LAT Food rebranded, Phojanakong gone, Black Sheep magic, and more...
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LAT Food rebranded, Phojanakong gone, Black Sheep magic, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, January 6th, 2023
Hello Friday,
And Happy New Year to everyone who wasn’t here on Tuesday!
If you’d like to spend 2023 getting Family Meal on both Tuesdays and Fridays…
There are a LOT more of you reading this than there were at this time in 2022, so we are due some kind of update on what this is and who I am. But that will have to wait till next week. For now, just know that you are in the right place, and, at the very least, I’m not the wrong guy.
Let’s get to it…
The Media (Recipe Zeitgeist) – After spending much of the pandemic in what felt a bit like a post-Peter Meehan wilderness, LAT Food is pushing a big rebrand to start the year: “New logo, new features, same great taste: Welcome to the new L.A. Times Food.” There’s an intro to the team (with headshots minus critic Bill Addison), as well as a hint on the focus at the section for the future. Sounds like… Recipes! Which is where I notice a lot of editorial attention seems to be going at several other food media sites too.
A reaction to years of harder hitting Me Too / Racism / Pandemic news wearing food-focused readers down? A data-driven shift to post-pandemic home cooking SEO trends? Cost conscious cutting of restaurant journalism and criticism?
Maybe none of the above. But might mean PR types across the country will be pitching more “Can my chef post his life story as a guest recipe?” than “My chef has woven his life story into a great new menu you should try!” in 2023?
There may also be a lot more restaurant chefs working directly with food media in complicating ways. Per Laurie Ochoa and Daniel Hernandez: “Much of our coverage will revolve around our recently completed L.A. Times Test Kitchen at the paper’s El Segundo campus… Already, we’ve brought in Alta chef Keith Corbin and Black Pot Supper Club founder and chef Martin Draluck; in the coming months, you can expect to see chef residencies, workshops, cooking classes and a cookbook club as we make key hires and introduce new voices.”
Good luck, all!
Meanwhile, Ochoa, the GM, and Hernandez, the editor, re-introduced themselves via bios titled “My front-row seat to L.A.’s evolving food scene” and “Everyone is an outsider until they’re an insider: A theory on food media” respectively.
If you, like me, were hoping that latter headline meant there was going to be some kind of intense examining of those complicating ties between restaurants and chefs and the people who cover them, you will be disappointed. Turns out it’s just a kind of treatise on getting over imposter syndrome.
Some Sad News – “On January 2, the New York chef King Phojanakong died at the age of 54. Over the course of his career, he maintained, in the words of Time Out, a ‘cult following’ with his restaurants, Kuma Inn on the Lower East Side and Umi Nom in Bed-Stuy… In December, he was diagnosed with an extremely rare case of granulomatous amoebic encephalitis, a serious infection of the nervous system and brain. King is survived by his mother, Emma; father, King; wife, Annabel; daughter, Phebe; and son, Eduard. If you wish to donate, there is a GoFundMe to support the family.” Chris Crowley has the obituary in GrubStreet.
And last but not least – From right here in Hong Kong… A magic trick.
On the left, you’ll see major HK restaurant group Black Sheep’s “About” page in September, 2022 (the last time it was captured by the Wayback Machine). On the right is today’s:
I’ve reached out to find out what happened, but all I know officially so far is… POOF!
And that’s it for today! Except of course for Tuesday’s paid version of Family Meal which is copy / pasted below for free subscribers as usual. If you’d like to get Tuesdays’ on Tuesdays too…
I’ll see paying subscribers back here on Tuesday, and everyone else Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or a theory on food media 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!
Here begins the Family Meal that went out to paying subscribers on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023:
Beard financials, Critical gentrification, Some sad news, and more...
Hello Tuesday,
And hello 2023!
The holidays have mostly been about roundups and predictions in food media, and it’s all mostly meh. But I went to a fortune teller in Hong Kong the other day who read my palm and told me 2023 was going to be a good year, and because my emotions are tied in part to your own well-being, dear reader, I can only assume it’s going to be a good year for you too.
So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
As for Family Meal, I shared my predictions on Twitter earlier this week. They are as follows:
And I just published a very special Family Meal kind of roundup: A chronological, date by date, long scroll of every Family Meal news item in 2022. Some of you will find it useful, I’m sure! Here you go:
Family Meal’s 2022 Year in Copy / Paste!
