opportunities for Amazon. The e-commerce giant struck a deal on Wednesday with Grubhub that allows Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States to forgo delivery fees on orders from certain restaurants... The deal gives Amazon the option to purchase over a 2 percent stake in Grubhub at an undisclosed but negligible price, the statement said. Amazon can also buy an additional 13 percent stake in the company at an unspecified ‘formula-based price,’ which depends on Grubhub’s hitting certain performance targets like adding new customers.”
So, after all the noise about Grubhub being up for sale, it looks like it very well could simply fade to Bezos?
Just like the rest of us.
July 12th:
The Extortion – Headlines around the internet this week:
NYT: “Restaurants Face an Extortion Threat: A Bad Rating on Google”
SF Chronicle: “It is basically extortion’: San Francisco restaurants slammed with fake negative reviews online.”
Houston Chronicle: “A blackmail attempt left a Houston restaurant bombarded with 1-star reviews. Its fans fought back.”
And many more, including what I think may have been the first — in Eater Chicago: “Internet Scammers Unleash a Deluge of One-Star Reviews on a Chicago Vietnamese Restaurant.”
In other words, if this is happening to you, you are not alone. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help much and per the NYT’s Christina Morales the advice for dealing with this doesn’t sound very promising: “Law enforcement officials have urged restaurant owners to contact Google if they’ve been targeted, and to report these crimes to their local police departments, as well as the F.B.I. and the Federal Trade Commission. The commission advises businesses not to pay the scammers.” Tellingly, there is no link for “contact Google.”
So… Good luck! Honestly, this feels less like a case for law enforcement, and more like something the TikTok brigades or BTS Army should handle…
July 15th:
The Tease – Michelin is doing that “here are some new restaurants that will definitely be in the next guide at some level” teaser thing again, this time in NYC, where 25 new potential Stars, Bibs, and Plates were announced yesterday. Full list here. Good luck, all!
The Reveal – Reminder for those who care about / love schadenfreude re / made a business plan depending on The 50 Best Restaurant Awards Sponsored by Water: The big top 50 reveal is set for Monday in London. Speeches start at 3:30PM East Coast time in the US. Details on schedule and streaming here. Good luck, all!
Side note: When I went to the awards in 2019 in Singapore, José Andrés was there to give a talk, and wandered the pre-show lobby relatively unnoticed. Almost no non-Americans knew who he was. Guessing that will be different if he shows up this year? If you’re there and he’s there, lmk!
The Accused – Headline in NYPost: “NYC’s ‘Mayor of Little Tokyo’ accused of sexually assaulting company exec in bombshell $95M lawsuit.” Details of the alleged incident from reporter Priscilla DeGregory do not make for an enjoyable read(!), but if you do try to make your way through it, please stick around for the third to last paragraph for a VERY forceful, EXTRA classy denial from defendant Shuji Bon Yagi’s lawyer.
The Settled – Also in NYC, “Sweet & Vicious, a downtown Manhattan bar and restaurant popular for its ‘jargaritas’ — frozen margaritas served in giant Mason jars — has been a nest of sexual, racial and gender-based harassment where workers endured racial slurs, had tips taken by the management and went unpaid for work, according to a 16-month investigation by Letitia James, the New York State attorney general… The owner, Hakan Karamahmutoglu, will pay $500,000 to be split among at least 16 employees.”
Allegations, as detailed by Kim Severson in the NYT hit all the harassment highlights, but if I’m in management, I’m feeling especially warned by this part: “The investigation began in early 2021 after several women who worked at the bar banded together and spoke with a lawyer, who directed them to the attorney general’s office... ‘We basically didn’t know that someone at that level of power would put a spotlight on these things that happen every day in the hospitality industry,’ [one employee] said in an interview.’” I’m also surprised this went to the AG before it went to the media?
And if you’re thinking, “A 16-month state-level investigation, a $500k settlement, and a mention in the AG’s press conference over this?” You might want to double check your “HR systems”….
The Media (Opportunity) – Bon Appétit is looking for a Staff Writer, and in reading their chest thumping company profile, I didn’t realize people sometimes referred to Epicurious as “Epi”? Neat.
The Gone But Not Forgotten – Yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer launched what aims to be a series of long profiles on the now closed restaurants that helped shape the city in some way. First up (behind the paywall) from Michael Klein: Zanzibar Blue, “Ground zero for Philly’s upscale jazz scene.” ATTN PR: The piece shouts out all the founder’s new (currently open) places, and says: “Would you like us to remember a now-closed restaurant? Tell us about your favorite and we’ll consider it for a future column.”
And last and least – OK… I admit it. It actually is kind of fun to scroll through the OpenTable top 100 list. Two reasons: First, if you come from anywhere other than one of the always-in-food-media US cities, you might find a wildcard hometown blast from the past in there (for me it’s Annie Gunn’s in St. Louis, one of those places I’ve never been to, but know). And second, the list is so national-media agnostic that it’s full of places I definitely don’t know, like the Fat Canary in colonial Williamsburg? Which has a five star rating and nearly 4400 reviews? And is named for a poem by an old-timer named John Lyly, who, after wishing “Oh, for a bowl of fat canary” drops this spectacular line: “Oh, for a wench (I deal in faces, And in other daintier things)”?
It’s like they say, you learn something new everyday in Colonial Williamsburg.
July 19th:
Awards Season – The World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards Sponsored by Water were back last night, this time in London and hosted by Stanley Tucci. Only two US restaurants made the list: Le Bernardin at 44, and Atomix at 33, both in NYC, of course. The top 10 in decending order are: Geranium, Copenhagen; Central, Lima; Disfrutar, Barcelona; DiverXO, Madrid; Pujol, Mexico City; Asador Etxebarri, Atxondo; A Casa do Porco, São Paolo; Lido84, Gardone Riviera; Quintonil, Mexico City; and La Calandre in Rubano, Italy.
Official list here. Context and caveats from Hillary Dixler Canavan and Ryan Sutton in Eater here. And video of Tucci hosting and starting the night off by accidentally anthropomorphizing the sponsor as Stan Pellegrino here.
Personally, I’m starting to view this list more as a guide to where all the judges — food media, chefs, various comp-and-flattery enthusiasts — are traveling lately. Russian restaurants were not allowed (the awards were supposed to be in Moscow this year), and a lot of Asia made tourism tough this year, which is presumably part of why the top restaurant on that continent was number 20 (Den in Tokyo). But it seems like beyond Copenhagen, everyone in Europe has been headed back to the Basque region and many trophy hunters are venturing to big cities in the Americas below the Rio Grande. Congrats to those places! Here’s to your new tourists keeping their COVID and leaving their wallets!
Congrats, all!
The Talk – Speaking of Copenhagen influence, I missed the fact that MAD, the group behind the restaurant / food Symposiums (and now Academy) started by René Redzepi back in 2011, has taken the show on the road for a series of “MAD Mondays” talks around the world. Unfortunately, I learned about MAD Mondays because of yesterday’s Eater LA headline: “Mariscos Jalisco Declines to Participate in MAD Event Due to Inadequate Compensation.” MJ’s Raul Ortega told reporter Bill Esparza that “Raduno, the creative agency organizing the event on behalf of MAD, offered him $1,000 to serve 200 people,” which Ortega says is below their catering minimum and not enough to cover costs.
A spokesperson for MAD points out that “In keeping with MAD Mondays tradition, [participating restaurants] are being recognized in front of the audience and also promoted in our event collateral and on MAD’s social channels,” which sounds like an attempted mix of “in-kind sponsorship” and “think of the exposure!” Some restaurants are happy with that trade! But it’s hard to read that an organization that has spent so much time talking about sustainability and mental health in the restaurant industry is asking restaurants to play a version of the US food festival game. In order to destroy the system we must become the system? Maybe someone should give a MAD talk about that?
The Media – Announced this week: “The San Francisco Chronicle’s newest food reporter is Mario A. Cortez…. Cortez will cover restaurant news, write features on all things edible, and follow the Bay Area’s growing food technology scene.” Mugshot and bio included in the announcement, and he goes by @macortez619 on Twitter and Instagram.
And last but not least: The Delivery Suits – In a Bay Area case being watched by cities around the country: “Food delivery giants DoorDash and Grubhub have struck a tentative deal with San Francisco legislators to drop their fiery lawsuit against the city in exchange for modifications to a local law capping delivery fees for restaurants at 15%.” Elena Kadvany says those modifications “would allow owners to opt out of the 15% limit and pay more for further promotion of their businesses by using the apps’ marketing services. This is DoorDash’s model in cities without caps; restaurants can choose to pay 25% or 30% commission rates in exchange for marketing services and better visibility on the apps.”
So…. the apps get almost exactly what they wanted, and the city avoids court. “‘A rare win-win-win between the restaurants, the delivery companies and the legislative process,’ said Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.”
Fantastic room-where-it-happened side note: “The potential deal wouldn’t have happened, Thomas said, without a surprising intermediary: Uber. In recent months, the ride-hailing company, which operates food-delivery service Uber Eats and was not involved in the lawsuit against San Francisco, served as a go-between in behind-the-scenes talks among Thomas, city officials, and DoorDash and Grubhub.”
A trusted, totally impartial intermediary is sometimes just what negotiations need. Thanks, Uber!
July 22nd:
Before we get started: The Correction – I said on Tuesday that the World’s 50 Best restaurants list included only two US restaurants, Le Bernardin and Atomix in NYC. Apologies to the SingleThread team for missing their inclusion at #50.
The Departure – Not sure I’ve ever seen a local “developing news” video segment on a chef leaving his restaurant group, but on Wednesday, ABC 13 in Houston broke this news on air: “In a seismic shift in the Houston restaurant scene, James Beard award-winning chef Chris Shepherd is stepping away from Underbelly Hospitality, a restaurant group that runs some of the most well-known eateries in the city.”
Behind the paywall at the Chronicle, Greg Morago reports, “Underbelly Hospitality will now be run by MLB Capital Partners, the restaurant group’s major investor. The Houston-based private investment company is led by Todd Mason, Jeff Lindenberger and Fred Baca. MLB, which owns the Houston Farmers Market where two Underbelly concepts are operated, came on as Underbelly investors in 2018.” MLB is working on a buyout plan now, and says negotiations are “amicable.”
I assume (with no insider knowledge) there are some of the usual money / control issues behind the move, but Shepherd is telling media he’s mostly leaving to focus more on his Southern Smoke festival and charity.
Good luck, all!
The Lobbyists – Looks like the Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC) is slowly figuring out what its role might be post-pandemic. In an email to “friends” this week, Exec Director Erika Polmar says she was in DC recently to “continue our work of educating lawmakers on the integral role of independent restaurants in our economy and communities nationwide. The visit also served as an opportunity to cultivate the IRC's relationships with Congressional allies and industry partners.”
For now, the payoff of those relationships is still COVID relief. Polmar’s result this week was: “A letter signed by 48 Senators to SBA Administrator Guzman urging the SBA to process EIDL applications that were received prior to the May 6, 2022 deadline. The letter sharply criticizes the SBA’s handling of this program and indicates that the remaining $800 million in loan subsidy can support more than $7 billion in lending.” Unfortunately, I see only a handful of Republicans on that list, including Senators Roger Wicker, Bill Cassidy, and Joe Manchin.
The Media (opportunity) – Announced yesterday: “Eater NY Is Hiring a New Lead Editor. We’re looking for someone endlessly fascinated with the New York City dining scene.” Full job posting here. I’d do it, but I’m only mostly fascinated.
And last and least: The Thirst – We must now address the bear in the room, which are these headlines about that Hulu show, The Bear:
Bon Appétit: “Everyone’s Horny for the ‘Sexually Competent Dirtbag Line Cook’”
Salon: “Why is everyone so horny for kitchen slang?” (Answer: The Bear.)
NY Mag: “The Hottest Show of the Summer Has No Sex.”
Uproxx: “Will (And Should) Carmy Have Sex In ‘The Bear’ Season 2?” (“Debate” centers on whether being with a woman (always a Zelda!) would ruin his creative drive.)
And Mel Magazine: “Jeremy Allen White In ‘The Bear’ Looks Like The Type Of Fuckboy Every Woman Knows.” Sub-hed: “Images of a disheveled, tattooed guy named Carmy have many reminiscing about that one guy they banged behind a dumpster.”
I’m only one episode in, so am prepared to get this shoved back in my face, but… I’m loving that all these articles refer to Carmy, who (so far) seems like one of the most ambitious, hardest working, biggest dreaming characters on TV, as a “dirtbag” or “scumbag.”
So…. Congrats to all the actual kitchen scumbags who will get confused for him in what Bon Appétit’s Sarah York called this “Line Cook Summer”!
And for a big pop culture close out: I like to imagine Kanye West reading all these stories after someone sends him that viral tweet last year that described Pete Davidson as having “chaos goblin line cook” energy.
“I'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the most / So I think it's time for us to have a toast / Let's have a toast for the douche bags / Let's have a toast for the assholes / Let's have a toast for the scumbags / Every one of them that I know/ Let's have a toast for the jerk offs / That'll never take work off / Baby, I got a plan / Run away fast as you can.”
July 26th:
The CV – A weird one in Dallas: “In media interviews and online résumés, [Carte Blanche chef Casey La Rue] said he worked in the early 2000s at Thomas Keller’s restaurant Per Se in New York, Daniel Boulud’s restaurant Daniel in New York, Ken Oringer’s restaurant Clio (since reopened as Uni) in Boston, and Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. But representatives from those restaurants told The Dallas Morning News that they have no record of La Rue ever working for them, either as a staff employee or a stage, an unpaid intern. Chefs and staff from the four restaurant groups also said they did not recognize La Rue from photos.”
