Getty Images From Caraway’s nonstick (and non-toxic) bundles to a hobbit-sized cast-iron frying pan, these little pans do big things What better way to frame a lone fried egg than with a hobbit-sized skillet? Why schlep out a monster pan when you’re cooking an oatmeal skillet cookie, or a quick shakshuka for one that requires a mere seven-ish inches of circumference for optimal poaching? Sometimes, less is more, and it’s something that the best small frying pans can do so very well. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Joanie Zisk | One Dish Kitchen (@onedishkitchen) When I moved around often in my twenties, I didn’t own much. As a result, home-cooking-wise, I was typically living off the minimalist duo of a jumbo, oven-safe, cast-iron skillet (think, a 15-inch Lodge skillet) and what I called the single-serving frying pan, which was most often a 5- to 8-inch wide frying pan with some kind of mystery nonstick coating. While this might sound spartan, those two pieces of cookware allowed me to make almost anything my heart desired — for one, anyway. These days, I find myself cooking for more mouths more frequently, but the handiness of that tiny frying pan has remained essential for quick, single-serving meals and side-quest dishes, from pan-searing a strip steak to whipping up a stir-fry with my leftovers. Now, as someone who has sizzled their way through many pans over many years, I try to check a few specific boxes when looking for a great frying pan. Durability is important, so hardy materials such as stainless steel and cast iron are top of mind. I’m not against nonstick pans, but I have become increasingly creeped out by synthetic “forever” chemicals — otherwise known as PFAS — that coated the nonstick pans of yore. Instead, I’m opting for nonstick frying pans with more transparency about what exactly goes into their glossy coatings. (I’m also more aware of potentially harmful microplastics in utensils, and now exclusively use medical-grade silicone cooking utensils and glass storage containers.). Below, I have rounded up a few options of small, single-serving frying pans for every budget and material preference, from almost-palm-sized nonstick frying pans to miniature pan-and-lid bundles. For beginner cooks, this nonstick frying pan and lid set … Or, opt for Caraway’s nonstick pan without the lid If you’re not looking to spend quite as much on a bundle, you can also opt to buy the above frying pan at under $100 in any number of its color options, including marigold, sage, and a dusty rose pink. Stainless steel is a workhorse A palm-sized frying pan An aesthetically-pleasing Japanese frying pan Caraway doesn’t just do ceramic cookware Smithey’s rustic pan is a pot rack flex Happy frying.
Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SCAD It’s the latest in a long line of healthier drink acquisitions for the soda giant This week, massive food and beverage conglomerate PepsiCo announced that it would drop nearly $2 billion to acquire Poppi, the low-calorie, probiotic-infused soda brand that you’ve likely seen on your social media feeds. According to Reuters, the move comes at a time when Pepsi is facing declining demand as customers look to consume less sugar and seek out healthier drinks. And considering the way the beverage industry works, this acquisition was all but inevitable. Over the past two decades, big soda brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi have seen soda consumption in the United States and beyond decline significantly as health experts warn about the dangers of consuming too much sugar. As such, these brands have been aggressive in acquiring upstarts in the beverage market. Every time a drink trend with a health halo kicks off, the two mega-corporations appear to swoop in and acquire the most successful of the smaller companies driving the trend, adding an even wider range of beverages to their already massive portfolios. History bears this out. In 2007, Coca-Cola purchased Glaceau, the company behind the brand Vitaminwater, which was quickly earning a reputation — and scores of fans — as a healthier alternative to both sugary sodas and their diet counterparts. That same year, PepsiCo purchased Naked Juice, a bottled juice brand with flavors like “Green Machine” and “Mighty Mango,” all of which promised a wide range of nutritional and health benefits. In 2009, as the coconut water craze began, Coca-Cola acquired a stake in the brand Zico, which promised to be a healthier and “more natural” alternative to workout drinks like Gatorade. PepsiCo also purchased a coconut water brand, the now-defunct O.N.E., that same year. Then came seltzer-mania: In 2017, Coca-Cola bought the rights to Topo Chico, and PepsiCo bought SodaStream the following year. Considering the explosive growth of the healthy soda or functional beverage category, which is projected to be worth $2 billion in annual sales by 2029, it’s not surprising that PepsiCo has most recently dipped its toes into these probiotic-infused, stevia-sweetened waters. There’s a lot of money to be made from our culture’s collective anxieties around consuming too much sugar or too many chemicals, especially at a time when the diet industry is booming, and medications that radically curb appetites and impact digestion like GLP-1 inhibitors are also exploding in popularity. In February, Coca-Cola launched its own prebiotic soda, called Simply Pop, that also boasts Vitamin C and zinc to purportedly help boost your immune system. By purchasing Poppi, PepsiCo is betting on a future in which its marquee offering, the 122-year-old soda that gave the company its name, is an occasional splurge or a weekend treat, not something that you drink with lunch and dinner. In 2025, we need our beverages to be working for us, whether that means bolstering our immune systems or helping our bowels move more smoothly. And even though many experts don’t view beverages like Poppi as especially beneficial — usually, there’s not enough fiber in each can to really make a difference in your guts, and for some folks, that fiber could actually make things worse — that won’t stop companies like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola from using their vast financial resources to capitalize on the trend.
