Virtual profits, The Counter down, A critical cookbook, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, April 15, 2022
Hello Friday,
This will be a quick one. It’s an extra long holiday weekend for many (in food media), and the biggest photo on NYT Food is an Easter ham. NB paying subscribers: Unless food media kicks into some unexpected high gear and starts pumping out big news between now and then there will almost certainly be no Family Meal on Tuesday.
On top of lack of stories, I need to take some time to organize our unexpectedly early return to Hong Kong. Starting next week, restaurants there will be allowed to open until 10PM again (up from current 6PM) and have four people at tables (up from 2)! Gyms and movie theaters can also reopen. They’re going to take the caution tape off playgrounds! (But not beaches?) And (biggest for us): School starts again in-person on Monday.
Unfortunately, that means another 7-day hotel quarantine for me, this time probably accompanied by a 7 year old boy with NORMAL amounts of energy. Thoughts and prayers appreciated.
Let’s get to it…
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.”
And that’s it for today! Except of course for Tuesday’s paid version which is copy/pasted below as usual. If you’d like to get Tuesdays’ on Tuesdays too…
I’ll see everyone back here on Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or a “very nice fixture” 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, April 12th, 2022:
King chop, Yoshida spotlight, May departure, Ruggerio rug, and more...
Hello Tuesday,
Today’s Family Meal is coming to you in part from a car en route to Ubud, where I’ll probably go by myself to Room4Dessert before the adults in our group eat a savory dinner all together at one of the Locavore restaurants. Love to journey off the beaten path!
I finally watched Will Goldfarb’s Chef’s Table episode last night, and am but a moth to the flame of David Gelb’s fail-fail-fail-fail-win slow motion hero’s journey. If you have any questions for Mr. Goldfarb, lmk.
Let’s get to it…
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.
And that’s it for today! Way too NYT/NYC/dude-centric this time, Sorry! But… I’ve got to run to dessert. Having moved from car to coffee shop while writing this, I also made that reservation at Goldfarb’s place. Starts in 10 minutes.
Let you know how it goes (probably on Instagram, if you’re into that kind of thing), and see you all back here Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or a “very nice fixture” 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!