La Rue responded on Instagram by taking pot shots at the reporting from Dallas Morning News’s Claire Ballor (and DMN’s food section in general), while never actually substantiating his résumé. Not a great PR strategy for someone with supposedly national ambitions. If I were La Rue, I would simply lean in to his more interesting dodge: “When asked about his résumé and told about the responses from those restaurants, La Rue told The News he did work at those establishments, but that he went by a different name at the time, which is why the restaurant groups do not have records of him being there. He declined to provide the alternate name or proof of his employment. La Rue did provide a picture of a W-2 tax document from [Boulud’s] Dinex Group… but the name on the document was redacted.”
Casey! Go all Ayn Rand on these pinko journos! Society’s rules need not apply! Nothing matters but your skill and your mind! Let them wonder: WHO IS CASEY LA RUE?
Awards Season – Ever optimistic, the James Beard Foundation has already set dates for next year: “Mark your calendars! Join us in Chicago for the 2023 James Beard Awards… from June 3 to June 5, 2023.” They also ask that any donations you make this year be earmarked: “Family Meal Andrew Business Class Tickets O’Hare Summer 2023.” Thank you.
Some Sad News– Also in Chicago, per Ashok Selvam in Eater, the city’s “culinary world and French community are mourning the loss of Chez Moi chef Dominque Tougne. Tougne, who opened another restaurant, French Quiche, in 2020, died on Wednesday, July 20 after suffering a heart attack. He was 56.”
And last but not least: Some Sad News Too – “Diana Kennedy, an Englishwoman whose 1972 cookbook “The Cuisines of Mexico” revealed the glories of regional Mexican fare to American readers, died on Sunday at her home in Michoacán, Mexico. She was 99.” William Grimes has a classically biographic NYT obituary, but NYT Food’s Tejal Rao, who spent time with Kennedy for a story a few years ago, wrestles more deeply with Kennedy’s role as a white expat “protecting” and preserving regional Mexican foodways. That piece is definitely worth a read:
“She never backed down from her ludicrous position of dismissing Tex-Mex, California Mexican food and all of the rich, regional cuisines that grew from the Mexican diaspora. She also disparaged creativity and adaptation among Mexican cooks in Mexico who dared to alter classic dishes as she’d recorded them — the most paradoxical of her positions.”
There are many, many obituaries, tributes, and remembrances for Kennedy around food (and other) media this week, including in the Washington Post (from Bonnie Benwick), Texas Monthly (Patricia Sharpe), the LA Times (Daniel Hernandez), the Guardian (Sian Cain), and more.
Best story: Author David Kamp tweeted about the time Kennedy kicked a young Rick Bayless out of her car and made him walk back to town. “He was very brash, and I was getting annoyed, so that was it: I gave him the bum’s rush.”
July 29th:
Awards Season: Bar Edition – The Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards were announced last night in New Orleans, with international winners this year based either based in London or Sydney, and Ryan Chetiyawardana’s places winning big (Lyaness in London was World’s Best Bar and Best International Hotel Bar, and Silver Lyan in DC won Best US Hotel Bar). Sample US regional winners:
Best US Cocktail Bar: Katana Kitten (NYC); Best New US Cocktail Bar: Happy Accidents (Albuquerque) Best US Restaurant Bar: Jewel of the South (NOLA); and Bartender of the Year: Chris Hannah (Jewel of the South). Full list via press release here.
Congrats, all!
The RRF Report – Headline in Restaurant Hospitality: “The SBA is sitting on $180 million in undistributed Restaurant Revitalization Fund money.” That’s a relative pittance, and a good chunk ($24M) of it is earmarked to fight potential lawsuits, but that story from Joanna Fantozzi led me to a new Government Accountability Office report that came out a couple of weeks ago, including tons of post-mortem numbers and details on the saga that was the RRF.
Sample roundup from the abstract: “Just over 100,000 businesses received funding (40 percent of eligible applicants). The median award was about $126,000. Most recipients (72 percent) reported they were owned by women, veterans, or members of socially and economically disadvantaged groups. About 43 percent had 2019 revenue of $500,000 or less.”
Side note from the full report: The SBA had expected 70% of applicants to go through their POS partners (Square, Toast, Clover, Aloha, and Oracle), but in the end only 6% of applicants went that route, and “over 4,000 recipients who applied through such a channel have been flagged for suspected fraud or ineligibility, including an alleged fraudster who received $8 million.” A lot of that ineligibility may be due to missing documents in the POS applications (did you include a 2019 tax return?), but presumably next time this happens, these systems will get more scrutiny. Maybe.
The NIMFYs – You know those Wonder vans that idle in suburban driveways while the driver-chefs reheat delivery meals for homeowners? Turns out, suburban neighbors do not like huge vans idling in driveways. The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Berger reports, “In towns like South Orange [New Jersey], peppered with electric cars and lawn signs proclaiming that ‘Science is Real,’ and where gas leaf blowers were banned this summer, the diesel vans aren’t universally welcomed. ‘There’s a stigma of calling the Wonder truck and having them idle outside your house for the decadent purpose of making you dinner in a truck,’ said Will Meyer, a 41-year-old attorney, who concedes the food is quick and tasty. ‘It feels like this is late empire sort of stuff.’”
On the other hand…. quick AND tasty?
For the Somm – The SF Chronicle wine team is out with a big package this week on the state and future of Napa. I have yet to read them all, but there are articles on Napa’s “Disneyland” (read: tourist trap) wineries (think Castello di Amorosa, Del Dotto, Hall, and Raymond); historic wineries (major renovations at places like Clos du Val, Heitz, Robert Mondavi and Charles Krug; “power players” (dudes “Jean-Charles Boisset, Scott Becker, Benoit Touquette, Steve Spadarotto, Juan Pablo Torres Padilla, Andy Beckstoffer, Alex Ryan and Gaylon Lawrence Jr. are all amassing empires”); labor shortage issues; and wine critic Esther Mobley’s big question: “Is Napa Valley Cabernet all starting to taste the same?” which she also discusses on the Chronicle’s podcast Fifth and Mission here.
Some Sad News – 2007 Top Chef finalist “Howard ‘Howie’ Kleinberg, who owned Bulldog Barbecue in North Miami, died over the weekend of a heart attack, his mother, Susan, said. He was 46.” Carlos Frías has an obit in the Miami Herald.
The Media (opportunities) – Despite the fact that nearly everyone in food media I’ve talked to on this US trip so far sounds pretty down on the state of food media, the money behind food media is…. bullish on food media? The Infatuation, which scaled back city coverage at the beginning of 2021 before being bought by JP Morgan Chase later that year, is suddenly using that credit card cash to hire for a bunch of new positions, including editors and writers in DC, Atlanta, and Houston.
Meanwhile, in NYC, Bon Appétit’s digital editorial director Serena Dai says she’s looking for a staff writer, and I see that NY Magazine (Grub Street) is officially hiring a replacement for Adam Platt in their food critic role. I will do it if called, but…
Good luck, all!
And Last and Least: Everybody POAPs – Almost 8 months after minting their first restaurant membership NFTs, the guys over at Flyfish Club still haven’t signed a lease on a restaurant space. But they have started POAPing.
It’s (as far as you know) the hottest new NFT-based craze! Are you the kind of person who occasionally needs to prove you were at an event in the Hamptons? POAPing is for you!
It’s like a digital ticket stub for restaurants (or any kind of event or place)? I guess I can sort of kind of stretch my imagination to conjure a useful use-case where a review site like Yelp requires POAPs to rate a restaurant? But… I doubt I would feel comfortable POAPing at fancy restaurants, especially smaller, more intimate ones. And I’m certainly not going to go running around telling everyone I POAPed at a a “Hamptons Summer Social,” so maybe this one’s just not for me.
August 2nd:
Food desks at both the NYT and WaPo are running stories on kitchen temps this week, with the latter’s Tim Carman focused on whether potential new federal worker protection rules could help — “Last year, the Biden administration laid the groundwork to begin the process for writing [temperature] rules for both indoor and outdoor workers.” — and the former’s Victoria Peterson worried specifically about restaurants in the Pacific Northwest: “Punishing heat has owners closing early, canceling outdoor dining and wondering about their future in a region where air-conditioning is not the norm.”
Oh, and it looks like Tales of the Cocktail is emailing attendees to let them know they might have COVID, because COVID attended the event. So COVID is still part of the zeitgeist too, apparently.
Here in St Louis, we are settling into my folks’ house for the next ten days after two and a half years of grandparent – grandchild separation. If you have you have STL recommendations, please send my way! So far the kids give rave reviews to the arcade selection at Blueberry Hill.
A slow news weekend and a busy family weekend have combined for just two quick items today (beyond the heat and the COVID), so…
Let’s get to it…
The Handover – More of a plodding corporate succession plan than a seismic end of era, but: “Danny Meyer, CEO and founder of Union Square Hospitality Group, is stepping down from his role, effective Sept 6. Meyer’s replacement as CEO… will be current COO and president of the company, Chip Wade, who joined in 2019. Meyer will remain executive chairman of the board, while Wade will also join the board of directors… Before joining [USHG], Wade served as vice president of operations for Red Lobster for just under six years, and before that held executive and leadership roles with Darden, Legal Sea Foods and Smokey Bones.” Details via Joanna Fantozzi in NRN.
And For TV Fans – Headline in Deadline: “Top Chef: Bravo Series Heading To London For Season 20.” Not many details there from Rosy Cordero, but sounds like we’re looking at a global syndication crossover show: “Featuring past winners and finalists from 29 international versions, Top Chef World All-Stars will see 16 competitors battle it out for the ‘Top Chef’ title.” Woohoo?
August 5th:
The Delivery Wars – Amsterdam-based parent company “Just Eat Takeaway wrote down the value of its US-based Grubhub unit by 3 billion euros ($3.1 billion) amid plunging stock market valuations and rising interest rates, a sign of the difficulty facing the business after it was acquired for about $7.3 billion last year.” That’s… unexpected, but brutal. And the details from Bloomberg’s Ivan Levingston don’t get much better (sales growth not great, and total orders down almost 7% year on year).
Meanwhile, Expedite’s Kristen Hawley has an excellent rundown of all the other delivery app wheeling and dealing in her newsletter this week, including: “Uber reported quarterly earnings on Tuesday morning, and the company is free cash flow positive for the first time ever. That means it still has money in the bank after it pays for its operations.” Plus, Uber is also trying to offload a foreign acquisition: Zomato, the Indian food delivery company. (EDIT: Hawley writes to remind readers that Uber only had a 7.8% stake in Zomato, so it’s not like they were selling off an entire company.)
And DoorDash’s second-quarter earnings also came in yesterday evening, with CNBC’s Ashley Capoot reporting revenue grew 30% year on year (beating expectations) and total orders were up 23%. DoorDash stock jumped 18% on the news.
The End of an Era – In NYC, 25 years in, “Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s acclaimed [Soho Hotel] restaurant Mercer Kitchen is closing at the end of this year, the chef confirms.” Per Eater NY’s Erika Adams and Melissa McCart, “Multiple sources say that a restaurant from the nightlife veteran behind Zero Bond, Scott Sartiano — who more recently became a partner in the hotel — will replace Mercer Kitchen.”
Some Sad News – In London, “Chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author Alastair Little has died at 72. Dubbed the ‘grandfather of modern British cooking,’ he was, is, and will remain one of the most influential chefs in the history of British food.” Relatable note from James Hansen’s tribute in Eater: “Though Little’s early fame did result in TV appearances, he never truly became a culinary household name despite the import of his restaurants and philosophy. It was the ingredients and suppliers that he treasured: he repeatedly described services as turgid, rough, unpleasant affairs he would have avoided if he could have helped it.”
And in El Paso, “Maynard Haddad, longtime owner of the former H&H Coffee Shop, died Friday. He was 88. Haddad, his restaurant and car wash at 701 Yandell Drive were icons in El Paso…. The coffee shop, known for its picadillo burritos and chile rellenos, was open for 63 years.” Maria Cortes Gonzalez has an obit in the El Paso Times. (Non- El Pasoans may remember Haddad from his feature on Padma Lakshmi’s Taste The Nation, wherein he holds Laksmi’s hand while telling her he supports Trump. Cue cutaway to I disagree with this elder look…)
The Media / The Robs – Per Erika Adams in Eater, on top of Grub Street critic Adam Platt’s recent departure, New York “magazine has confirmed that two other longtime veterans, food editors Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld, have left their positions after 32 years.” The all-staff goodbye memo from EIC David Haskell (included in the Eater story) calls the Robs “New York legend.” Brooks Headley calls them, “Badass.” The Robs… declined to comment.
And Last and Least: The Servies – Everyone’s favorite restaurant review site, Yelp, is launching it’s very own awards! Sponsored(!) by Snibbs (Shoes For All Day Comfort) and, obviously, The Texas Restaurant Association, Yelp says The Servies are “the first-ever awards solely dedicated to front-of-house staff. Finally, the hard-working folks who pour, serve, seat and greet are getting the recognition they deserve.”
Ah, yes. Finally, workers occasionally subjected to the condescending behavior of guests and contemporaries will now be able to hold their heads high and show everyone their miniature statuette of a golden cartoon finger balancing three trays, saying proudly:
“It’s a Servie! You know, a Servie. From Yelp!”
August 9th:
The Hike – Before the phrase of the week was “FBI Raid” the word of the week was (in food, at least) “Inflation.” As if to follow up on a somewhat viral NYT local headline from yesterday — “$15 French Fries and $18 Sandwiches: Inflation Hits New York.” — NYT Food was out with an explainer this morning: “That Dinner Tab Has Soared. Here Are All the Reasons.” None of those reasons are new for people reading this newsletter (costs up all around!), but the piece does a very thorough line-by-line, year-on-year comparison of expenses at one restaurant, Good Food on Montford in Charlotte, for consumer reference. Might be worth sharing with the balkers.