Cedar Summit Farm/Flickr But were afraid to ask, for fear of looking uncool in your favorite restaurant Bettina Makalintal is a senior reporter at Eater.com, covering restaurant trends, home cooking advice, and all the food you can’t escape on your TikTok FYP. Previously, she worked for Bon Appétit and VICE’s Munchies. Spring is so close, like a shoot ready to poke through the thawing dirt — and that means it’s time to brace yourself for ramp season. In some parts of the world, it’s already beginning, judging by the dishes starting to emerge on Instagram. You know, ramps: those cute, terribly en vogue little vegetables with the slightly confusing name that sprout up yearly on every hip restaurateur’s menu, and whose hyper-seasonal presence has been known to spur long lines at farmers’ markets and clamor across the culinary internet. But what exactly are these little green wonders — and why are people so into them? What are ramps? A good way to define ramps might be to describe the negative space, i.e. what ramps aren’t. Ramps are not leeks, nor are they scallions, nor are they exactly shallots. Ramps are sometimes called wild leeks, wild garlic, or spring onions, adding to the confusion. They look like scallions, but they’re smaller and slightly more delicate, with one or two flat, broad leaves. Both the greens and the lower white stalks are edible. Ramps taste stronger than a leek, which generally has a mild onion flavor, and they’re more pungently garlicky than a scallion. Why do chefs and cooks freak out about ramps? Ramp season is short, and hence, quantities are limited. Like truffles and wild mushrooms, ramps are typically foraged, giving them an air of adventure. They’re also one of the first vegetables to emerge from the defrosting soil after a long winter. Waiting for the first ramps of the season has the anticipatory excitement of waiting for Punxsutawney Phil to look for his shadow. They’re one of those turning points that promises the farmers market is about to get exciting again, after a long winter of root vegetables. How do I cook with ramps? Ramps are the gorgeous, perfect little cousin of the onion, so use them anywhere you might use other alliums. Cook them in butter and make them into an omelet. Turn them into pesto, compound butter, or vinaigrette. If their temporal nature saddens you, keep the season going a little longer by pickling them. E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Harvesting wild ramps. How much do ramps cost? Ramps are priced like they’re in demand: While guides tend to estimate prices around $20 per pound or $5-$10 for a small bunch, ramps went for $27.99 per pound last season from the specialty food purveyor D’Artagnan. Should I freak about ramps? As with all things, only in moderation. There are consequences to the annual ramp-age — namely, overharvesting. Wild foods advocate Russ Cohen has decried overeager ramp foraging in the past, saying that more sustainable harvesting is necessary, lest long-term ecological damage be done. How can I get ramps sustainably? If foraging your own ramps, Cohen has recommended picking just one leaf per plant and leaving the bulb in the ground so it can continue to reproduce for future years. And since ramps grow slowly, the National Agroforestry Center also recommends only harvesting portions should you encounter a ramp cluster in the wild, as opposed to the whole thing. It cites a 2004 study that recommends “harvesting no more than 10 percent of a patch and harvesting from the same patch only once every 10 years. In this way, natural populations have a chance to recuperate.” When buying ramps, you might consider buying only ramp leaves if they’re available, or choosing from sellers who don’t sell the plant with its entire bulb. (In order to protect native ramp populations, the cultivation of ramps could also be a growth area as demand no doubt increases.) So sure, freak out, but in a controlled manner, remembering that you’re not the only person excited about ramp season. Where can I get my hands on some ramps? Check your local farmers’ market. Otherwise, you might luck out at Whole Foods, produce markets, Eataly, or other specialty grocery stores.
On the streets of Chandni Chowk. | Subodh Agnihotri/Shutterstock From the right vendors for perfect street food in the old city to the fine dining spots to reserve ahead, here are a local food editor’s top picks for dining in New Delhi Compared to other capital cities in the world, Delhi’s restaurant scene changes slowly. This is partly because eating in restaurants has only recently become a source of recreation for anyone outside the elite classes; even today, generations of working class residents rely on the city’s beloved street-vendors and old, family-run sweet and snack shops across the city’s vast, throttling expanse. Nevertheless, food is everywhere in Delhi — like in other Indian cities — including some unexpected places. These days, Delhi’s powerhouse of Punjabi or Mughlai cuisine — the type of food best known in the West — is being challenged. Young people from India’s Northeast are making their names as some of the city’s best chefs, and the puritanism that once defined eating in India’s capital is giving way to creative impulses befitting this modern, growing metropolis. In addition to the vendors of the old city, where locals and tourists stream past stacks of rotis fresh from tandoors, cooks from every part of the country showcase the varied cuisines of their communities in small-scale, independent, and dynamic restaurants popular with the city’s younger generations. It’s impossible in one list to completely summarize a city that defies linearity, but these 38 essential restaurants should get you started — but if a smell beckons from a side street or small storefront, abandon your plans and follow your instincts. You can also ask locals for tips and assistance, but don’t always expect a straight answer. In the historic parts of the city, like Old Delhi, simply following crowds will take you to great food. In this latest refresh, we’ve revamped our write-ups to include even more relevant info for diners, including a rough range of pricing for each destination — ranging from $ for quick, inexpensive meals with dishes largely under $10 (or the equivalent in rupees), to $$$$ for places where entrees exceed $30. New to the map in March 2025: Gulati, a popular Punjabi dhaba that nails the classics; Fujiya, an old-timey banquet style Punjabi Chinese restaurant in an upscale neighborhood; Delhi’s first Korean restaurant, Seoul, which just got a fresh facelift; Rude Chef, a casual and stylish restaurant from an accomplished chef serving interesting global cuisine; Nepalese momo specialist Lha Kitchen, which has become popular with influencer types; fashionable California-esque vegan food at Greenr Cafe; all-day nihari from Ballimaran Nahari; Nagaland’s Kitchen, a restaurant in an old Delhi marketplace that feels like a neighborhood bar; popular Nagaland cuisine from Dzukou Tribal Kitchen in far south Delhi; and Bhawan, a versatile canteen-inspired restaurant in Gurgaon. A note on getting around: It’s a mistake to take a taxi into Old Delhi. Instead, use the metro, then walk or take a rickshaw the rest of the way. Use Uber to reach places in Delhi’s Central, East, South, and West districts. Sharanya Deepak is a writer and editor from New Delhi, who has been covering Indian dining for Eater since 2019. She is also an editor at Vittles, and her work has appeared in Roads and Kingdoms, The Believer, and The Baffler, among others.
It’s got a big counter footprint and a bigger price tag, but dang, this ice cream maker is really fun (and now I finally understand the cult of Creami) I love soft serve. When I lived in Brooklyn, I chose my primary care physician primarily because her office was next to a location of pay-by-weight soft-serve chain 16 Handles. When I moved from New York to Los Angeles, before committing to my apartment, I confirmed that it would be within a 10-minute drive of Magpies. Every Wednesday, my sister and I exchange text messages with a brief appraisal of Magpies flavors — is roasted strawberry intriguing, or not blowing us away? (The former.) Should we center our evening around trying the Vietnamese coffee and butterscotch swirl? (Probably!) While I love a cheeky impulse scoop from Jeni’s, Salt & Straw, or Van Leeuwen, it’s soft serve that really motivates me. However, until very recently, it had absolutely never occurred to me, not even once, that I might want to own a home soft-serve machine. In fact, I didn’t even have any interest in making ice cream at home at all, and thought it sounded laborious and unnecessary… until my TikTok #fyp became inundated with content surrounding a very popular machine called the Ninja Creami. