Hello Friday,

And hello, all!

The US midterm elections are this Tuesday, and former President Barack Obama wrote to me personally this week to ask that I remind you to do two things: 1. VOTE! and 2. Become a paying subscriber of the newsletter you are reading right now!

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That guy is always asking me for something.

Let’s get to it…

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).

And that’s it for today! Except of course for Tuesday’s Family meal which is copy/pasted below as usual.

I’ll see paying subscribers back here Tuesday, and everyone else on Friday for next Family Meal.

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or a 7-Book Deal With Abrams 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, November 1st, 2022:

Reef retreats, Sushi Styles exposed, Le Non-Colonial, and more...

Hello Tuesday,

And hello to paying subscribers only! If you got this as a forward, please consider chipping in to keep it going…

Subscribe now

No time for chit chat today. A tropical storm is en route and we are busy battening down the hatches (read: mentally preparing for school closures) here. We’ll be fine, but also… wish us luck!

Let’s get to it…

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.

And that’s it for today!

Scuba duba dubbed boo, I’ll see you Friday for Family Meal too!

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or ice on rice 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!

Family Meal

RRF Redux Reflux Funds, Greene Gone, Eater…