Final tally from Priya Krishna and Umi Syam, after a loooong scroll through cost increases of anywhere from 1% (case of paper bags) to 1770% (paid job postings): “The restaurant makes nearly $2 million a year in sales; [owner Bruce Moffett] estimates that his profit margin has fallen to about 8 to 10 percent, from roughly 15 to 20 percent before the pandemic.”
Meanwhile, the SF Chronicle food team is trying to explain to its readers “how Bay Area bakeries are keeping croissant prices stable despite inflation.” (Caleb Pershan and Yuri Avila report “Starter Bakery, a wholesale operation in Oakland… shrunk the size of its croissants by 20 percent.”)
And back in a world where consumers don’t need nickels and dimes explained via spreadsheet: The LA Times’ Jenn Harris tells them the $74 truffle-topped cheesecake at José Andrés’s new San Laurel restaurant in DTLA’s new Conrad hotel is worth it.
Multitudes.
The Unions – are still very much on the march in the coffee world. Per Naomi Waxman in Eater Chicago yesterday: “Pro-union retail workers at Intelligentsia sailed to victory Monday in a union election that allows employees to join Local 1220 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). This election outcome marks IBEW’s second successful organizing campaign in Chicago’s coffee industry, occurring just short of a year after its win at Colectivo Coffee, the Wisconsin chain with five Chicago-area locations. It also falls amidst an ongoing wave of contentious union elections at Starbucks cafes locally and elsewhere in the U.S.”
Some Sad News – In CA, “Jerry Budrick, one of the original waiters at Chez Panisse and a longtime presence as the Berkeley restaurant’s maitre d’, has died at age 78. Budrick died July 24 after a five-year struggle with esophageal cancer.” Full obituary via Mario Cortez in the Chronicle.
And in NY, “Georges Briguet, the bonhomous owner of Le Périgord, who greeted and seated guests by name nightly at that classic haute cuisine French restaurant in Manhattan for a half-century, died on July 26 in Montauk, N.Y. He was 85.” Obit from Sam Roberts in the Times.
August 12th:
The Departure – Restaurant-world-adjacent headline in WaPO: “World Central Kitchen CEO abruptly exits amid nonprofit’s rapid growth.” Tim Carman reports, “Earlier this month, the organization’s board of directors and [Nate Mook] agreed to part ways. The announcement came in the form of a short statement on Aug. 2. The announcement offered no rationale for the change of leadership, and WCK’s press office declined interview requests.” José Andrés and Mook are all gracious goodbyes on social media, but that statement from the board is pretty curt, and Carman suggests they may have been concerned about decisions around the Ukraine effort. In the article, Mook floats the idea that to sustain its work there, “the group may try to secure government funding or perhaps even hand off operations to a United Nations agency.” The latter would be quite a handoff, both logistically, and mission-wise.
Some notes: Mook says WCK is now pulling in $400M per year for its efforts, and the organization will be looking for a new CEO soon. I’ll do it, Big J, but no cold weather disasters. Deal?
The Ask – In Chicago, former critic Michael Nagrant wonders: “Did the Chicago Tribune food editor just use her implicit clout to publicly ask the industry she covers to donate food to a third-party organization that she’s president of to benefit her and 49 other journalists?” The Instagram story Ariel Cheung apparently used to ask, “Anyone know of a restaurant or food biz that would be down to donate food to a Chicago journalism event with ~50 people?” has expired, but media-restaurant relations like this are forever not a great look.
For Design Fans – For a continued sense of this slow news summer… NYT Food’s top story this morning is about the Pina Pro, a trendy new outdoor table lamp some restaurants are into (because Cipriani was an early adopter?). I’m sure they look great on your restaurant’s sidewalk seating, but for the life of me I can’t understand how you make a slender little stem like that and don’t top it with a miniature green banker’s lamp and a tiny brass pull cord. Is cute dead?
And Last and Least: The P&L – How’s your restaurant doing? Good? Great. Well, I regret to inform you that per Tim Kiek in The National, a recent financial filing shows: “The London restaurant of flamboyant Turkish chef Salt Bae made £7 million ($8.55m) in its first four months of [operations], after opening in Knightsbridge in September last year…. The same report showed that Nusret UK made an overall profit of £2.3 million, an impressive figure given the wider travails of the UK restaurant scene.”
Critic Jay Rayner bashed his head against the wall about this on Twitter, but as the saying goes: “A fool and his money are probably having a really great time at Nusret London without you, Jay.”
August 23rd:
Everyone’s Stepping Away – “David Kinch, the executive chef of three-Michelin-starred restaurant Manresa in Los Gatos, will retire from his position at the end of the year, leaving the future of his renowned 20-year-old restaurant uncertain.” The Chronicle’s Caleb Pershan reports Kinch wrote in a statement that, “After leaving Manresa, he hopes to find ‘a new equilibrium,’” which means a focus on his more casual restaurants and less time in the fine dining world of “back-breaking work that demands you show up at your fullest every day, no excuses.”
His last day at Manresa will be December 31st, and FYI, investors: “The chef is selling the restaurant property and business, which he owns, a representative confirmed. ‘Hopes are that the restaurant remains open,’ they said.”
And just north of Manresa…. “AL’s Place, one of San Francisco’s most lauded Michelin-starred restaurants and once named the best new restaurant in the country by Bon Appetit, is closing for good. The vegetable-focused restaurant’s final day in the Mission District, is Aug. 28, owner Aaron London confirmed.” London tells the Chronicle’s Elena Kadvany business is good and the lease isn’t up, he just wants to spend more time with family, maybe write a cookbook, maybe do some consulting or something. The dream.
And just north of AL’s Place… In Portland, OR, chef Maya Lovelace, who called out bad acting Portland industry types on Instagram before being called out for her own leadership at Yonder back in that wild summer of 2020, has decided to step away too. “‘We have made the decision to walk away from the restaurant industry and seek a more gentle, joyful, sustainable life and livelihood,’ a post on her restaurant’s Instagram reads.” Lovelace and her team had wanted their latest restaurant Hissyfit to be “a chance to intentionally do everything our ideal way and see if it worked.” It closed after one month. Details via Brooke Jackson-Glidden in Eater.
The Protest – In DC, “A former employee of Michelin-starred restaurant Kinship is staging an ongoing protest outside the Shaw dining room, alleging a racial incident involving chef/owner Eric Ziebold. Klyn Jones, a former server at the French/American spot, began protesting outside the establishment last week. She has held a sign alleging that Ziebold ‘said the words “Stupid N—” to me four times.’ In a passerby’s TikTok video, which has now gone viral, Jones says ‘The owner is racist and they [patrons] should not give their money to this establishment.’” A source tells the Washingtonian’s Anna Spiegel Ziebold did say the word as part of some kind of training-related hypothetical situation, which is… an own goal at best. But Jones keeps saying on Instagram that she has all kinds of (presumably secret) recordings, so I guess the truth will out…
Catching Up On Some Sad News – “Chef Jim Burke, 49, who with his wife [Kristina Burke] owned James, a celebrated South Philadelphia restaurant, and later taught in the culinary program at Drexel University before helping to repair another restaurant’s [Wm. Mulherin’s Sons] troubled work culture, died [earlier this month] after a two-year battle with a rare lung cancer.” Michael Klein has an obit in the Inquirer, and a follow-up on fundraising efforts here.
Meanwhile in New Orleans: “Through 25 years of change on Frenchmen Street, Adolfo’s Restaurant has remained a consistent presence... The restaurant will continue, but now without its founder. Adolfo Perez Palavicini died [two weeks ago] at age 63.” Obituary via Ian McNulty on nola.com.
And in Oregon: “Yohhei Sato, owner of celebrated Portland knife sharpening company Sato Sharpening, died of unknown causes Saturday, August 13. He was 37. Sato’s knife sharpening career and boisterously warm personality made him something of a Portland legend, both within the restaurant community and outside it.” Eater’s Brooke Jackson-Glidden has that obituary.
The Media – “Eater is looking for a reporter and editor to oversee Eater Boston, one of its marquee publications.” Announcement here. Application here. Full time gig. Good luck!
And Last But Not Least: The Stewart – The Washington Post sent Richard Morgan to do some freelance restaurant criticism at Martha Stewart’s new “The Bedford by Martha Stewart” in Las Vegas, and I’m still stuck on this line: “The ironic paradox of a Martha-themed restaurant is how little it’s about her and how much it’s about her guests.”
This, “despite drinks like the Martha-Tini and frozen pomegranate Martha-Rita,” food items like “Big Martha’s Pierogis,” “Martha’s Square Burger,” and “Martha’s Smashed Baked Potato” (smashed tableside), and asides like: “Sat beside some faux bois cabinets, I opened them to peek inside only to find rows upon rows of Stewart’s cookbooks” (cookbooks which are also “displayed in cases throughout” the restaurant).
Put that woman on the cover of a magazine and make it less about her, more about the reader!
August 26th:
The Saga – “Two months after a judge found him not guilty of charges of sexual misconduct, disgraced chef Mario Batali has settled lawsuits with two women who sued the chef for allegedly sexually assaulting them.” And per Amy McCarthy in Eater, “Unless any new victims come forward, or any additional lawsuits are filed, these settlements likely mean that the six-year-long legal saga that followed allegations from multiple women that they were assaulted by Batali is over.”
But does he think his career is over? (Scoff at your own risk.)
The Saga Too – Ken Friedman does not think his career is over. Eater LA’s Farley Elliott reports, “Friedman, the restaurateur behind a string of smash-hit restaurants [The Spotted Pig, et al.] that closed in the wake of widely reported #MeToo allegations, was a quietly influential participant in the creation and early days of Horses, one of the hottest restaurants to hit Los Angeles in years. Friedman helped to secure the initial lease for the property, walking chef-owner Liz Johnson through the building in September 2020, just months after he publicly settled harassment claims with 11 women for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. He also remained in communication with Johnson, partner Will Aghajanian, and investor Stephen Light through at least the restaurant’s opening in September 2021, pursuing what he believes to be an agreed-upon 20 percent stake in the profits from the restaurant.”
Elliott has texts showing Light ostensibly promising Friedman some kind of profit sharing agreement and assuring him: “You are a silent partner helping the owner as an ‘expert’ until this gets off the ground and finds its footing. Then [you] can be more active/out there as your previous baggage falls off.”
But Light says none of that was ever official, and while “Ken was involved in very early conversations of Horses… his behavior became extremely inappropriate and we cut all ties.” Johnson said Friedman was “someone that lived up to his reputation and for that, Will, Stephen, and myself removed him from our lives.”
I, for one, am shocked. (And, as the person responsible for bringing “Hold your horses!” back to street talk prominence in or around the late 2010s, I would like my finders-fee share of the profits too, please, Mr. Light.)
The Cloud – Headline in Business Insider: “Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens sold restaurateurs a dream, but some say they got dirty kitchens in unsafe locations.” Reading the details from Meghan Morris, I got the impression that a lot of the problems CloudKitchens is facing (causing?) are natural consequences of a business model that offers low barrier to entry for inexperienced operators. There are many not nice things going on there, from classic high pressure sales tactics (“Only one kitchen space left, better sign now!”) to brutal no-refund clauses for entrepreneurs just scraping by, but a lot of it reads as not that different than painful brick and mortar openings (building delays, hardware issues, software issues, etc). That said, one of the main selling points of CloudKitchens is that it avoids a painful brick and mortar opening, so… not great.
Whatever the issues, the numbers are rough: “Three former salespeople said 70% of operators at their locations quit after less than one year; a fourth salesperson said 90% of his operators left within three months. Insider's analysis of five CloudKitchens locations found that 41 out of 71 restaurants that were open in May 2021 were no longer operating there a year later.”
Like butter! (Endless churn.)
The Flyfish – Meanwhile, on the experienced operators front, VCR Group, the Gary Vaynerchuk / David Rodolitz / Josh Capon team behind NFT-funded Flyfish Club, is still struggling to find a space for the restaurant they sold memberships to over 8 months ago. Apologizing to members (NFT owners) on their Discord, they site: “Unforeseen supply chain issues” causing delays in commercial real estate inventory; “volatility in the markets, inflation tensions, and other large global events/factors at hand” causing “some developers [to re-trade] on large business terms; and limited availability of “trophy assets in Class-A buildings.” (Screenshot here.)
It’s hard out there for a group that raised at least $14M in no-equity / no-strings-attached money from the general public. I wish them luck.
September 2nd:
The Pipeline – Headline in the Washington Post: “Culinary School Enrollment Drops Even As Need Soars At Restaurants.” Some key figures from Alison Salerno: “The Culinary Institute of America, often cited as the nation’s most revered culinary school, now accepts 97 percent of all who apply, a much higher rate than the 36 percent it accepted for the 2001-02 academic year. The number of applicants rose less than 1 percent between the 2001-02 academic year and the 2020-21 academic year... Over the same time frame, the school’s yield — the percentage of admitted students who ended up enrolling — dropped from 91 percent for the 2001-02 academic year to 33 percent.”
At its Providence campus, Johnson & Wales’s applications are down 23%, with only 14% of accepted students actually showing up. “It closed its Denver and North Miami campuses in 2021.”
And: “Nationwide, the number of postsecondary institutions with culinary programs dropped by 20.5 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 264 to 210, according to the American Culinary Federation Education Foundation.”
Cost, meanwhile: STILL NOT CHEAP. “Tuition (excluding room and board) for Johnson & Wales’s Charlotte campus, for example, rose during the 2021-22 school year to $36,274, a 4.4 percent increase from the prior academic year. That compares with in-state tuition of $7,188 per academic year at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.”