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Creami by now; its reach is virtually inescapable, with a devoted fandom on par with the people living in Vegas for months on end for the Dead & Co. residency at the Sphere. At the touch of a button, it creates ice cream in all different textures, with infinite possibilities for bases and mix-ins, and the internet is aflurry (no pun intended) with Creami-centered flavor ingenuity. Thanks to its seemingly magical ability to turn storebought protein shakes into creamy frozen desserts, fitness buffs and calorie-counters love it just as much as dessert-first home cooks. The Creami cult has truly taken on a life of its own, spawning a subreddit with a whopping 80,000 members exchanging recipes for Creami-made homemade cookie butter ice cream, stracciatella gelato, and Dole Whip. A friend bought the countertop appliance for his girlfriend and told me they used their Creami every day for months — something you never hear about a single-purpose kitchen appliance. Like many others, I became deeply Creami-curious. Unsure whether it was worth the 200-ish dollars and the counter space, I abstained from making a purchase, but continued to observe it from afar. However, Ninja recently released a new model called the Ninja Swirl by CREAMi — or Creami Swirl, for short — with a built-in soft-serve feature as well as several other upgrades. When the opportunity came knocking for me to give it a literal and figurative whirl, I was beyond ready. As a longtime food and commerce writer, I’ve reviewed everything from full-size refrigerators and high-end espresso machines to gummy candy (I also have a major sweet tooth). With this convergence of experience and interests, the Creami Swirl fell firmly within my purview and area of coverage, and was the first home ice cream machine that really compelled me. After a preliminary spin, I can confirm that while it’s big, it’s loud, and it costs $350, it can do some pretty amazing things. Here’s my honest review. First impressions... The unboxing process for the Swirl, while exciting, was also intimidating. At about 21 pounds, the Swirl is a bit lighter than a KitchenAid stand mixer (weighing in at 26 pounds), and similar in terms of counter footprint. While the original Creami’s footprint is roughly that of a medium-sized coffee machine, the Swirl is nearly twice its width to accommodate the soft-serve dispensing function, which also includes a large handle on the right side of the machine. At over 17 inches tall, it clears the underside of my kitchen cabinets by less than two inches, so be aware that you might have to get creative with where you keep it or position it. The Ninja Swirl by Creami, on its first test drive. All photos by the author The Swirl has — quite literally — a lot of moving parts. In addition to the main machine, in the box, there are two pint containers, an external container, a Creamerizer paddle, a drip tray, a few different lids, and stickers on everything encouraging you to scan QR codes to get started. Unfortunately, I am personally allergic to QR codes and would rather stick to an instruction manual, so I decided to commit to learning everything through paper, words, and trial and error. Setting the Swirl up If you’ve never used a Creami machine before, know that you have to make your ice cream base recipe and freeze it overnight before you can truly get started, so you will have to plan ahead (by one day, anyway). Because the Swirl comes with two pints, I decided to prepare two opening recipes to taste- and texture-test: the Ninja-recommended classic chocolate soft-serve recipe, and a protein ice cream recipe, since that’s such a point of appeal for so many Creami devotees. For the latter, I took the simple two-ingredient format from this recipe and started with a Premier Protein shake in Cake Batter flavor; I added pistachio-flavored Jell-O instant pudding mix instead of vanilla for a little added jazz and pizzazz. I froze the bases overnight in the pint containers (it says to freeze them for 24 hours, but close enough), and they emerged ready to churn the following day. Identifying the pint containers and storage lids had been simple enough, but I was nervous to take the many stickers off the rest of the machine for fear that I’d miss an important step. Thankfully, if you look VERY CLOSELY at the illustrations in the instruction booklet and try as hard as humanly possible not to be lazy or stupid and mistake one part for another, you’ll figure things out in just a few minutes, although I wouldn’t exactly say “intuitively.” There is a lot of twisting, pulling, and remembering which way is counterclockwise. None of it’s actually difficult, and after the first run, it got exponentially easier. By the second batch of ice cream, I was moving much faster and with far less apprehension that I was going to miss a step. What are the new features on the Ninja Swirl by CREAMi? Let’s break it down. The latest-model standard Ninja Creami has seven different settings: ice cream, sorbet, lite ice cream, smoothie bowl, gelato, milkshake, and mix-in. The Creami Deluxe — also called the Creami XL Deluxe — has 11 settings: ice cream, sorbet, lite ice cream, gelato, milkshake, frozen yogurt, Italian ice, frozen drink, “slushi,” “creamiccino,” and mix-in. The Deluxe also has 24-ounce tubs vs. the 16-ounce pints used in the other machines (thus the XL), so it can make larger batches of ice cream, as well as the option to spin only the top or bottom of the tub, which is a cool feature if you want to do a multi-layered creation. The new Swirl by Creami has a total of 13 programs, including two main modes — soft serve and scoop — plus 10 additional settings: ice cream, sorbet, lite ice cream, gelato, milkshake, frozen yogurt, fruit whip, frozen custard, and, notably, a new setting called Creamifit. Creamifit is optimized for low-sugar, high-protein recipes, clearly intended for those who are frequently using this machine as a way to make their protein shakes into dessert. So, to be clear, the entirely new settings — besides the soft-serve functionality — are the fruit whip, frozen custard, and Creamifit programs. You’ll also notice a new “retract” button on the machine; it simply retracts the plunger that dispenses the soft serve when you’re done with that function. How does it perform? Alright, enough specs! Let’s talk about the ice cream. The first batch of ice cream I made using the Swirl was the cake-batter-pistachio protein recipe that I (sort of) invented. I used the scoop setting and the Creamifit program because it had a protein shake base, and after some troubleshooting, was rewarded with a very creamy, scoopable, and frankly delicious ice cream. Protein ice cream made in the Creami Despite being made with untraditional ingredients as far as old-school ice cream goes, the protein ice cream was very smooth, silky, and appropriately sweet. After enjoying a bowl with my friend Jake, who was along for the taste-testing, I reprocessed the pint with the soft-serve setting, then transferred it to the soft-serve port and pulled the handle. The result was a little bit liquidy for optimal soft-serve texture, but since this was literally my first batch, I decided to reserve judgement for the next round. Plus, it still tasted good, and I was having a nice time regardless of imperfections. This machine is not quiet, but it is fast. The sound level is louder than my KitchenAid mixer but quieter than my noisy, annoying Vitamix blender. There’s a digital countdown clock that lets you know how many minutes each program will take, and I find this to provide a lot of psychological relief, because even when the machine is roaring, you know that it’s only going to last a few minutes. Jake taking the Swirl’s signature feature for a spin with chocolate soft-serve We then processed the chocolate ice cream, made with a more standard recipe of milk, sugar, and heavy cream, using only the soft-serve setting, and the texture and viscosity came out very close to traditional soft-serve, albeit still slightly melty. We refroze the pint for about 30 minutes after the first run and then ran it through the soft-serve side of the machine again, and this time achieved pretty impressive results and a more classic texture that highlighted the edges of that signature soft-serve “swirl.” I garnished my bowl with some unreasonably cute sprinkles from Williams Sonoma and felt very satisfied. I know the sprinkles are aesthetically doing some heavy lifting here, but honestly, this tasted amazing. Does the Swirl really make instant soft-serve? This machine does produce ice cream that looks and tastes like soft-serve (not “instantly” if you consider that you have to pre-freeze the base), but it is not exactly true soft-serve by technical definition. “Real” soft-serve machines can hold ice cream at a very-low-but-not-quite-frozen temperature and will continuously churn it and introduce additional air each time a portion is dispensed. It’s not super realistic for a home-use countertop appliance to be able to perform that complicated process, a problem that virtually every home “soft-serve” machine attempts to deal with differently, and alternative machines like the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream & Slushy Maker and the TooA Gelato Maker deal with it less successfully than Ninja. My understanding is that the Creamizer