Relief cliff, Delivery $$$, Ghost expansion, Media opportunities, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, July 24, 2020
Hello Friday,
My kingdom for an optimist. Anyone?
Let’s get to it…
The Relief – Never sure how much general stimulus type stuff to include in Family Meal, but hard to avoid mentioning the coming cliff. Emily Cochrane, Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport have a good summary of where we’re at this morning in the NYT: “Thursday’s intramural squabbling among Republicans only increased the likelihood that Congress and Mr. Trump will fail to reach a deal before the supplemental benefit of $600 per week for unemployed Americans expires at month’s end. Failure to extend the supplemental benefit would result in sudden income losses for millions of people at a time when the economic recovery appears to have stagnated.”
And I know many of you are already dealing with this personally, but Eli Rosenberg had a good rundown on the unemployment situation, plus some empathetic multi-industry snapshots of the consequences for those who tried to use PPP money instead of unemployment in WaPo yesterday. “‘They got PPP loans and they’re now running out, and they’re having to make major cuts,’ said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, who advises several small businesses. ‘It was the wrong bet. This wasn’t just a transitory event.’”
The Opportunities – With editorships open at Bon Appetit, LA Times Food, and Eater NY, the New York Times Food section must’ve felt a little jealous, because yesterday Sam Sifton announced they’re looking to hire three editors and three reporters to the desk. The reporting job description is very food / cooking forward, so if you’re a cook/chef thinking of a career change in these wild times, I say go for it and good luck! (Editor listing here.)
And if you’re not ready to apply for a staff job, but want to start dipping your toes in the food writing world, Bon Appetit’s Joseph Hernandez just tweeted out a series of new guidelines for how to pitch: bonappetit.com, basically, and Healthyish. (Links go to the guides.) Good luck!
Those Delivery $$$ – As restaurants struggle, capital continues to flow to restaurant tech. Chowbus, “a food-delivery business that finds restaurants whose cuisines specialize in regional cuisines from Northern and Southern China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam” just raised “$33 million in financing led by the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Altos Ventures and New York’s Left Lane Capital.” Details via Jonathan Shieber in Techcrunch.
NB: Chowbus is not to be confused with ChewBox, the Locol delivery / commissary / indie-plates collaboration between chef Roy Choi, VC Stephen DeBerry, entrepreneur Kim Gaston, and others, which got a big new write up in Food & Wine this week from Andy Wang.
And P.S. – Also mentioned in the Techcrunch article is Black and Mobile, “a delivery service focused on Black-owned restaurants and food stores.” Founder David Cabello was profiled earlier this month by Jenn Ladd in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where we learn he’s apparently bootstrapping his company into several new cities after an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign last year.
Those Ghost $$$ – Meanwhile, clamoring for space on those delivery apps will be a growing gush of new brands working out of relatively low-rent commercial spaces. In NYC, “Zuul announced [yesterday] that it has secured $9 million in funding to expand its ghost kitchen operations throughout New York City. The company… services brands that deliver to both residential and commercial customers throughout downtown Manhattan. Zuul will deploy the capital to expand its footprint across high demand areas of the five boroughs.” Rose-colored details in the press release here.
Side note: Tough time to be named Zuul in the restaurant business, when so many in food media are calling for new gatekeepers. Get it? GET IT?
Michelin Season – I can already see some of you rolling your eyes, but… I got curious as to what Michelin inspectors are doing in the US right now, so I reached out to their California reps last week to ask a few questions. The gist is: Inspectors haven’t made any visits at all since the first shelter-in-place order in mid-March, not even outdoors. They’ll wait until it “seems appropriate based on the individual establishment and their circumstances,” which the guide is sussing out in part by “staying in close contact with chefs,” though they won’t tell me which chefs. Fair enough?
For Design Fans – “A Dolly Parton-themed Rooftop Bar Just Opened in Nashville — and It’s a Whimsically Pink Paradise.” OK. Yes. Maybe. But it’s also called White Limozeen and I can’t tell you how much it pains me that they spent good money writing “Pool” in cursive at the bottom of the pool, when a quick google search yields several 1989 Cadillac limos for under $5k. I’m not usually one for gimmicks, but if someone could please show the Graduate Hotel owners the album cover and run them through a quick powerpoint on how Instagram works, I’d think we could have a car on that roof next week.
And last and least – For those of you thinking of applying for the NYT Food section jobs, a job app life hack: Writing your cover letter in the style of the editor you’re applying to lets them know you both read their work and can adjust to fit their mold where necessary. For example, I will also be applying to these jobs and have written my cover letter in a composite style of every Sam Sifton cooking newsletter I’ve ever read. It’s copy / pasted at bottom to help you get started on your own. Crib what you need. You’re welcome.
And that’s it for today.
I’ll see you here Tuesday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or a whimsically pink paradise 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!
NYT Food Cover Letter
From: Andrew Genung
Applying for whatever includes health insurance.
My Dearest Mr. Sifton,
We cook to cook, because cooking is what cooks and what we cook keeps us cooking. In a sense, cooking is what makes us human, and that — to use the underground music slang made famous by Chuck Berry’s cousin Marvin in the 1985 rock and roll documentary Back To The Future — really cooks.
But more than just cooking to cook, we cook to cook for each other, our fellow humans, our fellow cooks. I, for example, would like to cook for you. And by cook, of course, I mean work.
Perhaps you’d like to try presenting me with a nice staff writer position? Or maybe there is an editor’s job you’d be interested in risking on a newsletter writer like me? However it comes together, I think you’ll be really happy with the result. And isn’t that what we’re all looking for in these troubled times? A little happiness? Me getting these jobs? I think so.
The other day I went fishing for stripers, and was reminded by the poetic flop of a fish to check my random poetry generator. The poem I found — and an unrelated Childish Gambino video — are definitely interesting, and, ipso facto, so am I.
Today is the birthday of Modern English frontman Robbie Grey. Remove all the sexual references and innuendo from their hit Melt With You, and I think you’ll get a sense of how we could work together.
The future’s open wide.
Andrew