Cookbook Season – For a finger on the publishing pulse, fellow newsletterer Paula Forbes is out with her always excellent Fall Cookbook Preview at the Stained Page News. This year, it’s broken into several helpful categories, including Chef & Restaurant books, where you’ll find: Bras getting the Phaidon treatment; Via Carota finally on shelves next month; Delmonico’s revisited; Ghetto Gastro’s Black Power Kitchen; Tennessee’s Hachland Hill; and, eventually (in January), Winson Presents A Taiwanese American Cookbook, by Josh Ku, Trigg Brown, and Cathy Erway. And more! Good luck, all!
The Step Away – Back hometown in St. Louis, “Ben Grupe, a 2022 semifinalist for the nationwide ‘Emerging Chef’ James Beard Award, is no longer the chef of the acclaimed Tempus in the Grove in Forest Park Southeast.” Ian Froeb has the scant details in the Post-Dispatch here, including that classic industry side note: “Grupe was not an owner of Tempus, however. According to the PR rep, Tempus’ owner is Peter Brickler.”
Some Sad News – “Roland Mesnier, the French-born pastry chef who whipped up desserts for five presidents and dignitaries over a quarter of a century in the White House and boasted of never serving the same dish twice, died Aug. 26... He was 78… Mr. Mesnier… was offered the White House job in 1979 after pleasing first lady Rosalynn Carter with his promise that he would focus on lighter dessert fare such as fruit.” Classic Carter.
And last but not least: For TV Fans – A trailer just came out for Chefs v Wild, the new Dave Chang produced cooking competition on Hulu. Couldn’t find any one list of all the contestants, but EatNorth’s Daniel Ball says a bunch of Canadians made the cut, and Eater’s Amy McCarthy spies “Katie Coss, a Tulsa, Oklahoma native who formerly served as the executive chef at Sean Brock’s Husk in Nashville, and James Beard Award winner and author Alan Bergo, who spends his time foraging for plants and mushrooms in rural Wisconsin.”
It looks… exactly as expected. Cooking competition meets survival “reality.” Fusion TV. Might be fun? Woohoo?
And… that’s it for today? Grubstreet’s Alan Sytsma says this fall is going to be “the busiest opening season in years,” so here’s to a fuller slate soon!
September 9th:
The Lists – Bon Appétit is out with its big “50 Best New Restaurants 2022” (not to be confused with, you know, 50 Best) this week. It’s unranked and broken down by region, and will work as a long list for their more marquee 10 Best New Restaurants 2022 list due out on Wednesday.
Congrats go out to all!
Unfortunately…. Apologies also went out to Magpie and the Tiger in DC. Seems BA accidentally included the restaurant’s email on a big “You made the list!” send, even though it had actually already been scratched due to the restaurant closing its brick and mortar during editing. Husband and wife team Caleb Jang and Roren Choi got a follow up email with the “disappointing news” from [MERGE NAME EDITOR BON APPETIT].
The Lists Too – Eater’s useful “Most Anticipated Restaurants of the Fall” lists have also been coming out this week. So far I see Atlanta; Austin; Boston; Carolinas; Chicago; Detroit; DC; Houston; Las Vegas; London; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; NYC; Philly; Portland, OR; Seattle; and the Twin Cities.
All those come under a “Just Trust Us” page, which says the Eater folks are specifically keeping eyes on: Omar Tate in Philly; the Dame team and Kwame Onwuachi in NYC; Daniel Rose in LA; Ravi Kapur and Matt Horn in SF; and the Sichuan Fry / Dumpling Shack brick & mortar effort in London.
And all that comes under a big package Eater’s calling its “Fall Preview 2022,” which features a Bettina Makalintal profile on the Ghetto Gastro team that includes maybe the most aspirational(?) we-do-what-we-want resume of any food-based brand I’ve seen in a long time: “For the 10 years Ghetto Gastro has existed, the collective has been hard to pinpoint… An early focus on event planning and catering led to parties in the 2010s that initially enmeshed the collective in the fashion world. In recent years, Ghetto Gastro’s name has started to pop up in broader spheres: alongside air fryers, waffle makers, and cookware in a CruxGG retail line available at Target and Williams-Sonoma; in their line of syrup and waffle mixes advertised on Instagram; and in collaborations with brands like Nike, Timberland, and Fly by Jing. One of the collective’s biggest moments yet came at the 2022 Oscars, when it worked with Wolfgang Puck on food for the official post-ceremony celebration. ‘Is it an art collective? Is it just entrepreneurship? Is it mutual aid?’ [Jon Gray] says. ‘It’s multitudes; it’s all of those things.’”
Multitudes. All of those things. Air fryers.
The Tips – Looks like DC voters will get another chance to vote on eliminating the tip credit. The Washington Post’s Michael Brice-Saddler says Initiative 82, a measure that “seeks to raise the city’s tipped minimum wage (about $5.05 per hour) to match D.C.'s standard minimum wage ($16.10 per hour) by 2027” will be on the ballot this November.
And in a total coincidence… The NYT’s Talmon Joseph Smith says he’s “investigating the prevalence of wage theft for tipped workers,” and is fishing for tipsters on Twitter…
The Tease – On Tuesday, Michelin NYC did that thing again where they say “These restaurants will be in the next book!” but don’t say where the restaurants will rank in terms of stars, bibs, or “plates.” 30 restaurants made the tease. Official announcement here. Michelin NYC’s full guide is due October 6.
For TV Fans – Chef’s Table Pizza is now streaming on Netflix, with episodes on Chris Bianco in Phoenix; Gabriele Bonci in Rome; Ann Kim in Minneapolis; Franco Pepe in Caiazzo; Yoshihiro Iami in Kyoto; and Sarah Minnick in Portland, OR. Trailer here. Coltrane here:
And Last But Not Least: The Clubs – Is it just me, or are the major food groups all in on private clubs lately? In Chicago, NRN’s Ron Ruggless reports: “Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and Tao Group Hospitality have announced plans for a first-time collaboration on a private members-only club in Chicago, the companies announced Friday. Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You restaurants and New York-based Tao Group Hospitality said the new venue will be in Chicago’s River North neighborhood with a scheduled opening in late 2023.”
Says one Mr. Melman: “We believe this project will bring a new, curated social and dining experience to our community.”
Hell yeah! See you there, fellow curated?
September 13th:
The Best New – Food & Wine was out with its big Best New Chef 2022 list yesterday, but before we get to the winners, a bit about what they went through to get there (from a footnote):
“Chefs who have been in charge of a kitchen or pastry program for five years or less are eligible… After the chefs are notified of their BNC award, F&W conducts background checks, and requires each chef to share an anonymous multilingual survey with their staff that aims to gauge the workplace culture at each chef’s establishment.”
Quite a little vetting process there! But 11 chefs made it through this year, and editor Khushbu Shah has profiles on each of them at these links: Melissa Miranda (Musang, Seattle); Calvin Eng (Bonnie's, NYC); Caroline Schiff (Gage & Tollner, NYC); Damarr Brown (Virtue, Chicago); Emily Riddell (Machine Shop, Philadelphia); Tim Flores & Genie Kwon (Kasama, Chicago); Ana Castro (Lengua Madre, New Orleans); Warda Bouguettaya (Warda Pâtisserie, Detroit); Rob Rubba (Oyster Oyster, DC); and Justin Pichetrungsi (Anajak Thai, Los Angeles).
Congrats, all!
And a special congrats to the new Food & Wine Restaurant of the Year 2022: Locust, in Nashville, which Shah says “is open three days a week, for five and a half hours a day. Two hours are dedicated to lunch; the remaining time is for dinner service. On average, there are about six dishes on the menu, plus the occasional special (or three).”
I am very happy to hear that strategy is working for the team at Locust! But I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to go all in on this like Shah does: “If Locust proves one thing, it is that the era of restaurants bending over backward for diners, doing everything to capture every customer possible, is officially over.”
Does it feel over, folks? Officially over?
The Influencers – In the LA Times, Jenn Harris has a long one on influencer marketing for restaurants that surprised me for… how positive it was? Feels like most stuff about influencers leans the way Pim Techamuanvivit puts it in the piece — “Restaurants operate on tiny margins… and you’re asking us to fund your Instagram story content? It’s just not right.” — but this one gives a lot of space to people like Joel Gonzalez, owner of Mariscos Corona in LA. “Gonzalez agreed to pay [influencer Ashley Rodriguez] $1,500 for one video that she posted to TikTok and, later, Instagram. Gonzalez says he spent an additional $40 for her food. ‘If I could tell any other restaurant owner — it was worth it,’ he says.”
P.S. Key quote re transparency: “The general consensus among the half-dozen food influencers interviewed for this story is that consumers don’t care if — and probably assume that — the food is free.” The best scams are when people know you’re scamming and still let you scam them…
The Petard – In Philadelphia, Eater’s Danya Evans reports, “Restaurateur Jon Myerow publicly champions progressive change in the restaurant industry, but numerous former Tria workers allege that he created a work environment defined by angry outbursts, sexualized comments, and workplace relationships that made some staffers uncomfortable.” Familiar details in the piece, many disputed by Myerow. Seems this all has its genesis back in May of 2021, when a staffer was inspired by other people’s similar stories and decided to share an anonymized accusation on Instagram. So… I guess I wouldn’t get too comfy if I’m someone who was called out back then? But at the same time, Eater national’s tweets about this story got all of 8 retweets and just one comment (from someone disagreeing with the reporting), so… these exposés are not getting as much exposure as they used to.
Obviously this time that has something to do with the relative fame of the accused, but we’re also dealing with some kind of general, post-pandemic (and post 2021) weariness / desensitization to these kinds of accusations, right?
And last but not least: For TV Fans – I have some bad news. Doesn’t look like any restaurant or cooking shows won Emmys last night. Top Chef lost Best Competition Show to Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls on Amazon Prime.
Bezos!
September 16th:
The Tipping Wars – Per DCist’s Sarah Y. Kim, “The campaign opposing Initiative 82, an upcoming ballot measure that would eliminate D.C.’s tipped wage, got a major fundraising boost from industry titans that include José Andrés’ ThinkFoodGroup, according to recent reports from D.C.’s Office of Campaign Finance… ThinkFoodGroup’s contribution raised some eyebrows as Andrés has called for eliminating tipped wage in New York. Andrés, who is known for his humanitarian work, told the Washington City Paper that he supported New York’s proposal, but not [DC’s last bill aiming to eliminate the tip credit], because the New York plan was ‘more well rounded’ and included a ‘recovery surcharge for restaurants.’”
The arguments for and against the tip credit are definitely not as simple as some pro / anti worker hype, and I sympathize with both restaurateurs and front of house who say the credit is baked into an already shaky business / income model, but TFG and Andrés should explain their thinking here, and, dare I say…. Present a proposed alternative? Maybe even at a national level? What does it mean to be a leader in this industry if you only play a reactive role to every proposal that comes along? (With the exception of PPP, RRF, etc.)
You could even just lay it all out there in favor of the tip credit forever! Unless, of course, you’ve said it’s no good in another city, in which case… Time for a ThinkFoodGroup ThinkTank I think? (Happy to hear you guys out on this. Or, what say you, IRC?)
For the Somm: Some Sad News – “Fred Franzia, the iconoclastic businessman who turned the wine industry on its head with his inexpensive Charles Shaw label, better known as Two-Buck Chuck, died on Tuesday at his home in Denair, Calif. He was 79.” NYT Obit treatment via Priya Krishna, who says, “Mr. Franzia’s unorthodox business practices rattled many in the wine industry. He did not care. ‘Take that and shove it, Napa,’ he said in a 2009 profile in The New Yorker, after selling his 400 millionth bottle of Charles Shaw.”
SF Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley also has a detailed obituary for Franzia here.
The Small Screen – Normally I wouldn’t tease an upcoming “five to 10 minute” long Buzzfeed short, but Jessica Yadegaran of the Mercury News reports that premiering tomorrow at the Oakland Museum of California: “In ‘Share the Pie,’ [Reem Assil] is juggling a typically frenetic day that begins with an obnoxious food journalist, played by Soleil Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle, and ends with a culinary awards ceremony where she receives an honor — and gives the esteemed panel a piece of her mind.” Obnoxious food journalists and esteemed panels prepare yourselves for… comeuppance!
September 20th:
The Lists – The NYT is out with their very own 50 Best: The big “Restaurant List 2022.” Too many (50!) to list here, but congrats, all!
One interesting thing reading through this list: Just how much focus is on the food itself. If that doesn’t surprise you these days, here’s a quick(ish) comparison of recent list prologue kickers:
F&W Best New Chefs: “Welcome to a rising generation of culinary talent that’s committed to leading and feeding others with a deep sense of integrity and hospitality—and to cooking up incredibly delicious, deeply personal, culturally grounded food. Welcome to the 2022 Best New Chefs.”
Bon App 10 Best New Restaurants: “Restaurants are approaching things differently than in the past. They’re giving center stage to regional foodways that many of our cities have sorely lacked. They’re cooking food that shakes off the expectations and burdens of what certain cuisines are supposed to look or taste like. They’re putting staff first in ways that feel new and inspiring and just right. And they’re having a hell of a lot of fun. Even when we were on our second or third dinners (so many double dinners!), my fellow editors and I left those meals feeling like we’d been part of something truly special… these 10 new restaurants exemplify exactly how special a restaurant can be.”
NYT Restaurant List 2022: “While some of our picks debuted just this summer, others have been around for decades. The one thing they do have in common: The food is amazing. These are the 50 restaurants we love most in 2022.”
The food!
Granted, those first two lists dealt specifically with “new,” which may have forced their hands a bit, but I searched for some key Newsmax red flag words in the NYT piece, and there were relatively few mentions of flavor-agnostic social terroir beyond “shining a spotlight on X culture’s food” talk. Brett Anderson blind links back to his February 2021 piece on Gregory Gourdet’s workplace efforts at Kann in Portland (which only opened a month and a half ago!), and only after we hear about a pork-neck bisque that “will forever change how you think of cabbage” does Kim Severson let us know that Leah & Louise in Charlotte is “is the first of five new places [Greg and Sabrina Colliers] and their restaurant group have planned for [a complex] designed to provide opportunities to Black cooks and managers.”