paddle does whip additional air content into the ice cream when it’s on the soft-serve setting, and then it’s pressure-extruded in the format of soft-serve with the “piped” look. Looks and tastes like soft serve to me.... I’m not saying you should care about whether it’s “real” soft-serve, because I kind of don’t, and I’m not going to put a standalone, commercial-grade, several-thousand-dollar soft-serve machine in my home. So the Ninja Creami Swirl is superior in that respect: As far as home countertop machines go, it does outperform virtually every competitor within its price and size range. How’s cleaning it? Not too bad — I was able to disassemble and hand-wash all the parts in hot water in about five minutes. To my understanding, virtually every part that comes off of the machine is dishwasher-safe, so that’s also an option if you want to make sure every nook and cranny is 100-percent rinsed. What I want to do next Because the Swirl has so many settings, it will take time for me to try out all of its different dessert programs, and I will update this review as I go. I’ve heard great things about its frozen yogurt capabilities, so that’s on deck for my next test. I’m also keen on trying the frozen custard — that’s a brand-new setting, as I mentioned above — and, of course, making Dole Whip, one of my all-time favorite desserts (and lovely mixed with rum). Stay tuned, and I’ll be back soon with a full report on how it performs with those programs. The Ninja Swirl by CREAMi: Overall Pros and Cons Pros Makes fantastic scoopable ice cream Touch-button technology is seamless and easy Wealth of programs for making frozen dessert out of pretty much anything Great for people who want to make healthy desserts at home Far better results than comparable home soft-serve machines on the market No need to add ice or buy special mixes It’s fun Cons Price range is high Might be tricky to find space for in small kitchens Achieving optimal texture of soft-serve takes some trial and error Cleaning requires taking apart several things (although most are dishwasher-safe) Noisy Is it worth it? If you have the funds, the counter space, and a persistent desire to make soft-serve ice cream at home, the Swirl is likely your best option for a semi-affordable home machine. The soft-serve function is relatively easy to set up, and an enjoyable novelty that doesn’t take up too much extra time beyond the initial processing. Chocolate soft-serve made in the Swirl. That being said, if you’re more intrigued by the Creami’s main features — to turn a wide variety of bases, traditional and healthy, into customizable frozen desserts — and you don’t really need to experience your ice cream in soft-serve form, you’re probably better off going with a classic Creami (for $200) or a Creami Deluxe (for $250), which are at considerably lower price points and take up less kitchen space but can still do almost everything else the Swirl can. The Creami lives up to its name I forecast that I’ll mostly use my Creami to make scoopable protein ice cream (inside me there are two wolves: a gym rat and a level-10 sweet tooth), but I’m hoping to have more dinner parties this year and beyond, and I’m genuinely excited to have this machine on hand for a next-level dessert setup: laying out a topping bar and serving guests cool, creamy soft serve that they can top with expensive Williams Sonoma sprinkles, cookie dough, mochi, salted caramel, and chocolate shavings. Chic, right? The Ninja Swirl by CREAMi is available at Amazon, Walmart, and Ninja.
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Kriston Jae Bethel/Bloomberg via Getty Images The COVID pandemic accelerated a labor shortage in the industry. Now, restaurant owners and chefs across the country say they’re still struggling to recruit and retain talent. In the spring of 2021, restaurants across the country were scrambling to find staff. After a calamitous year of intermittent closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many local governments were beginning to loosen indoor dining restrictions. As vaccine distribution widened, operators couldn’t keep pace with pent-up demand. Restaurant workers who’d been laid off during the height of the pandemic were reluctant to reunite with their former employers, many choosing to run out the clock on their unemployment benefits rather than return to work and risk getting sick. Many found other jobs — and stuck with them permanently; others retreated to their hometowns or migrated to new cities. Workers consistently noted how the forced time off made them realize the extent to which their labor was often undervalued in the industry, and chose to walk away. There were already labor shortages before the pandemic, but industry leaders were taken aback by the unprecedented shortfall. “Hiring is a nightmare,” Caroline Styne, co-founder of Lucques Group in Los Angeles, told AP in June 2021. “I’ve never been in a situation like this.” A New York Times article that year reported that some restaurants were shutting down for months at a time because they were having so much difficulty finding workers. “People aren’t even showing up for interviews these days,” Erick Williams, chef-owner of Chicago’s Virtue, said when asked about the staffing crisis. For many restaurateurs, the pandemic disrupted the normal inflows of talent to the industry. Now five years removed from the onset of the pandemic, the labor market in restaurants is still suffering lingering effects. A report published in February by the James Beard Foundation found that a majority of independent restaurant owners cited difficulty hiring and retaining high-quality staff as among their primary concerns. Those surveyed also expected staffing shortages to be “one of the top three trends affecting restaurant operations in 2025.” For many restaurateurs, the pandemic disrupted the normal inflows of talent to the industry. “At any given time before COVID, a third of the people were always on their way out — whether because they’re graduating school or are exhausted by the industry and wanted to change careers — but we always had people coming in,” says Ellen Yin, owner of the Philadelphia-based High Street Hospitality Group. “COVID not only resulted in a large exodus, but also a huge shrinkage in the number of people coming into the industry.” For aspiring young cooks, the cachet of working with a big-name chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant is no longer a sufficient draw into specific kitchens nor into the industry as a whole. “Using clout as payment for candidates is not sustainable anymore, and I think that the pandemic really exposed this tactic,” says Brooke Burton, a senior recruiting partner for the Madison Collective, a staffing agency that works with many fine dining clients. “It’s a crutch that award-winning chefs and restaurateurs now can’t use in hiring because candidates know they can do better.” Disruptions have extended beyond entry-level kitchen positions. The loss of so many career professionals with specific knowledge, like sommeliers and service directors, has left the industry starved for talent. “The qualified layer of restaurant workers with experience found other work, whether it’s in the industry, adjacent to the industry, or outside of the industry,” says Alice Cheng, the founder of Culinary Agents, a firm that specializes in job marketing and recruiting for restaurants nationwide. “The industry lost a lot of experience in five years.” For millions of spurned restaurant workers, the pandemic-induced hiatus was an introspective moment — a rare break from the daily grind that allowed many to reconsider the long-term viability of restaurant work. Carrie Strong walked away from a 20-year career as a sommelier in high-end restaurants in New York City, like Lever House and Aureole, choosing instead to pursue remote work as a consultant, wine educator, and brand ambassador. The pandemic hastened a long overdue epiphany — that her restaurant career was no longer tenable. “I can’t be on the floor full-time anymore,” says Strong. “My body can’t handle it. My ankles swell up. I have bad knees from all those years in restaurants.” Replacing tenured workers has proven to be difficult, particularly in critical back-of-house positions where there’s now a short supply of technical expertise. The pandemic hastened a long overdue epiphany — that her restaurant career was no longer tenable. “It’s still hard to find advanced cooks — specifically pasta cooks and butchers — people who can break down whole animals and cook proteins,” says Reneé Touponce, the executive chef and a partner in Port of Call and Oyster Club in Mystic, Connecticut. “You have your cooks that are very new and fresh or the ones who are in sous chef or CDC (chef de cuisine) positions that are looking for salaried jobs with benefits. But the in-between [roles] are the ones I’m finding most difficult to fill.” The widening qualification gap has presented new challenges that have made it difficult for chefs to keep their kitchens fully staffed. When new hires are inexperienced, it