There’s just a bit of news on top of that to share today, so…
Let’s get to it…
The Financials – Annual nonprofit reports are never quite as detailed as what’s submitted to the IRS (and later publicly available anyway…), but the Beard team put their curated 2022 fiscal year numbers out over the holidays, and if I’m reading page 17 right, if it weren’t for ERC income and a PPP loan, the James Beard Foundation would have lost $901k this year instead of being up nearly $370k?
Some kinda solidarity with the industry there…
The Lists – Eater is once again trickling out some Most Anticipated Restaurant lists, this time for all of 2023. So far I see Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, the Twin Cities, and D.C., with more presumably out there or on the way.
The (Gentrification) Critics – On the same day in late December there was a…
Shot: Soleil Ho in the SF Chronicle under the headline, “I’m a restaurant critic. Am I fueling gentrification in the Bay Area?”: “Restaurant critics don’t talk about gentrification much, even though we’re inevitable participants of it.”
And chaser: Cesar Hernandez in the SF Chronicle under the headline, “What does gentrification taste like? This dreadful Oakland restaurant serves it on a tortilla.”: “You can’t write about downtown Oakland’s dining scene today without writing about gentrification… On the menu at Calavera is cultural appropriation with an almost total lack of respect for the culture being appropriated. One restaurant can't be saddled with all the sins of food gentrification in a changing neighborhood. But for me, Calavera is guilty of so many.”
Guilty by association? “A table of women toasting with $15 June in Tulum cocktails and eating tacos with their forks, scooping up the saucy proteins and leaving behind the stained, limp tortillas.”
The No Precedent Pocket Change – “The food delivery service Grubhub has agreed to pay an $800,000 civil penalty along with $2.7 million to consumers to settle a lawsuit brought in March by [the D.C. Attorney General].” WaPo’s Steve Thompson reports, “The lawsuit alleged that Grubhub obscured fees, listed more than 1,000 restaurants on its platforms without contracts with those businesses and often charged higher prices for items than the restaurants charged, without disclosing such information to consumers. The attorney general’s complaint said Grubhub engaged in a bait-and-switch scheme by representing to customers that they would pay only a ‘delivery fee,’ then adding a ‘service fee’ and ‘small order fee’ to many orders at the checkout page after customers had gone through the trouble of selecting restaurants and menu items.”
Per the settlement order, Grubhub says it paid out “solely for the purpose of concluding this matter,” and, legally speaking, didn’t admit to shit.
Some Sad News – “Chef Jean-Robert de Cavel, an adopted son of Cincinnati who led a resurgence of fine dining in the region, died [December 23rd] at age 61. De Cavel came to Cincinnati in 1993 when he was 32 to work at The Maisonette. He since opened several fine dining restaurants, including Table, Pigalls Le Bar a Boeuf and French Crust Café and Bistro.” The Enquirer staff has a free obituary here, and writer Keith Pandolfi shared his thoughts behind the paywall here. Pandolfi also tweeted an old episode of Dan Pashman’s Sporkful podcast, where “we learn about Cincinnati's past as a hub of fine French dining, and Dan talks with Chef Jean Robert de Cavel (below) about his love affair with this midwestern city.”
And in SF, “Ilya Romanov, a celebrated bar manager who worked at the Russian Hill restaurant Nisei and adjacent cocktail lounge, Bar Iris, fell to his death [from a rooftop] on Polk Street on Friday. He was 33.” Caleb Pershan has an obituary in the Chronicle.
And last but not least: The Order – On an episode of The Daily over the holidays, NYT restaurant critic Pete Wells makes it clear the return to star ratings was not his choice. After a while without them, he says, he started noting lots of rumblings from readers wanting stars back. “Then I started hearing from people higher up at The Times, or I had some discussions with my editor. The first time it was mentioned I thought it was just way too soon. I said, know this isn’t even a conversation. It just seemed like a step back. Like I would be going back to something that I didn’t necessarily believe in anymore and I wanted to keep doing it the new way. It was so much more interesting to me. But then there comes a day when my editor says, it’s time. And at this point, it’s not a question, it’s a statement.”
If he ever walks into your place and you feel a little intimidated, just remember: Pete Wells gets bossed around at work. By his bosses. Like a person. Wild.
And that’s it for today!
I’ll see you all here Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or the purpose of concluding this matter 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!