Feels like a subtle, but important choice — not new, but worth noting. NYT says: “You are going to want to go here for the food! Oh, and side note…” while others tell their readers: “You are going to want to know about the complexities behind the food, which, by the way, bonus…”
For TV Fans – There’s a Mario Batali documentary coming to Discovery+ this week? TV Insider says “Batali: The Fall of a Superstar Chef” will premiere this Thursday. “Behind the charisma and charm lurked a dark side that eventually caught up to Mario Batali when multiple women came forward with horrific accounts of harassment and their powerlessness in fighting back.”
For TV Fans Too – Maybe a little less on your restaurant scandal radar, but if you’re big into reality restaurant TV, TMZ reports: “‘Welcome to Sweetie Pie's’ star, James ‘Tim’ Norman is guilty of setting up his nephew's murder ... according to a Missouri jury. The former reality TV star was convicted of three counts -- murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud -- after the jury deliberated for 3 days.”
And last but not least: The Critics – Eater NY is out with an opposing opinion chit-chat review where Ryan Sutton and Robert Sietsema bicker over Michael Solomonov’s Laser Wolf in Brooklyn. Headline: “Laser Wolf Is a Stunner of a Williamsburg Skewer Spot, Unless You Hate It!” I genuinely think this style of review is informative and great, especially because it reminded me of such Troy McClure reviews as, “You Might Not Like This Place I Like,” and “Maybe You’ll Enjoy This Thing I Didn’t.”
September 23rd:
The Batali Show – Last weekend, a reader sent me a tiny blurb on a new Discovery+ documentary on Mario Batali. When I included it in Tuesday’s Family Meal (copy/pasted below as usual for non-paying subscribers), I assumed it was going to be a bit of a rehash / dramatic reenactment of known accusations. But on Wednesday, the NYT’s Julia Moskin and Kim Severson reported: “Now, in a new documentary film, one of the women [included in Batali and Joe Bastianich’s $600,000 settlement deal with over 20 employees last year] identifies herself publicly and gives a detailed account of what she described as a sexual assault by Mr. Batali.”
I’ll let you read those details for yourselves, but you will not be shocked to learn that the upstairs room at the Spotted Pig plays a starring role.
Can’t comment much more without watching first. Trailer here:
The Regulators – Gig economy companies like Uber, DoorDash, et al. are on notice. Last week, the FTC voted to newly commit itself to: “holding companies accountable for their claims and conduct about gig work’s costs and benefits; combating unlawful practices and constraints imposed on gig workers; and policing unfair methods of competition that harm gig workers.”
As Expedite’s Kristen Hawley said on the podcast we just recorded, a big government agency just told the delivery kings, “We’re watching you.” Lobbyists must be thrilled.
And last but not least: For Design Fans – There is a lot going on in this Eater spread of the new Per L’Ora hotel restaurant, “An Opulent Downtown LA Dining Room.” Maybe too much? I’m all for maximalism, but do all those black circles add up to something a little occult about that central mantel? (Is it missing two statues? What does it mean, Dan Brown?!)
And I’m not so sure rooms count as “opulent” when the furniture all looks like it’s covered in “Grandma knew the kids were coming” washables?
Apologies to you chair skirt fans. De gustibus, etc.
September 27th:
The Unauthorized – “On Oct. 11, Simon & Schuster will publish what it calls the first unauthorized biography of [Anthony Bourdain]. ‘Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain’ is filled with fresh, intimate details, including raw, anguished texts from the days before Mr. Bourdain’s death, such as his final exchanges with [Asia Argento] and Ottavia Busia-Bourdain his wife of 11 years.” The NYT’s Kim Severson reports journalist Charles Leerhsen “said in an interview that he wanted to write a book without the dutiful sheen of what he called ‘an official Bourdain product.’ Indeed, he portrays a man who at the end of his life was isolated, injecting steroids, drinking to the point of blackout and visiting prostitutes, and had all but vanished from his 11-year-old daughter’s life.”
While a lot of the usual suspects said no to interviews with Leerhson, Severson says “one person close to Mr. Bourdain who hasn’t pushed back against the book is his wife, Ms. Busia-Bourdain, who controls his estate. The book’s most revealing material comes from files and messages pulled from Mr. Bourdain’s phone and laptop, both of which are part of the estate.” Leerhsen tells Severson he expects no objections to the book from the estate.
However much truth this book actually gets at (or misses), sounds like it reads tragedy all the way down. “‘I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,’ Mr. Bourdain wrote to Ms. Busia-Bourdain in one of their near-daily text exchanges. ‘I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.’”
The article ends with a PSA: “If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.”
The Balance – Earlier this month in Chicago, a judge found that “in spring 2011, [former Grace owner Michael Olszewski] transferred all funds from [his real estate] company’s employee benefit plans to personal annuity policies in his own name with his wife as the beneficiary. However, in 2012 and 2013, he filed annual reports for the employee benefit plans indicating the plans had assets. In spring 2016, Olszewski deposited the amounts withdrawn in 2011 into plan accounts on behalf of each plan, but in 2017, Olszewski withdrew $79,649.50 from each plan and deposited the funds into a money market account in his name and his wife’s name.” As writer Michael Gebert points out: “What else was happening around that time in his world? Well, Grace opened in late 2012, and shut down in late 2017.”
Olszewski was ordered to pay a fine and has been “permanently barred from serving as a fiduciary in the future.”
For Grace?
The Suits – Buried in a parenthetical in his Bon Appétit piece asking “What Do We Lose When Every City Has a Carbone?”, former Carbone captain Adam Reiner says Dallas restaurant Carbone’s Fine Food and Wine has dropped its trademark infringement lawsuit against Major Food Group newcomer Carbone: “(Since I interviewed [Carbone’s FF&W owner Julian Barsotti], he’s withdrawn the lawsuit, and confirmed a settlement will not be announced. When reached by Bon Appétit for comment regarding Barsotti’s original claims, Major Food Group did not respond.)”
And last but not least: The Media – FYI, CA: Tejal Rao, previously the NYT’s California restaurant critic tweeted Monday: “Some news: I’m staying in LA and starting a dream role at the Times, covering food and culture as a critic at large!”
Will the NYT hire a new California restaurant critic? And is it me? TBD.
September 30th:
Michelin Season – In NY, Eater critic Ryan Sutton reports, “Michelin’s 2022 Bib Gourmand awards are here — in part.” True to their newly tease-y selves, Michelin released only a list of the new Bibs in the book this year, so we still don’t know who may have dropped off or moved up. 18 new entries this year, with Sutton most surprised that “Dhamaka, a packed South Asian spot that highlights overlooked regional dishes from India — and that topped ‘best of’ lists from the New York Times and Eater — [is a Bib and will therefor] be denied a star this year.”
P.S. I missed the fact that Michelin raised the Bib Gourmand spending level by $9 from $40 to “two courses and a glass of wine or dessert for under $49 before tax or gratuity” this year.
They shoulda gone with $8 and called it a 20% surcharge…
The Suits – On the serial ADA litigator front, “A Florida man who has filed disability lawsuits against hundreds of businesses, including dozens of Bay Area wineries and restaurants, may not actually have the disability he claims, defense attorneys allege.” The SF Chronicle’s Esther Mobley has the story of a man who told the court he couldn’t use defendants’ websites because, “he cannot read text on a computer screen enlarged to 3200% from less than two feet away,” even though a private investigator later managed to get video footage showing “him looking at his phone screen at about the same range.”
These suits are always a bit hard to talk about, because while it’s sometimes obvious people are filing endless driveby lawsuits against small businesses they don’t actually care about patronizing, and it usually feels good to catch “scammers” in general, the other side wonders — quite reasonably — why small businesses can’t just comply with the ADA…
The Rethink – Headline in Eater: “Celebrity Chefs Flocked to This Food Nonprofit. But Employees Allege It Was Plagued by Inappropriate Behavior and Mismanagement.” Erika Adams has a report on Rethink Foods that sounds like a mix of startup growing pains and some of (hate to say it) the usual accusations (which are mostly denied).
You should read those and decide for yourself! (And if you’re the boss you should read twice!) But there’s also a food charity aside that stuck out to me: In 2019, Rethink had near-record revenue of $1,209,084. “In 2020, Rethink shattered those previous financial records. It pulled in nearly $38 million in total revenue in 2020, a year-over-year increase of more than 3,000 percent.” Sounds a lot like World Central Kitchen, which went from revenue of $29M in 2019 to $270M in 2020, and had a similar jump of $635k in 2016 to $21.6M in 2017 after hurricane Maria. And that’s before Jeff Bezos gave José Andrés $100M in 2021.
The funds are there. It’s just tough to tap them until things collapse.
The Monthly – FYI, PR: Bon Appétit is launching a new, monthly, “Most Exciting New Restaurants” series to compliment its big annual spread. Won’t include these every month, but… good lists to make if you can make ‘em! Kate Kassin has September’s here.
October 7th:
Michelin Season – Headline in the NYT: “Peter Luger and Carbone Among Michelin Star Losers and Winners.” Fixed it for them: “Peter Luger and Carbone Among Michelin Star Losers.”
Eater NY’s Ryan Sutton and Luke Fortney have a deep dive into yesterday’s 2022 Michelin Guide NY reveal here. The three star level remained the same (including Eleven Madison Park!) and Blue Hill at Stone Barns kept it’s two. Of (negative) note: “The inspectors dropped 11 restaurants from the one-star list, including Peter Luger, the steakhouse that was the subject of a withering Pete Wells review before the pandemic, and Marea, the tony Italian seafood and pasta spot on Central Park South. The Italian American Carbone and ZZ’s Clam Bar also fell off the list, leaving Major Food Group — which is on a rapid expansion tear — with zero Michelin stars in New York City.”
Al Coro and Saga made it up to two stars, and there were 17 one star additions. Congrats, all!
Also of note: The ceremony was hosted by Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka? Michelin must be hoping the general public will start tuning in to these events, but I had no idea that was happening until I saw Eric Ripert post a picture of the ceremony on Twitter, so… not exactly cutting through PR-wise yet.
That Web3 Loyalty – Founder of Eater and Resy, Ben Leventhal, is up to… something. But I talked to him on Wednesday with Expedite’s Kristen Hawley and I’m still not sure what exactly it is. That conversation (Episode 4 of the podcast we’re figuring out!) is here:
LINK MISSING
Need to work on my Kara Swisher pushback skills, but here’s what we found out: As reported by Hawley in her newsletter, “In the first half of 2023, he’ll launch Blackbird, a payments, loyalty, and membership platform designed for restaurants.” And it’s going to involve web3 tech (call it blockchain?) in some way. Leventhal raised $11M in seed round(!) funding from a bunch of VCs, (including Gary Vaynerchuck, one of core team members behind FlyFish Club, the NYC NFT-membership — web3! — restaurant that is apparently still struggling to sign a lease on a space). So even after selling Eater to Vox and Resy to Amex, maybe all his life he was only waiting for this moment to arise?
In his own words on our podcast, here’s Leventhal on:
Why web3:
“This is a technology company that’s being founded in 2022…. I’d like to build something that’s cutting edge. I think if you’re building a technology company in 2022 and you’re not thinking about web3, you’re probably not seeing the technology landscape in full.”
How he plans on selling web3 to a skeptical restaurant world:
“When we started Eater, everyone was skeptical. Everyone thought it was the end of everything. When we started Resy, everyone was skeptical…I welcome the skepticisim. I love skepticism. It engergizes me. Let them be skepticial. The way we’re going to change minds is to deliver a magical product.”
And, I couldn’t resist, what he thinks of Eater these days:
“I don’t want to get too deep into what I think of Eater. What difference does it make? I’m proud of the fact that Eater still exists and is thriving and that there are lots of people reading it. I think the editorial team at Eater, it’s their prerogative to form it and shape it the way they see fit. That’s what I think of Eater.”
The Service – Meanwhile, speaking of loyalty… That whole “customers should spend more and be patient with service during these trying times” thing is wearing thin with… industry people? In Grubstreet, Chris Crowley says, “Food prices are up, the quality of service is down, and restaurant pros are doing the unthinkable: staying in on their nights off.” Example: “Ramón Manrique Hung, the beverage director at the East Village beer bar Proletariat, estimates he’s going out to restaurants ‘60% less’ than he used to, and the reason is simple: ‘They don’t give me the same pleasure.’ … two drinks each, maybe some oysters, all eaten in about an hour — that can easily cost $120 or more. ‘Service is not the same anymore, either… Nobody cares, and the last couple times I went out, I was like, That was too much money and the service sucked?’”
True for you too?
Some Sad News – “Colin Alevras, an inventive chef and sommelier whose tiny, cultish East Village restaurant, the Tasting Room, helped popularize a quirky, personal farmers’ market cuisine during its nine-year existence, died on Oct. 1 at his home in Lower Manhattan. He was 51.” His wife says the cause was cancer. Eric Asimov has a full obituary in the NYT. Industry friends will also recognize Alevras from his time as beverage director at DBGB Kitchen & Bar and Má Pêche, and service director at The Dutch.
And in Shreveport, LA, “The owner of the James Beard Award-nominated restaurant Lucky Palace, Kuan Lim has died.” Meredith G. White had the news in the Shreveport Times this week, and Brett Anderson had a big profile of Lim in the NYT in 2020.
And in Portland, OR, “Sarah Pliner, the chef known for her venerated, now-closed restaurant Aviary, died in a traffic collision [on] October 4… Pliner was struck and killed by a truck while riding her bike.” Brooke Jackson-Glidden has that sad news in Eater, where she notes pre-Aviary, “Pliner started her Portland career in the ‘90s, cooking at places like the Heathman and Giorgio’s, before leaving the city. She re-entered the Portland restaurant scene as a New York expat, spending time at restaurants like Michelin-starred Nordic destination Aquavit.”
