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Family Meal - Friday, February 19th, 2021

Hello Friday,

Before we get started: I am, as usual, not equipped to keep up to date with everything going on in a disaster zone, but my heart goes out to everyone struggling in the South right now. Looks like teams at Eater Austin, Houston, and Dallas are doing fantastic work keeping up with the restaurant-related news in parts of Texas, but beyond that if I can spread the industry word on anything helpful, please lmk.

Let’s get to it…

The National Indoor Outlook – Via Tara Duggan in the SF Chronicle: “California now has the distinction of being the only state where indoor dining is almost universally shut down, with only five rural counties that have met certain thresholds for lowered coronavirus transmission offering it. All other states now allow indoor dining in some capacity, according to the National Restaurant Association, including many with much higher rates of coronavirus cases than California overall. New Mexico and New Jersey, as well as New York City, were some of the last holdouts.”

The Advisors – Three members of President Biden’s COVID advisory board during the transition are out with a big Op-Ed in the NYT this week. Headline: “A Dismal Spring Awaits Unless We Slow the Spread of Covid-19.” Key paragraph from Ezekiel Emanuel, Rick Bright, and Céline Gounder: “We know indoor dining, bars and gyms are perfect for spreading the virus. Keeping them closed is essential. But small business owners and their employees should not be forced to choose between their livelihoods and the nation’s public health. The government needs to provide them with financial support, strictly conditioned on those businesses being closed to indoor service. Similarly, workers need paid sick leave when they must stay home to quarantine.”

Left out of that recommendation is the obvious need for a ‘82 DeLorean and 1.21 gigawatts, but I’m sure Ezekiel can call Ari and get that on set ASAP.

The Spiderman-Spiderman Milkshake Ducks – Welp. “Earlier this month, Reply All kicked off an ambitious miniseries, ‘The Test Kitchen,’ which sought to take on… the implosion of Bon Appétit due to scandal. But shortly after the release of its second episode, Reply All seems to be going through a reckoning of its own… A former staffer, Eric Eddings, published a Twitter thread accusing [hosts Sruthi Pinnamaneni and PJ Vogt] specifically of contributing to a ‘toxic dynamic at Gimlet Media’ that was ‘near identical’ to the Bon Appetit culture depicted in the miniseries.” You’d think people who work in sound would check closer for echo before shouting “J’accuse!” into live mics, but both hosts have now stepped away from the show, and it’s unclear what will happen to the rest of the series. Details via Nicholas Quah in Vulture.

The PSA – Speaking of BA… An organization calling itself Favorite Chef has apparently been running a pay-for-votes contest wherein the winning chef would ostensibly be featured in Bon Appetit. Some (unwitting) chefs were even getting local coverage off their being “short listed” in a national “Bon Appetit” contest. Having caught wind of that, BA clarified: “Favorite Chef purchased a paid ad in the magazine that intends to spotlight the winner of the contest they were conducting. Neither the contest or the feature are BA edit-endorsed, and we've asked them to clarify the terms of the competition.” The terms have been updated, but the contest is still on. Good luck?

The Media – Tweet from Luke Tsai in SF: “Some personal news: This Friday [today] will be my last day at Eater SF. In a few weeks, I start my new job as food editor for KQED!” Tsai says he’ll be accepting pitches at KQED once he settles in, and Eater’s Amanda Kludt tells me they’ll be hiring for the vacant role soon. Good luck, all!

The Critics – FYI: This Wednesday at 1PM ET, Boston Globe restaurant critic and food writer Devra First, New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, and food writer and host of the podcast Boundless Horizon Korsha Wilson will join [Eater’s Ashok Selvam] to discuss how their jobs have changed and been challenged in the past year, how they consider their responsibilities to diners and their communities, and how critics’ voices — challenging industry blindspots, spotlighting the humans behind the food, drawing attention to inequality — can make an impact.” Not my time zone, but you can submit a question at signup and critique the conversation to me afterwards.

For Design Fans – Quick trip over to Hong Kong for my new favorite design feature: “They Didn’t Choose Minimalism!” Not a dig at your possible sleekness, but all I want to see when we come out of this is the un-sterile, the cozy, the cluttered. And I am so happy at what it means to see that the big money behind a Mandarin Oriental hotel bar going that direction. Here’s Miyako Kai’s Instagram spread on The Aubrey.

And last but not least: For the Somm – Also in the SF Chronicle this week, a “Farewell to Napa's annual wine auction, the raucous charity bacchanal that's ended after 40 years,” From wine critic Esther Mobley: “What I love most about the Auction Napa Valley story is the tendency it had to attract strange and humorous celebrity appearances. Like the time Jay Leno auctioned a jacket made out of wine corks off Robert Mondavi’s back. Or the year that Lyle Lovett showed up to sing even after he’d been trampled by a bull only a few weeks earlier. (He remained in a chair for his performance.) There was one year when Francis Ford Coppola… insisted on being the chef for the evening. He swore that he was really back in the kitchen forming the gnocchi with his own hands….

“But I don’t think I was the only one who found the whole thing a little bit too outrageous… In 1987, someone paid $2,800 for a six-pack of wine coolers — an expensive, and I think very effective, way of poking fun at the over-the-top nature of it all. Another bidder that year, Paul Smith, called the wine-cooler incident a ‘disgrace.’ ‘It’s kind of hokey and it’s just not that professional,’ he told The Chronicle at the time. Smith had himself paid almost $30,000 for wines at that auction, not for the sake of irony. He clearly didn’t get the joke.”

And that’s it for today!

Please make all your most expensive jokes via ironic subscriptions to your favorite newsletter, and I’ll see paying subscribers here Tuesday for next Family Meal.

Everyone else, until Friday! (Or Monday if you’re on Clubhouse. See below.)

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or an expensive, and I think very effective, way of poking fun at the over-the-top nature of it all to andrew@thisfamilymeal.com. If you like Family Meal and want to keep it going, please chip in here. If you got this as a forward, sign up for yourself!

P.S. - Every Monday morning at 10:30AM ET / 7:30AM PT, Kristen Hawley (of the excellent Expedite newsletter) and I are on Clubhouse running through all the big restaurant / food media / restaurant tech stories we’re following to start the week. Would love to have you there and hear from you! Link here. (If you need an invite, lmk.)