raises the expectations for other employees; Touponce says that her sous chefs have had to take on more responsibility behind the line, working shifts and handling more day-to-day cooking. The absence of tenured employees has also disrupted the way knowledge is traditionally disseminated from veteran leaders to new hires. This has impacted the industry’s more specialized sectors, like craft cocktail bars, even more acutely. “There was a huge exodus of mentors during the pandemic,” says Andre Sykes, the beverage director at Detroit City Distillery. “Those people were supposed to train the current generation of bartenders, which left a huge void of knowledge.” Looking forward after five tumultuous years, restaurants that survived the pandemic now face new challenges, including the reality of needing to offer higher wages and more benefits in order to attract workers from outside the industry. “We had something like 40 percent inflation of labor costs in Charleston on the kitchen side from March 2020 to March 2023,” says Michael Shemtov, whose company Honest to Goodness Hospitality has seven restaurants in Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville, including Butcher & Bee. But paying more doesn’t necessarily guarantee attracting more qualified applicants. “We’ve noticed new hires inflating their qualifications and demanding a higher starting wage,” says Grace Glennon, who along with her husband Kyle Spor owns Afternoon, Crybaby’s, and Baby J’s in Gainesville, Florida. “Then when they get into the actual job, many of them clearly don’t have the requisite skills. I never saw that happen before COVID.” “Our company has a much more extensive benefits structure now.” Yin says that restaurateurs are now incentivized to find other ways to attract talent. “Our company has a much more extensive benefits structure now,” she says. “We used to have only one health plan before COVID, now we offer three different tiers with dental and 401(k).” Shemtov’s restaurants began adding a “healthy hospitality” surcharge to every bill (currently 2.2 percent), which allows his company to pay 70 percent of every employee’s health plan (versus just 50 percent before the pandemic). His employees are also now auto-enrolled in a retirement savings plan and offered a maternity/paternity savings match. “My thesis is that if I can get them to save $4,000-5,000 in a retirement account, then they’re really going to think hard about leaving me for another job,” he says. But attracting talent can still be challenging in secondary and tertiary markets where offering comprehensive benefits packages may be too costly for many operators. Out of necessity, some have started to look beyond the traditional applicant pool to acquire capable help. “Because we can’t find a lot of cooks, we focus on bringing in interns from culinary school,” says Touponce. “It’s helpful for us because we’re busier in the summer months, which is when a lot of culinary students are available for internships. Prior to COVID, we didn’t really need interns.” Since many new hires arrive with a lower baseline of experience, restaurateurs have had to invest in developing more comprehensive training. “We’re taking it as a given that most new hires probably won’t have the skillset we need from the beginning,” says Shemtov. “Before the pandemic, they used to spend a few days or a week shadowing someone before they go live, now they go through a three-week training process.” The new normal can be frustrating, but Shemtov feels like the changes his company has implemented over the past five years will make it more resilient going forward. “People talk about wanting to get back to pre-COVID times, but I would say that if we could rewind, we would have the same issues,” he adds. “The good old days were never that good — we’re not going back there.” Touponce also sees the aftermath of the pandemic as an opportunity for the industry to learn from its mistakes and rehabilitate its broken work culture. “I think a lot of good things came out of the pandemic,” she says. “Cooks are being treated better and paid better, we’re being more mindful and supportive, and everyone has a clearer understanding about the relationship we have with our community. I think COVID really made us all more aware of what’s important.”
David Scott Holloway After years of assisting Mario Batali and then Anthony Bourdain, Woolever has written a memoir that’s tricky to classify and even harder to put down Laurie Woolever’s memoir Care and Feeding is many things: a workplace memoir, an addiction memoir, a chronicle of being young and a little bit lost in New York City, an account of working in close proximity to fame. Woolever is a longtime journalist and cookbook author who also worked as an assistant to Mario Batali and then Anthony Bourdain. While those two men are part of Woolever’s story, her book is, above all, a very funny and self-aware odyssey through the highs and lows of trying to find one’s place in a frequently mystifying, occasionally hostile world. Prior to writing Care and Feeding, Woolever authored Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography and co-wrote World Travel: An Irreverent Guide and Appetites: A Cookbook with Bourdain. We spoke with her about the process of turning memories into a book, working in the shadows of important men, and why this is not a culinary memoir. [This story mentions incidents of sexual harassment.] ecco How did you decide that you wanted to write a memoir? As I write about in the book, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So in some ways, this is a project that I’ve kind of been writing in my head for a long time. I’m not sure that I always thought it would be a memoir, but I knew that I wanted to write about my experiences in New York, in kitchens, with high-profile people, traveling, all of the experiences that I’ve had since I graduated college. And there was always a good reason to not do it: the jobs that I had, or the other obligations on my time, or the people who I didn’t want to read it, like my mother, who’s no longer around — I’m not sure if I would have done it if she were still around. But I sort of cleared the decks at the end of 2021 with the oral biography and World Travel. I felt like I’d got some momentum as an author and thought, why don’t I give it a try? I wasn’t sure if I should do a memoir or maybe some autofiction or just a straight novel or a series of essays. And then for various reasons, memoir seemed to be the one that made the most sense and fit with the material and the time period that I wanted to write about. I’ve always been writing down my own story, but it wasn’t like I was always thinking someday I’ll write a memoir, because it feels, honestly, a little obnoxious to live that way. I was going to ask you about that because a lot of people want to write a memoir, and there have been a lot of culinary memoirs as well. I don’t know if you think of this as a culinary memoir, but I was wondering what your perception of memoirs was before you began writing, and if there was anything you wanted to avoid. A good memoir is really compelling to me. Obviously there are some amazing culinary memoirs — Kitchen Confidential; and Blood Bones & Butter; and Black, White, and the Grey. I didn’t really want to write a culinary memoir; I wasn’t looking to do Garlic and Sapphires for my generation. Obviously food has been a big part of my career and my life. For me to have turned my back and say, “I’m not going to write about food at all,” would be sort of foolish from a marketing and business perspective, but also not true to my history. But that being said, I didn’t want to just pack it full of, I ate this and I ate that and I cooked this. I think sometimes there are ways that you can kind of overdo it and really torture a metaphor and try too hard to stitch together qualities of food or cooking and whatever’s going on in the narrative. And I wanted to avoid that. So there’s as much food in it as made sense for my story and as my editor requested. But I’m not M.F.K. Fisher. You write quite a bit about drinking and addiction; I don’t know if it was your intent or not, but as a reader I really got a sense of how exhausting it was to go through. Obviously you’ve been sober for several years, but what was it like to put yourself back there, where you were reliving it to a certain extent? It was strange and nice to be at a remove from it. It’s not something that I had a perspective on when I was in it. So, it was a little sad to go back and realize how much I was on a path of self-destruction. I was very much in denial about my behavior and where it was leading me. So, it was painful in some ways, just to look at all of the time I wasted and the damage that I did to myself and the people around me. But also, it was kind of reassuring; it reinforced for me that the choice that I made to stop drinking was the right choice. So it also feels like, wow, I can see now with some perspective that I’ve actually grown up and gotten healthier and all of the things you hope happen once you give up bad