The Trotter Trailer – Per Ashok Selvam in Eater, “The pandemic may have delayed plans for the theatrical release of a documentary about legendary Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, but soon the general public will finally get to see the film. Critics have already screened Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter with the Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper gushing, giving the movie 3 1⁄2 stars.” Trailer included the piece, here.
And Last But Not Least: The Critics – Pete Wells took on Martha Stewart’s Vegas effort this week and… it’s pretty good. “To eat at the Bedford is to realize, again and again, that Martha the Powerful has put her name on a restaurant whose details would never meet the approval of Martha the Tasteful.” But, Wells notes, MTP sold “the rights to her intellectual property, for a reported $175 million in 2019,” so “if you happen to eat there and are left holding the lukewarm potato, at least you will not be the first Las Vegas visitor to learn that the house always wins.”
Oh, and in case you missed it: “Entries and recommendations for the 2023 James Beard Awards can now be made through November 30, 2022!” I think I’ve given up thinking Family Meal could fit in any of the categories, but you should apply! Self-nominating is GOOD. Per the announcement blog: “Chefs, bartenders, food lovers, food advocates, and more: anyone (yes, really, anyone!) can make a recommendation for the Restaurant and Chef Awards and Leadership Awards.”
Plenty of changes to note this year. Check the full press release for details. On the operations awards side (paraphrased from the blog):
A new category, Outstanding Bakery, has been added, while the Outstanding Pastry Chef and Outstanding Baker categories have been combined into Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker. Outstanding Wine Program has been expanded to Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program, and Outstanding Bar has been expanded to include wine bars, beer bars, cocktail bars, coffee bars or any other business whose primary offering is beverage.”
October 14th:
The Tip – Headline in the NYT: “Battle Over Wage Rules for Tipped Workers Is Heating Up.” Talmon Joseph Smith’s article on the tip credit doesn’t say much new for most of you, but here’s what voters are reading: “The last robust compliance investigation of full-service restaurants by the Labor Department is somewhat dated, having ended in 2012, but it found that 83.8 percent of the examined firms were in violation of labor law, with a large share of the infractions related to tips.”
Next steps nationwide: “In the District of Columbia, a measure on the November ballot would ban the subminimum wage by 2027. A ballot proposal in Portland, Maine, would ban subminimum base pay and bring the regular minimum wage to $18 an hour over three years. Employers in Michigan are bracing for increased expenses in February, when the state tipped minimum of $3.75 an hour is set to be discontinued and the regular state minimum wage will rise to $12 from $9.87.”
P.S. - Hate to say it, but Smith’s Twitter thread on the issue may be more informative than the article…
The Status – Also in the NYT: “Biden Proposal Could Lead to Employee Status for Gig Workers.” Gist: “The Labor Department on Tuesday unveiled a proposal that would make it more likely for millions of janitors, home-care and construction workers and gig drivers to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. Companies are required to provide certain benefits and protections to employees but not to contractors, such as paying a minimum wage, overtime, a portion of a worker’s Social Security taxes and contributions to unemployment insurance.”
This rule would only apply to federal level regulations (i.e. federal minimum wage), and will probably take a while to make any meaningful changes if any. Story from Noam Scheiber.
The Grilling – In San Francisco, “Horn Barbecue’s owner, Matt Horn, is a rising star among Bay Area chefs, with a growing national profile, too. He’s been the subject of numerous admiring feature stories, which often focus on his attention to detail and commitment to using quality meats, smoked low and slow over California oak.” SF Gate’s Alex Shultz says lines are out the door most weekends, and yet… “Financial difficulties have plagued Horn since late last year; some distributors have stopped selling Horn meat until he pays what he owes, reportedly resulting in last-minute runs to Costco to fill the smokers. Staff paychecks, too, have bounced, according to eight current and former workers, some of whom have had to follow up repeatedly to get paid.”
One supplier is suing Horn for unpaid bills, workers are calling out “unsafe” conditions (mostly related to neighborhood safety it seems), and it’s a general PR mess (at best) for what until now had been a media darling restaurant operation in the process of expanding its Kowbird brand to Vegas and presumably beyond…
The Suits – Also in SF, four “STK Steakhouse employees filed a class-action lawsuit on Friday accusing the restaurant of wage theft, illegal tip distribution and a ‘toxic workplace culture of openly telling employees that they are replaceable.’” Details via Elena Kadvany in the Chronicle.
The Cancelled – After Eater ran its expose on Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a few of you wrote in to say it a lot of the accusations felt like a reach. Welp, Bloomberg’s Kate Krader is out with a Blue Hill profile on Dan Barber and the restaurant that mostly pushes those accusations way below the fold, so… Tempest. Teapot?
And in Houston, Eater’s Amy McCarthy tweets, “Don't say shit to me about cancel culture when a man who admitted to beating up his girlfriend in front of her child can still earn the #1 spot on [the Houston Chronicle’s] best restaurants list.” Will the vetters at the Beard Foundation and / or other lists be more McCarthy, or more Chron?
Some Sad News – Missed this from October 1st: In LA, “Madame Wu, famed Westside restaurateur who served the stars, dies at 106.” Obituary via Steve Marble in the LAT. “In its heyday, Madame Wu’s Garden was a welcoming beacon on Wilshire Boulevard, bubbling with activity and packed with the Hollywood elite…On a given night, Frank Sinatra and his young bride, Mia Farrow, would be enjoying a plate of Wu’s beef, stir-fried shards of flank steak with onions and oyster sauce. Mae West showed up on Sundays and faithfully ordered the cold melon soup, while Gregory Peck and Paul Newman fancied the shrimp toast and crab puffs. Princess Grace of Monaco gushed about the Peking roast duck…. A bundle of energy who slowed down only slightly in retirement, Wu died Sept. 29 at 106.” The NYT’s Tejal Rao had a longread profile of Wu last week as well.
For the Media: Some Sad News Too – In a post on LA food (and cannabis) writer Sean Cooley’s Instagram, Nick Johnson writes, “With the heaviest heart, I’m sorry to report that we lost Sean on Saturday afternoon. His memorial will be on 10/29 in Altadena, CA. Please visit the link in Sean’s bio to view the invitation,” Many will know Cooley from his work at Thrillist. Writer Esther Tseng tweeted about the loss as well. He was 38.
And last but not least… The Bot – This Twitter account posts “real personalized license plate applications that the California DMV received from 2015-2016.” Here’s a good one:
October 18th:
The Paywall – Headline in the NYT: “The Era of the Paywalled Restaurant Is Upon Us.” Story from Rachel Sugar: “‘However many years ago, it slip the host or hostess $20 and bypass the line,’ said Alex Lee, the chief executive of Resy and vice president of American Express Dining. He runs the companies’ Global Dining Network, a program that offers a select group of Amex members (Amex owns Resy) access to certain restaurant perks through the reservation platform… [Now,] a new generation of tactics have emerged to help would-be diners jump the line, including latter-day concierge services, NFTs granting holders special privileges, members-only credit card perks and private ‘clubstaurants.’ What they all have in common is that they will cost you.”
We don’t get many numbers on the costs there, but we do get a link to a September 27th Bob Morris piece on “Casa Cruz”, which “is technically not a club, but a restaurant with an investor group of partners that pay between $250,000 to $500,000 to join, according to Kate Bartle, a spokeswoman. The 99 current investors get exclusive access to the fourth floor and rooftop terrace... The main restaurant and lounges on second and third floors are open to the public… ‘And when partners invest in something, they end up promoting it to their friends, so you don’t have to do any marketing’ said [founder Juan Santa Cruz].”
The marketing-free guest list at an opening party: “Victoria von Faber-Castell, a young pencil heiress, lounged with Isabella Massenet, the Net-a-Porter scion, and Flynn Busson, the son of Elle Macpherson.”
I don’t have any big thoughts on what all this means (yet), but you will be shocked to learn that most NYT comments on the “paywalled restaurants” piece revolve around some version of income-disparity history repeating itself. My favorite so far: “Soon to come: an even more exclusive tier, in which diners are fanned with palm fronds by loinclothed eunuchs during the main course.”
Hell yeah! Whatever happened to that vibe, anyway?
The Payhole – In WA, “The Willows Inn, a nationally acclaimed restaurant on Lummi Island, has agreed to pay more than $1.37 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over accusations of wage theft involving 137 employees. This settlement comes a year after the restaurant, owned by… chef Blaine Wetzel and his business partner Tim McEvoy, paid $600,000 to settle a similar wage theft lawsuit, in which employees claimed they weren’t provided adequate rest breaks and were not paid for all hours worked… The most recent suit is considered an amendment to the earlier class-action lawsuit.” Basically, a bunch of staffers heard about what happened in the first suit and thought… hey, us too! Details via Jackie Varriano in the Seattle Times.
The Payoff – Tell the team: That big federal student loan debt cancellation program is live! (Or at least the application is.) The AP has a rundown on how to handle it here. Gist for qualifying college and/or culinary school types: “Go to studentaid.gov and in the section on student loan debt relief, click ‘Apply Now.’ … The form asks for: name, Social Security Number, date of birth, phone number and email address. It does not require documentation about your income or your student loans.”
Gone Grocery – We have yet to get a good analysis of what happened with all the grocery store pivots, consumer packaged goods (CPG) launches, and creative real estate usage restaurants tried during the pandemic, but apparently there’s some profit in them hills. I see David Chang is still using Instagram to hard sell Momofuku instant noodles and chili crisp, and per Emma Orlow in Eater NY, “The Via Carota team has expanded again, only this time it’s not another restaurant. Spazio Creativo… appears to be a lot of things but is essentially a Via Carota general store. It will ‘be a workspace for meetings, podcasts, events, pop-ups, and launches,’ co-owner Jody Williams told Eater via text message, adding that an expanded line of provisions is to follow.”
And last and least: The PR – In case you missed the LA Times story, the NY Post story, the viral tweet from Twitter’s self-declared “#1 Keith McNally Instagram News Reporter” (Jason Diamond) or the Instagram posts themselves, this weekend McNally banned late night’s James Corden from Balthazar for being “a tiny Cretin of a man. And the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago.” But then Corden called and apologized, and all was forgiven.
Congrats to no one involved. Except Diamond.
October 21st:
All no one is talking about is the James Corden - Keith McNally dustup, but I would like to follow up on the record and tell those of you who care that I firmly believe — with zero evidence — that Corden hired a crisis actor to sit next to him and an NYT reporter Thursday morning at the Mark. Oh, they just happened to send their eggs back? Really, James? Really?
Though speaking of stunts… McNally gained about 30,000 Instagram followers this week, taking him from 60k to 90k in just a few days. Congrats to the publisher of that memoir he’s writing!
Did the server get anything out of this?
Gone Kyoto – In international news, the NYT’s Julia Moskin reports, “Noma, the celebrated Copenhagen restaurant led by the chef René Redzepi, will uproot itself again next spring, opening in Kyoto for a 10-week residency. Housed at the Ace Hotel, near the 700-year-old Nishiki food market, Noma Kyoto will be open four days a week from March 15 through May 20 for lunch and dinner. Reservations for the meal, which will cost just over 850 euros per person including drinks, tax and service, will open on Nov. 7 on the Noma website; some tickets are also available as part of an accommodation package at the Ace.” Moskin calls Amex “the main sponsor,” and implies, to my deep economic shock, that the budget of this “residency” may not be based in the usual PnL numbers.
(P.S. - In slightly less cool credit card partnership deal news, Eater NY’s Luke Fortney also says, “José Andrés has signed on with Capital One to open a restaurant lounge at LaGuardia.”)
Falling Stars – October has seen two more big paper restaurant critics permanently ditch star systems post-panemic. WaPo’s Tom Sietsema dropped them via a “Goodbye to star ratings” essay on October 3rd, and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Craig LaBan officially ended the “bells” earlier this week. Said Sietsema after having paused stars early in COVID times: “I can count on one hand the number of readers who have told me they want stars back.” OK, but how many fingers, Tom? 3? 4?!
The COGS – Eater’s Ryan Sutton is back on his price check beat this week, and high-end NYC does not look shy about going higher-end these days: “The price of uncooked steaks is still up by nearly $2 per pound over the pre-pandemic price. And depleted herds combined with swelling feed costs will likely push up the price of beef even further. Translation: You could end up paying even more for that veal parm at Carbone or the gorgonzola wagyu strip loin at Carne Mare. That parm, incidentally, was $69 during the pandemic; now it’s $89. The wagyu strip, $72 just over a year ago, is now $115.”
Sorry to everyone who used to whisper “nice” under their breath when they saw that parm on the bill.
The Podcast – Kristen Hawley and I are back today with Restaurant Week, the podcast that doubles as a rough draft. This week it lives over on Hawley’s Expedite newsletter, where she says: “In this edition, Andrew is back from Bali just in time to discuss the James Corden Balthazar story no one can stop talking about. Additionally, Noma blows Andrew’s mind a few times (8:50); we fall into an Ace Hotel rabbit hole (15:00); Andrew has some questions about CPG and cocktail bars (18:30; 20:30); Biden’s gig worker proposal (23:30), and I share some thoughts on the new(ish) Digital Restaurant Association (26:53). After all of this, we manage to introduce ourselves.”
(NB: If you have medium-deep corporate pockets and want to tie a cool sponsorship to the Noma thing, listen for my “Don’t stage there, dine there!” idea. It’s a win-win-win, I promise…)
And last but not least: Gone NFT – In NOLA, “Nina Compton and her business partner and husband Larry Miller are working on their third New Orleans restaurant — an NFT cocktail club and lounge backed by a slew of other celebrity chefs from around the country.” Per Clair Lorell in Eater, “Compton and Miller are partnering with chefs Stephanie Izard, Marc Forgione, Michelle Bernstein, Rodney Scott, and Tiffani Faison for the forthcoming ShaSha Lounge: Social Aid and Pleasure Club, set to open sometime in 2023. Memberships will be sold as NFTs, ‘unlocking’ access to the club and special events.”
That’s sounds cool and all, Team! But… allow me to describe the below still from this new Snoop Dogg video as best I can before you decide who’s doing the coolest NFT shit around. (I shit you not): The song is called “Crip Ya Enthusiasm” and Snoop is in some kind of explicitly Larry David whiteface while he runs from a mugger who tried to rob him and Tupac next to a Death Row Records studio(?) which is next door to a FlyFish Club which Snoop was not allowed into because the bouncer pointed to a sign that said “NFT Holders Only.” And this is all happening to a, uh, Curb-sample-heavy beat in some kind of metaverse, obviously, because as far as I know, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Rodolitz, Josh Capon, and Conor Hanlon still haven’t found an IRL place for Flyfish Club —“the world’s first NFT restaurant” — yet.
And that doesn’t even get into the side plot about Biggie’s burrito truck…
Listen, I have a lot to say, but about 30 years ago I made a deal with some West Coast types that when it came to Death Row, I would “please not try to fade this.”
So that’s that.
October 25th:
The Cover – On New York magazine’s cover this week: Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s “Plywood Gourmet; How thousands of restaurants speedily, messily, and probably permanently took over the street.” It’s a longread first history of the dining shed era (very specifically in NYC), most of which those of you who lived through it already know. But there are some great anecdotes, including my favorite: “The streetery created a bunch of weird new markets in a golden moment for hustlers and entrepreneurs. As cold weather approached in the first COVID winter, Derek Kaye predicted that New York would reverse its long-standing ban on restaurants’ use of propane tanks for outdoor heating… In September 2020, he began buying up domain names: nycpropanedelivery.com, brooklynpropanedelivery.com, etc…. On October 14, [then mayor Bill de Blasio] signed an executive order allowing restaurants to use propane heaters. Within days, Kaye became New York’s go-to propane guy. He began with La Pecora Bianca’s handful of locations, then expanded to Café Luxembourg, Little Owl, Bluestone Lane, and more… Kaye would buy propane for $20 and sell it for as much as $30. At the peak of winter, he says, he was delivering to as many as 400 restaurants.”
And then there’s the cover. About those rats… I saw more than one person on Twitter claim hyperbole, but per van Zuylen-Wood, “Rat sightings are way up. According to the Daily News, the city received 21,577 rat complaints through the first nine months of the year, up from 16,000 in all of 2019.”
The WhoDunnit – In Priya Krishna’s NYT dip into the Restoration Hardware restaurants that have been opening all over the place — and grossing $10M each apparently! — she reports RH CEO “Gary Friedman, a former president of Williams-Sonoma… said he turned to ‘arguably the best chef in the world’ for advice on the restaurants’ menus, though he declined to name the chef. When asked who runs RH’s culinary program, a company publicist said ‘there is not a named chef for the restaurants.’”
“Arguably” may be doing a lot of work there. Or is it you?
The Media – In Miami, Herald food writer Carlos Frías says he’s moving on. “After six amazing years at the Miami Herald, I’m leaving for a fantastic, unexpected opportunity. I’ll be the new host of WLRN Sundial on WLRN 91.3 FM, our NPR station.” Frías tells me he’s looking forward to collaborating with the team there on building the show together, and, “We all want food to be major part of it.” He also says that as he understands it, the Herald will be hiring a replacement for him, “And I reiterated that I hope they hire someone who reflects Miami’s diversity and knows the city.”
And last but not least: FOH Confidential? – Coming out December 6th: “Your Table is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maitre D” by former Le Coucou (and many more) maître d' Michael Cecchi-Azzolina. Back cover description: “A front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from a career maître d’hotel who manned the front of the room in New York City's hottest and most in-demand restaurants.” Judging by Jeanette Settembre’s preview in the NY Post, sounds like we’re going to get a lot less “don’t order the fish on a Monday,” and a lot more “you’ll never guess who ordered the fish on a Monday… and didn’t tip!”
Celebrities in the crosshairs so far: Meghan Markle, Naomi Campbell, Tony Robbins, Dennis Rodman, and Keith McNally’s bestie, Anna Wintour. (Meanwhile, Conan O’Brien got some sort of social media extra credit this week for apparently firing a staffer who was rude to a server?)
Ah, celebrities. Ah, humanity!
October 28th:
I have read through every article I could this week, and the only stuff I thought was Family Meal style interesting was all the chatter around Initiative 82 in Washington DC, where voters are (once again) deciding whether or not the tip credit is worth keeping in the District.
The Washingtonian’s Jessica Sidman has an explainer for voters.
Jose Andres is against it.
One Fair Wage is for it.
And I still don’t think the public — nationwide — has any idea of the nuance behind both sides. Both sides!
But I also don’t see many big, alternative, non-status-quo proposals, especially from the biggest names in the industry. SO… If you have real ideas for dealing with this issue (especially if you are Jose Andres!), lmk.
Beyond that, all I have for non-paying subscribers this week is…
The Podcast – I went out for a bit of a decadent one last night, and my friend invoked the wine pairing, which means you get to answer the question you’ve always wondered: What would it sound like if I met Andrew on the sidewalk after a night out and had a 25 minute conversation with him and Expedite’s Kristen Hawley about restaurant news, World Central Kitchen’s international restaurant impact, DoorDash, Gaggan in HK, and Thomas Keller definitely, maybe, 100% being the guy behind the RH furniture store / restaurant phenomenon?
Answer, here.
November 1st:
The Retreat – Maybe the invasion of the ghost kitchens will be a bit more of a long game than a lot of people thought… Headline in Business Insider: “Reef quietly exits Houston as the SoftBank-backed ghost kitchen continues to face operational issues and loses partnerships.” Per Nancy Luna, “Former Reef operations leaders and employees in the US and Texas told Insider that at one point, Houston was among one ‘of the largest markets’ Reef operated in terms of vessels. However, the ‘sales were not there’ a former commissary cook in Texas said.” BUT, according to a spokesperson, this was all part of a planned realignment, and Houston "was not an important market for the business."
Move fast and break things, iterate on MVPs, etc etc. And also sometimes just straight run for the hills with your pants falling down wailing, “THIS IS A STRATEGIC RETREAT!” as the bullets whiz overhead…
The Turnaround Artist? – What to do when your restaurant was the subject of a viral, anti-racism takedown by the prominent new restaurant critic of the major local paper? Hire a new chef and score a follow-up profile in that paper explaining all the things he’s doing right to address the issue? Might work in SF… “In their 2019 review, San Francisco Chronicle critic Soleil Ho wrote: ‘Le Colonial’s theme is covered with the sticky film of racism — but compounding this insult is the fact that the food isn’t well-executed or particularly exciting.’... Now it’s on [Geoffrey Deetz], a 60-year-old chef with European heritage, to try to bring respect to perhaps San Francisco’s least-woke restaurant.” Deetz lived in Vietnam for 16 years, is married to the restaurant’s pastry chef and events coordinator Quynh Nhu, and, according to “Tony Tuan Nguyen, a native of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam who runs Fairfield’s Chau Tien Beer Co…. ‘He’s more Vietnamese than I would say most Vietnamese Americans here.’”(!)
Can Deetz and Nhu pull it off? Are changes like moving buddhas out of bathrooms enough? Will Ho go back for round 2 (with apologies to the many restaurants that would like some attention meantime)? All still TBD, but preliminary redemption storyline via Chris Macias in the Chronicle here.
The Self-Pub Club – I opened cookbook industry newsletter Stained Page News this week expecting to see Paula Forbes tease out some numbers behind “Why Chef Gavin Kaysen Self-Published His New Cookbook.” What I got was less sales percentages, more power of building a network. Said Kaysen, “When I lived in New York, I had a great relationship with all the people at the Today Show. So it wasn't a huge challenge to call them and say, ‘Hey, we'd like to be on the show and do the book.’ Williams Sonoma not only bought a thousand books, but then generously came on to sponsor our tour. So we can do five cities in New York, Chicago, Houston, LA, San Diego, hit all different William Sonomas. And then I called friends in those cities and said, ‘Hey Daniel [Boulud], can we do a dinner at Boulud Sud? Hey Grant [Achatz], can we do a dinner at Roister or Aviary?’ So we're doing all these dinners too elsewhere, to add to that mix.”
Nice lil’ mix if you can get it!
What Guests Are Reading – QR codes are “The Restaurant Industry’s Worst Idea” per “not a luddite” Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic. And “Where do restaurant ‘service fees’ really go?” asks Rani Molla in Vox, where, as if to explain both why she wrote the article and why it won’t contain a great answer, Molla says, “A look at Google Trends shows that diners are nonplussed by service charges, increasingly searching online to figure out whether or not they’re a tip. But looking it up doesn’t really help, since there is no set definition.”
And Last and Least: The Tentacles – Did you miss Harry Styles’s new song, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant?” Did you miss the video?
Sample lyrics:
“Excuse me, a green tea?”,
Music for a sushi restaurant,
From ice on rice,
Scuba duba dubub boo.
November 4th:
The Relief – I thought we were done with the Restaurant Revitalization Fund decades ago (in pandemic time), but a reader sent me an email last week saying they’d heard funds might be trickling out again. Turns out, that’s true. Per NRN’s Joanna Fantozzi, the Small Business Administration is gearing up to start distributing around $180M in funds that have been languishing in its coffers since 2021. “Over email, the SBA told NRN that the government agency is ‘planning for additional distribution’ and that restaurants would not have to reapply to be considered for the remaining funds. Instead, they will be distributed on a ‘first-applied, first-serve’ basis.”
In other words, there is still no preferential treatment for groups that were supposed to get preferential treatment initially. Check your hopes before you check your bank accounts.
Some Sad News – Food news this week was dominated by two departures.
First, more on the home cooking front: “Julie Powell, the writer whose decision to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ led to the popular food blog the Julie/Julia Project, a movie starring Meryl Streep and a new following for Mrs. Child in the final years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.” Kim Severson and Julia Moskin had an obituary in the NYT, which Moskin followed up with a more in-depth analysis under the headline, “Julie Powell Took Food Writing to a Franker, Darker Place.”
And second, firmly in the restaurant world: “Gael Greene, who reinvented the art of the restaurant review with sass and sensuality in four decades as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, died on Tuesday at her home in an assisted living facility in Manhattan. She was 88.” William Grimes has her obituary, also in the NYT.
There are so many tributes online I cannot possibly collect them here, but if I were looking for a primer on the critic herself, for my money I’d read two pieces to start: First, the “Men and the Menu” excerpt from her memoir Insatiable, in which she discusses a tryst with… Elvis! And second, the 2008 NYT article about her being let go from NY Mag, “A Critic, Insatiable, and Also Dismissed,” in which Glenn Collins works through what feels a little like an obituary for a career instead of a person.
The Media – Headline in AdWeek: “Vox Media’s Eater Pens a 7-Book Deal With Abrams, Its Latest IP Play.” Details via Mark Stenberg: “Eater, a Vox Media title, has partnered with the publishing imprint Abrams to release seven books, the latest brand extension from within the Vox Media portfolio and the first literary venture from Eater. The first three projects will include a book of recipes compiled by Eater restaurant editor Hillary Dixler Canavan, slated for release in 2023, as well as travel guides to New York City and Los Angeles, slated for 2024.”
The city guides make sense to me, but a collection of restaurant recipes compiled by a restaurant journalist in collaboration with the restaurants feels a little… off to me? Not to be dogmatic about this, but if Eater’s restaurant reporters are asked to solicit and collaborate with restaurants on a money-making project (like this book), doesn’t that make for a clear business relationship between Eater’s restaurant reporting arm and the restaurants it covers?
I asked Dixler Canavan that question via (last minute) email, and this is what she said:
“Restaurants are being compensated for their recipes, and we’ve seen a positive response from restaurants we’ve been in touch with. In terms of what it means for Eater – our mission first and foremost is to serve our audience of restaurant obsessives, and we see this book as very much in line with that mission.”
When I talked to Expedite’s Kristen Hawley about this on our podcast — oh yeah, this week’s podcast is here! — she said, “Sounds like you’ve never worked at a magazine before….” And that’s fair! And I’m sure it happens everywhere to varying degrees (NYT / LAT food festivals included), but… still can’t shake the feeling that it’s yet another widening of the gap between impartial food media and actual impartiality.
Thoughts?
Meanwhile, Eater NY has a new editor. Melissa McCart who had the role from 2016 - 2017 before going on to work on multiple big food projects (The Bittman Project among them) is back! Details here.
And if you’d like to be first in line to write the Eater Guide to Seattle book someday… they’re also hiring for a full time editor at Eater Seattle.
The Gallerist – Check out the new face in the National Portrait Gallery! I know what you are all thinking. Is that really necessary…. like, isn’t it a little over-the-top and self-promotional… for Cambro to get product placement in the portrait gallery? (I’ve decided that’s a Cambro hot box bottom right, right?)
And Last but not Least: A Carbone on every continent – I think we can all agree that when we saw Julia Moskin’s byline attached to a story about Major Food Group, we were maybe expecting more of an exposé than a profile. But what we were definitely not expecting was a photo of the MFG3 smiling, laughing, dare I say guffawing in joy?!
But then again, I guess that’s why everyone back of house calls him Mario “Chuckles” Carbone (as far as you know).
November 8th:
The food media march toward Thanksgiving has begun in earnest.
NYT Food and NY Mag are both leading with pies so far today. Eater has ditched restaurants for a “Home for the Holidays” package. The SF Chronicle went anti-marshmallow (“spicy orange and date butter” sweet potatoes?!). Food & Wine went anti-oven (“Fire up your grill, Instant Pot and Air Fryer this holiday”). And Bon Appétit… Uh, Bon Appétit is actually not doing TG yet?