habits. Did writing Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography help you prepare for the process of writing about yourself? Yeah, for sure. I really developed my skills as an interviewer, as a listener. I think before I started the oral biography project I really believed that I knew everything about Tony, which was silly in retrospect. But I was just coming out of the fog of grief and coming out of this job working so closely with him. So I just was like, I know everything that’s going on, and of course that’s not true. And in doing all of those interviews, I learned something new from every single person that I talked to, which made me realize you can never fully know a person, probably yourself included. So then it was also like, I may not remember something correctly, somebody else might not remember something correctly. That sort of let me approach this project with a little more willingness to be wrong, or be proved wrong, or discover new things. So, it was definitely a useful exercise to have done the biography before the memoir. One thing I appreciated in your book was how vivid and complicated and ultimately quite damning a picture you paint of Mario [Batali]. What was it like to put yourself back there with him? I’m curious if it made you look differently at how you remembered your experience of him and his behavior. I want to be thoughtful and careful when I answer this. I mean, you’re at Eater, and Eater was one of the publications that did a story about Mario in 2017 that kind of changed everything. As I write in the book, I was talking to reporters for those stories, which was a very terrifying thing that I had a lot of mixed feelings about. I started writing the book in earnest in 2022, so I had already kind of gone back into that vault not too long ago and really tried to examine what it was like and what my part in it was, and what impact it had on me, if any. I had already given a lot of thought to what my working conditions were like, and how significant it was that I got my ass grabbed at work, and that I was made to sort of straddle him on an airplane. So, I already felt pretty resolved about my feelings. But then to go back and really write about it and, as one has to do in a memoir, to center myself in it, I uncovered maybe some deeper feelings or just greater understanding of all the forces at play. What I ultimately came to was that — and I’m not breaking news here by any means — there was an enormous power imbalance and that’s always what it is in these scenarios of workplace sexual harassment. I think I didn’t truly internalize and understand that until I started writing about it in this way. [When Mario was] outed as somebody who sexually harassed people, there was a lot of extremely black and white, you’re-with-us-or-against-us kind of discourse. Which is understandable; I think there was a lot of rage and a lot of disappointment. Again, I’m not breaking news here, but some of this stuff isn’t so black and white. And especially if you’ve benefited and chosen to work with people who are ultimately shown to be not great people, it can just feel complicated. I guess I would imagine it’s akin to having a family member who you find out is doing bad stuff — it’s complicated. So, I wanted to be careful to give some of that a little bit of oxygen without excusing any of Mario’s behavior or in any way discounting the experiences of people who were hurt by him. [I wanted] just to say, here’s why it’s complicated, and here’s a theory or a little bit of context to understand why people might not have complained or spoken up loudly enough or protected themselves or each other in that time period. Some of this came out in 2017, but it felt very precarious to say anything except, “This man is the devil and must disappear off the face of the earth.” I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s a contingent of people that are going to be like, “Who the fuck is she and why should I give a shit about her?” So I wanted to be honest that there were times when I had a lot of fun working for Mario and there were a lot of career benefits to me. He introduced me to Tony Bourdain. He gave me my first opportunity to work on a cookbook. Again, that doesn’t make it okay for him to hurt people, but this is why it felt complicated for me. Relatedly, one thing you write about is working a lot, as you say, in the shadow of important men. You spent a long part of your career working for Batali and then Bourdain and you’re very honest in the book about how you wouldn’t have had certain opportunities without them. But this memoir is entirely your own, so, I wonder what it was like to put yourself in the spotlight? I only now feel like I have a spotlight on me because [writing] is a largely solitary process. I mean, yeah, it’s a little scary. I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s a contingent of people that are going to be like, “Who the fuck is she and why should I give a shit about her? She was just the assistant.” And that’s kind of okay, I don’t intend to engage with that. Yeah, I’m not a celebrity. I don’t have a television show and I’m not a superstar. So, there’s that fear of being sort of questioned like, “Who do you think you are to write a memoir?” But I think that in my story there’s enough to grab on to that I think people can relate to, whether it’s addiction, sexual politics at work, being ambivalent about marriage or motherhood, or body anxiety stuff. I think I’ve had pretty common American-white-middle-class-lady experiences that are relatable to all kinds of people. So, yeah, it feels like I’m taking a risk, and there are things in the book, behaviors and decisions that I made, that I’m not proud of. There’s some concern that I’m going to be judged, but then it’s like, I’m 50 years old and my mom’s not around to judge me anymore. And, I’m going to probably curate the extent to parts of the book my dad reads. So, if not now, when? Bourdain is obviously a big part of the book, and I feel like so many people think they own him. So many people who never knew him, I should say. But they are very attached to their memories of him, and so when it came to writing about him, how did you want to approach that? I mean, I would push back on the idea that he’s a big part of the book. I know that is the angle [of the book] that gets the most attention — the tagline says, “New York Times bestselling author of Bourdain,” and that was a deliberate choice by the marketing people to put his name on the cover. Obviously there’s a lot of interest there, but I really tried to be careful. I didn’t want to write a book about Tony. I’ve already done that. But it would be really ridiculous for me to write a workplace memoir and not talk about him. I think I did the best I could to be honest and also to make it clear that we had a great working relationship. I loved him and respected him. He was a very, very private person and there were long periods of time where I wouldn’t see him in person. I’m sure that nobody thinks about this stuff even a fraction as much as I do, but sometimes — especially shortly after his death, but even now — people will say in an interview, “You were closer to him than anyone.” Just because I was his assistant. I mean, I knew where he was all the time and what was going on in his business life, but there were things I didn’t know about. So, I wanted to be really, really honest about the ways in which he was supportive to me, the ways in which it was so great to work for him, the things that I learned from him, the examples that he set, and my own feelings of sort of wanting to be like him in some ways. I didn’t want to break any news about him. There’s a lot of his story that has come out since he died, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. Of course, I included the text message that we had shortly before he died. It’s pretty short and really didn’t say much, but that’s gotten a lot of [press] attention because I think it just speaks to the love that people have for him, and the hold he has on people’s imaginations. It’s almost seven years that he’s been gone, and there’s just such a hunger. I think when you leave the world the way he did, there’s so many unanswered questions, and so any little piece of information that people can find to try and make sense of the decision that he made to end his life, I totally understand that. But my goal was definitely not to blow open the mystery of Tony Bourdain. Something you mention in the book is that when Anthony was encouraging you to come forward about Mario, it briefly crossed your mind “that he was using the Mario situation, and me, to perform his allyship and secure a place in Asia’s [Argento, Bourdain’s then-girlfriend] increasingly fickle heart.” Was it hard to be honest about that kind of stuff? My observation is that he rejected this sort of canonization of him as a person. I think it was embarrassing to him. Yes and no. I mean, it’s the truth. It’s a thought that I had. I guess the question is, do you feel like you need to be loyal and protect the deified version — I guess that’s part of the needle that I’m threading. I love that people care so much about him and still watch the shows and talk about him, and all the evident love for him in the world is really comforting and wonderful and I hope that continues forever. I do not wish in any way to erode that. But at what point do you get to be honest about your own experience? I think that he was a human being, like we all are. He was very quick to say, “I’m not perfect. I don’t know everything. I make mistakes.” My observation is that he rejected this sort of canonization of him as a person. I think it was embarrassing to him. So, I think I was gentle but honest. My overwhelming sense, or my experience with him, was quite positive. But this was a sensitive time around the #MeToo stuff, and if I wasn’t working for Tony, I’m quite sure I never would have spoken to anyone because that felt complicated. One other thing that really came through to me in your book is just how surreal working around fame and power can be. I was struck by the scene where you’re having an abortion and the doctor wants to talk to you about Anthony; I almost screamed reading it. I’m curious what your perception of fame was before you started working for famous people, and how that changed for you? I’m 50, so I was a kid in the ’80s. The song and the show Fame sort of loomed large in the culture. I was kind of a show-offy little kid and wanted to be famous, for the sake of fame. And maybe that’s a very common thing. At some point I kind of came to my senses, but I was from a young age kind of captivated by the idea of fame, and maybe that sort of subsided a bit when I got to be, like, a teenage hippie. Then once I got to New York, it was like, “Here’s a place where there’s all kinds of wealth and fame and power and opportunity and if I can get up close to it, that’s pretty interesting to me.” Famous people are in some ways just like us. And then in some ways they’re probably not. I think there is kind of a ruthlessness that you have to have to get up to a certain level in any field where there’s a measure of fame. I’m not sure that that’s something I knew at the time. I mean, that’s something that I feel like I’ve heard more recently and it makes sense to me now. Anyone who’s so good at what they do has had to be a little bit of a sociopathic monster, and disregard the needs and feelings of others in order to get to the top. So, yeah, I guess I would say I’m a little disillusioned by fame because I see that it’s temporary. I mean, how many people have really sustained a level of fame for a very long time versus how many have had flashes of it and then tried to chase that high for the rest of their lives? I do not desire to be famous. I do desire for my book to do incredibly well. I do desire to feel financially secure in the way that fame sometimes lends itself to, but I saw with Tony that privacy became a very rare commodity for him and that seemed terrible to me. I really value just being an anonymous person in the world and I think that’s something that I would hate to give up. I don’t think I’m in any danger of it, but yeah, from what I’ve seen and the sort of relative levels of happiness of the people that I’ve known who are famous, I think it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Elena Veselova/Shutterstock My five-day journey of brining and braising the St. Patrick’s Day staple yielded delicious results I don’t know why I find making corned beef from scratch so intimidating. Perhaps it’s the fact that the project requires almost a week — which means a lot of time for things to go wrong. Maybe it’s because it involves raw meat sitting around for an extended period of time. Or put both together, and I’m worried this giant hunk of raw beef won’t cure properly (even though it ultimately needs to be cooked anyway). All my anxieties were put to rest after I actually corned my own beef, which proved to be easy, delicious, and more impressive than anything that comes from a can. To tackle this cooking project with confidence, I enlisted the help of Stephen Rodriguez, the executive chef of Tam O’Shanter in Los Angeles. On St. Patrick’s Day alone, Tam O’Shanter serves more than 600 pounds of corned beef. “[Making] corned beef is fun,” Rodriguez says. “There’s a lost art to some of the stuff we do in the cook, like pickling and brining, which is unfortunate, because it’s really easy.” To start, I needed to make a brine. For Rodriguez, the brine represents a choose-your-own-adventure moment — just don’t forget the pink salt, or curing salt. “The curing salt really drives in that [pink] color,” Rodriguez says. “From there, you can do sugar, garlic cloves, peppercorns, and whatever pickling spice.” I looked at a few different recipes online for inspiration and winged my brine, adding mustard seed, black peppercorn, bay leaves, garlic, sugar, fennel seeds, and of course, the pink curing salt. Each recipe had a different ratio for how much water to pickling spices was needed; I ensured I made enough to fit the Ziploc bag the beef was going to corn in, which was roughly two cups of boiled brine mixture added to six cups of ice water, eight cups total. I felt like a witch brewing a potion as the mixture came up to a boil. The steam from the cure smelled peppery and sweet; I just hoped it’d be enough to penetrate my two-and-a-half pound brisket. I opted for a flat cut of brisket: It’s leaner with a more compact shape, making it easier to slice once finished. But whole briskets or point cuts can be used as well if you prefer your corned beef shredded — and if you have the space to accommodate all that meat. Lack of fridge space is often the biggest challenge for those corning beef at home. (At Tam’s, Rodriguez has a dedicated shelf in the restaurant’s walk-in for the task.) My fridge isn’t particularly big, either, but because I recently cleared it out following the fires in Los Angeles, I had enough room for this endeavor. If you have a particularly large brisket slab, Rodriguez suggests breaking it down into smaller pieces to save room. “You can also vacuum pack it and it will take less space,” he advises. The brine finished steeping after 10 minutes at a boil. I combined the hot mixture with ice water to bring it down in temperature and also ensure the salty pickling liquid wasn’t too concentrated. I placed my brisket into a Ziploc bag and poured the liquid in. If you’re scared of leakage, place the Ziploc in a cake pan or brine your meat in a container with a lid: If you go with the latter option, ensure you completely submerge the brisket in the brine. After setting the meat-and-brine bag in the fridge, the hard part is over. “Corned beef is really a set-it-and-forget-it project,” Rodriguez says. And forget it I did — aside from turning the bag over every other day to ensure it was curing evenly. Rodriguez suggests curing for five to seven days. I’m impatient, so I pulled the beef out on the fifth day. I expected it to be pinker; it was a little grey and the meat felt tight, like it had shrunk in on itself. I rinsed the brine from the brisket with cold water and placed it in a Dutch oven with 10 cups of water and fresh peppercorns, bay leaves, and a sprinkling of allspice. From there, I turned the heat up on the stovetop to boil, skimming off any scummy, foamy bits. After 10 minutes, I put the entire Dutch oven in a 300 degree oven, where it was time for the second setting and forgetting. Thanks to the allspice, my house honestly smelled like a cozy pie shop as the corned beef cooked. Three-and-a-half hours later, it was ready. Kat Thompson The first thing I noticed was that the beef was pink! A welcome contrast to the raw beef’s unsettling grey shade, this was a good reminder to trust the process. As I tried to fish the meat slab out of the cooking juices, I also could see how tender the brisket had become. It shredded as I grasped it with a pair of tongs. I set it on a cutting board and cut myself a slice; the meat fell apart so beautifully that a chef’s knife was only really necessary to get through the fat cap. It was everything you want corned beef to be: juicy, tender, and undoubtedly salty. To serve, Rodriguez encourages going the traditional route by pairing corned beef with braised cabbage. “At the restaurant, we cook the cabbage in the brining liquid,” he explains. I’d already made a pickled cabbage slaw days prior; the acid in that cut through the fatty beef nicely. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a true corned beef plate without potatoes, which also function as a reprieve from the overwhelming salt. When I do this again — this cooking project feels worth it, given that it’s surprisingly simple and hands off — I think I’ll trim off more fat from the brisket and use slightly less salt, as my corned beef tasted pretty salty. But I’m sold on the idea that everyone should try corning beef at home. Rodriguez agrees. “Once you make something like this from scratch, you have an appreciation for the artisan [nature] of it,” he says. “It takes you back to the origins of how and why we cook.”