Good for you, BA! Stay strong until tomorrow at least!
What time are you voting today?
Let’s get to it…
The Sell Out – “Manresa, one of the Bay Area’s most widely acclaimed Michelin-starred restaurants, will close after 20 years in Los Gatos at the end of the year. David Kinch, the restaurant’s owner and executive chef, previously announced that he planned to retire but hoped to sell the business. A press release [yesterday] confirmed the three-Michelin-star restaurant’s final day will be Dec. 31.”
It was always hard to believe there could be a Manresa without Kinch’s name attached, but you are still welcome to try your hand at something similar in Los Gatos. Per Elena Kadvany in the Chronicle, “Realtor John Machado confirmed the 320 Village Lane building has not yet been sold, though he’s in talks with potential buyers. The sleek, 4,000-square-foot space was listed in October at $5.75 million and is available as a turnkey space, ready to be used as a restaurant with all of Manresa’s pots, pans, dishes and equipment.”
Good luck, all!
The Sell Out Too – I tried to book a table at the Noma Kyoto pop-up yesterday (for a half-baked plan to promote Family Meal through some sort of contest or resale or who-knows thingy), but… the entire residency sold out in seconds.
Congrats to the bots!
Some Sad News – In LA: “Andrea Bullo, owner of the popular Moonshadows restaurant in Malibu, was killed along with his son in a fiery crash [last] week in Woodland Hills, an employee confirmed…. Bullo was a mainstay of the culinary scene in the Los Angeles area for years, but he got his start in his native Venice, Italy, at Do Forni e Antico Pignolo. In the 1990s, he managed Prego in Beverly Hills before opening Moonshadows in 2001, according to his biography on the restaurant website.” Details via Salvador Hernandez in the LAT.
The Media – Heads up, PA: On Twitter this past Friday, food editor Margaret Eby posted, “Some news: Today is my last day at Food52. After a week of gallivanting and napping, I'll be joining [The Philadelphia Inquirer] as the Deputy Food Editor!”
And last but not least – I think I may have found my new favorite restaurant influencer? Over on Instagram, Providence, RI star @bunsandbites has been on a very specific beat for four years: “We are a visual platform that unites a deep devotion to good food, and a sincere appreciation for a nice behind. Just as food comes in all tastes and textures, bootys come in all shapes and sizes! Buns & Bites admires the diversity of cheeks, while indulging in our favorite eats.”
I’m sure some smart culture writer could do a much better job of explaining the push-pull tension between the wholesome, hilarious butt vs the hot, hot ass, but I am here to tell you there is something spectacular about a food account in which nearly every picture is someone sticking their tush out over food. Are we being teased? Are we being teased?
Friends, we are at the very least being entertained.
November 11th:
The Results – Four years after a similar measure was overturned by the city council post public approval in 2018, the Washingtonian’s Jessica Sidman reports, “Initiative 82—the DC ballot measure aimed at phasing out the tipped minimum wage—passed last night with nearly 75 percent of the vote. Incrementally over the next five years, employers will go from paying servers, bartenders, and other tipped workers at least $5.35 an hour to more than triple that. Currently, those employees earn the majority of their wages from gratuities, and businesses are legally required to make up the difference if anyone falls short of the $16.10 minimum wage. The first increase is slated to come in January, when the tipped wage rises to $6 an hour. It bumps up to $8 by July 1, 2023, then $2 more every year after until 2027, when there will be one universal minimum wage.”
That’s a big result for the One Fair Wage crowd, but, per Joe Guszkowski in RBO, “In restaurant-rich Portland, Maine voters declined a similar initiative that would have raised the minimum wage to $18 over the next three years for tipped and nontipped workers alike. The result was somewhat surprising because Maine in 2016 voted to kill the tip credit statewide, only to have it reinstated after a lobbying effort led by servers.”
Every restaurateur Sidman talked to in DC mentioned adding service charges to offset the new costs, but Jamie Leeds of Hank’s Oyster Bar took things a step further: “I will not open another restaurant in DC. That’s for sure.”
I get it. But it feels like this is yet another case of the pro tip-credit camp getting caught without an offense? These initiatives are coming for you — they will come for Portland, ME again too! And the arguments against them require too much nuance for most voters. The public has turned on tipping. What is your alternative? Or is there a clear, concise case for tip credits?
I don’t know. But… By the pricking of their thumbs, ballot measures your way come.
BONUS: Sidman, myself, and Expedite’s Kristen Hawley get into all of this on our Restaurant Week (working title) podcast this week, which you can listen to here.
This podcast is still very much a work in progress, so please listen and give us feedback! Good, bad, angry, sad. As storied philosopher Pete the Cat would say, “It’s all good.”
P.S. - Reuters has a helpful rundown of other minimum wage related results around the country here.
The Split Decision – Out LA way, “In a move to expand acclaimed French bistro Petit Trois, husband-and-wife team Ludo and Krissy Lefebvre have purchased both locations. The deal ends the bistros’ eight-year partnership with J&V Group, a company owned by chef-restaurateurs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo… Making the sale possible is a new partnership between the Lefebvres and hospitality firm Apres Cru, who together have formed a new restaurant group called L’Espérance Hospitality.” Details via Stephanie Breijo in the LAT, who adds that Shook and Dotolo are on their own expansion push with their Jon & Vinny’s concepts, and wished the Lefebvres well.
When They Go Low – After gaining notoriety during the pandemic for sparring with chefs like Tom Colicchio over the right way to handle a thing no one had ever handled before, Eric Rivera is headed south. “Seattle chef Eric Rivera announced on Instagram that he’s bringing two new restaurants to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2023. According to a post on Rivera’s website, Sapo will be ‘a private dining room that features tasting menus. fancy, fun, and lots of flavor.’ Coqui will be a Puerto Rican izakaya, blending Puerto Rican with Japanese ‘flavors, techniques, presentations, and a loud fun dining room.’”
Ok, looking back again, maybe “sparring” is a bit of a euphemism.
Colicchio: “That’s what I thought, all talk.”
Rivera: “You're just a rich white male chef clinging onto your failed empire and you're scared that you can't figure out a way beyond everyone blindly following you're bullshit. Fuck you.”
Ahhh. Remember the pandemic?
November 15th:
The Tenants – Inbox: “The search is over.” 11 months after launching “The world’s first NFT restaurant,” Flyfish Club finally has… a restaurant. Or, at least they have a lease. Gary Vaynerchuk, David Rodolitz, Josh Capon, Conor Hanlon, et al. announce: “We’re thrilled to share that Flyfish Club NYC now has a permanent home: 141 E Houston St… our private dining club will be in an incredible building by acclaimed architect Roger Ferris. More details on the location can be found on our website.” (Dramatic video of the ol’ glass-and-steel here.)
“Now,” said Rodolitz on the Flyfish discord, “we build.”
And now, we see what these guys do with their millions in upfront NFT-sale cash, and hundreds of thousands (conservatively) in recurring NFT-sale royalties.
NB: Rodolitz also told members, “It’s going to take the greater part of 2023 to do what we want to do,” so if you bought your Flyfish NFT in January of 2022, you’re looking at a full two years of membership before those club doors open…. HODL!
P.S. - Crypto types will be amused, with everything else going on, that the Real Deal reports Flyfish’s upstairs neighbors (renting 4 pricey floors) will be Solana Labs.
For the Somm – More of a first person meandering than full profile, but Esther Mobley has an interesting piece on “Paul Draper, who made the wines at Ridge, one of California’s most important wineries, from 1969 until 2016, when he officially retired (though he remains involved in the winery and is, in many ways, still its face).” Mobley says she “was struck by how indebted today’s natural-wine movement is to him — even if it rarely credits him.”
Much of that debt is tied to a somewhat radical transparency, even though he wasn’t the only pioneer there: “The saga of Ridge’s back labels culminated in 2011, when the winery finally received permission from the federal government to list ingredients. Draper had sought to do this for years, but the government had denied his requests. Then, in 2008, he noticed that Bonny Doon winemaker Randall Grahm had gotten the green light to add an ingredient listing, so Ridge went back to the feds and finally got the OK.”
Some Sad News – In the UK, “Joyce Molyneux, an innovative chef whose unpretentious restaurant in Dartmouth, England, the Carved Angel, received a star from the Michelin Guide in 1978, making her one of the first women whose kitchen received that distinction, died on Oct. 27. She was 91.” Neil Genzlinger has her obituary in the NYT.
And last but not least: The Market Share – The NYT goes full Restaurant Cosmo with: “What Does Your Favorite Reservation App Say About You.” No new news (or quiz!) from Priya Krishna, but a useful by the numbers buried in there: “OpenTable maintains an outsize presence in reservations, with more than 50,000 participating restaurants. (Resy, in comparison, has more than 16,000; Tock, around 10,000 businesses; Yelp, more than 11,000; and SevenRooms declined to share a figure.)”
What Does Declining to Share a Figure Say About You?
(A: Nothing. It’s fine.)
November 18th:
The Big Lists – Just out yesterday: “Esquire's Best New Restaurants in America, 2022.” It’s 40 restaurants long, with a few individual awards mixed in and some interviews with past “BNR hornorees” for good measure.
Top 10 from 1 to 10: Kann (Portland, OR); Yangban Society (LA); Neng Jr.’s (Asheville); Canje (Austin); Le Rock (NYC); n/soto (LA); Kasama (Chicago); Saffy’s (LA); June + Audrey (Nashville); and San Ho Wan (SF).
Some individual recognitions: Chefs of the Year - Katianna and John Hong (Yangban Society); Rising Star of the Year - Silver Iocovozzi (Neng Jr.’s); Cocktail Guru of the Year - Colleen Hughes (Supperland, Charlotte); and Wine Guru of the Year - Arjav Ezekiel (Birdie’s, Austin).
Congrats, all!
The Big Lists Too – Take this self-reported one with a grain of salt, but Restaurant Business is out with its 2022 Top 100 Grossing Independent Restaurants in America list, and at the very least it’s a fun look at total covers and check averages at some places you may not know too much about.
Case in point for me: Are you aware of Frankenmuth, MI? A town of Bavarian buildings where Zhender’s of Frankenmuth did over 900k covers last year at a $19 check average, and the Frankenmuth Bavarian Inn did over 600k covers at $25 a pop? I was not. But I am now.
Top 5 (plus sales): Komodo, Miami ($41M); The Boathouse, Orlando ($40M); Swan, Miami ($31M); Maple & Ash, Chicago ($30M); and Mila, Miami Beach ($27M). That’s two in the top five for Groot Hospitality, so congrats mostly to them and Miami! (And their PR teams…)
The Big Lists Three – In international news, the Latin American 50 Best list was announced this week. It’s here if you’re into that 50 Best kind of thing. Top 5, top down: Central (Lima); Don Julio (Buenos Aires); Maido (Lima); A Casa Do Porco (São Paolo); and El Chato (Bogotá).
Congrats, all… again!
And last but not least: The Menu – I cannot wait to see the new fine dining horror show (literally) The Menu, so I am not reading any of the many reviews that have been coming out this week, including in the New York Times. But if I were to read something about it — and I haven’t — it would be Eater’s “How the Minds Behind ‘The Menu’ Created an Authentic Fine Dining Hellscape,” or the one in the SF Chronicle headlined: “How an S.F. star chef made this restaurant horror movie feel frighteningly real,”
I know the chef referenced there is Dominique Crenn, but I don’t want to know anything else.
Thank you very much.
November 29th:
The Deadline – First, a reminder: The Beard Awards entry deadline looms imminent. “Submit your entries for the Media Awards or recommendations for the Leadership or Restaurant and Chef Awards by Wednesday, November 30 at 11:59 P.M. ET.” Awards page with details and links here. Whatever you think of awards in general or these awards, you should probably enter and nominate! It is what it is.
I said I wasn’t going to enter Family Meal this year, but… TBD.
The Host ($$$) City – And speaking of awards... In case you missed it (like I did): 50 Best announced earlier this month that their flagship list reveal event is scheduled for June in Valencia next year. ¡Viva Valencia! ¡Viva Tourism Department Budgets!
The Relief – “Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. Small Business Administration announced that the government agency would be distributing $83 million in unobligated Restaurant Revitalization Fund money to 169 restaurant operators with pending RRF applications.” Restaurant Hospitality’s Joanna Fantozzi reports, “Grants will be distributed in the order in which applications for the original RRF grants were received last year, starting this week. Operators will have until March 2023 to spend the money.”
Everyone else… that’s probably it. Ugh.
For the Somm: Some Sad News – “Margaret Duckhorn, who co-founded one of California’s best-known wineries, Duckhorn Vineyards, died on Saturday, Nov. 26, at age 83. The Duckhorn Portfolio, as the company she started is now known, did not disclose a cause of death.” Esther Mobley has an obituary for “the Napa vintner who helped America fall in love with Merlot,” in the SF Chronicle.
And last but not least: The Profile Treatment – Despite my having self-published the definitive “I walked around town with Kwame Onwuachi” profile a few years ago, Tim Cartman gave it his own shot in the Washington Post this week. The focus is on Onwuachi’s return to his roots in NYC (with his new restaurant Tatiana there) and some stuff reminiscent of his memoir, Notes From A Young Black Chef, but I was most surprised to learn about a few new business ventures Onwuachi has going. For example: “his product lines (like his upcoming sparkling waters, Miri, named for the Igbo word for “water”), [and] his consulting business (like his work with an air protein company, part of Onwuachi’s efforts to reduce our carbon footprint).”
So, uh, can I ask... What exactly are you doing to reduce our carbon footprint?
Oh, you know, just launching a little bottled water line and helping out with air protein.
Ah. Say no more!
Fin.