Seafood season offerings from Wendy’s McDonald’s and Popeyes. Why fast-food restaurants observe seafood season — and not other religious holidays According to Wendy’s, it’s “seafood season.” That means the chain’s limited-time-only Crispy Panko Fish Sandwich is widely available from now until April 20. Wendy’s can hedge, but you might have figured out that since its final day on the menu is Easter Sunday, this is a sandwich designed to cater to those celebrating Lent, a Christian observance — mostly but not exclusively practiced by Catholics — in which many practitioners abstain from meat (which in Catholicism includes mammals and poultry, though not fish), among other things. Ever since Lou Groen created the Filet-O-Fish in 1962 to ensure the heavily Catholic clientele at his Cincinnati McDonald’s had something to eat during Lent, many beef-centric fast-food restaurants have offered some sort of limited edition seafood option to cater to Americans who observe. This year, Del Taco is offering three seafood specials through April 23, which Del Taco president Tom Rose calls “the perfect combo for Lent season.” Arby’s has a “limited time” menu of crispy fish sandwiches. And though Popeye’s serves seafood year round, it’s offering a shrimp tacklebox and a fried flounder sandwich for Lent. While fast-food restaurants may offer spider-shaped doughnuts for Halloween or pink drinks for Valentine’s Day, Lent specials stand apart in that they revolve around the traditional dietary restrictions of the observance. Many practitioners either eat fish on Fridays during Lent, or replace meat with fish for the entire time. Lent does not involve an outright fast, nor is it a one-day-only observance, which allows restaurants to design a specific menu around the food observers eat throughout the weeks-long period. It’s difficult to estimate just how many Americans observe Lent. A 2021 YouGov survey reported 16 percent, but it could be closer to a quarter. A recent Gallup poll says that while church attendance and membership is declining, 68 percent of Americans identify as Christians. Only 22 percent are Catholic, which is the same number of Americans who say they don’t identify with a religion at all. About 7 percent of Americans identify as all other religions, including Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist. And a 2015 poll says that of practicing Catholics, only 47 percent gave up something for Lent. But culturally — even the Mardi Gras excess of Fat Tuesday is traditionally a last hurrah for the upcoming season of moderation — the spectre of Lent seems to extend beyond the devout practitioners. According to Chowhound, of the 300 million Filet-O-Fish sandwiches McDonald’s sells every year, about 75 million are sold during the 40 days of Lent. It’s enough for fast-food restaurants to take notice. “We started serving seafood to expand our menu offerings beyond chicken, cater to regional tastes, and appeal to guests looking for alternative protein options, especially during Lent, when many people avoid eating meat,” Popeyes told Eater. Shrimp and catfish were also “a natural fit, aligning with our brand’s Southern-inspired flavors and heritage.” Of course, not everyone observes Lent by eating fast-food flounder, or by giving up meat, either on Fridays or altogether. The Washington Post reported in 2020 that many millennials are giving up things like social media or alcohol, starting a workout challenge, or trying to cultivate more socially-conscious habits. “There is a tendency to think about Lent in terms of ‘giving up’ things, and at its worst this can just be a religious gloss on American diet culture,” says Mark Popham, who grew up eating fried fish during Lent at Moby Dick. Now, he attends Episcopalian church, and continues to observe Lent by doing things like carrying Narcan or cash to give out to those who might need it. However, he does still eat fast-food fried fish when it’s on offer, which he says feels like part of the overall goal of reconsidering the choices one makes in everyday life. “It doesn’t change much to have a Filet-O-Fish instead of a Big Mac, but it reminds you of the other changes you could be making.” Though not every Christian or Catholic observes Lent, most polls don’t take into account those who were raised observing who may still culturally enjoy more springtime seafood offerings even if they’re not active members of the church, the same way it might feel nice to eat turkey around Thanksgiving even if you want no part in celebrating colonialism. Pat Murphy describes themself as a “very lapsed Catholic,” and lives in Wisconsin where fish fries are a year-round occurrence, though they certainly become more popular during Lent. “I have a definite affinity for fish on Fridays which is heightened by the fact that it’s no longer a weird-feeling moral obligation. It feels kind of nostalgic to get fish on Fridays. Like visiting home when you don’t have to live there anymore and haven’t for a long while.” You also don’t have to grow up with fried fish Fridays to enjoy the fast-food specials this time of year. Zach Knowlton grew up relatively secular in a heavily Catholic town, but began observing a version of Lent in his 20s. “It’s a cultural connection thing, doing it makes me feel a little closer to home, despite not growing up with the practice,” he says. But mostly, he just loves fast-food fish sandwiches, and looks forward to “seafood season” every year. “We as a society don’t get enough chances to consume tartar sauce! They have such a different texture from a burger or chicken sandwich,” he says. “Plus, aside from McDonald’s, they are an LTO [Limited Time Offer], and I am the world’s biggest sucker for a fast-food LTO.” Who isn’t? Americans love pumpkin spice latte season and when the McRib is back. Lent is now just another limited time. But if limited-time opportunities can be fueled by religious-fueled family memories, where are the Dunkin’ Rosh Hashanah menus full of honey and apples, or Starbucks’ Durga Puja drinks? Murphy says that during Lent, it “feels weird that no one meaningfully acknowledges that it’s a religious, or at least religion-adjacent thing.” And watching everyone pack into fast-food restaurants for fried fish just makes them realize how few other holidays or cultures are given the same treatment. “I feel excited about it every year, but also melancholy that we’re only shining a spotlight on this one corner of our rich tapestry of community,” they say. When you do see specials for other holidays, it’s usually from chains that are part of those communities. Moka & Co., a Yemeni coffee shop with locations in New York, Michigan, and Kentucky, keeps special hours for Ramadan, so customers can enjoy their drinks after fasting. Halal Guys also offers discounts during Ramadan for family meals. And this past winter, Krispy Kreme partnered with Lodge Bread to create sufganiyot for Hannukah, though only at Lodge locations in California. It’s not like one needs to derive validation of one’s identity from the business decisions of fast-food restaurants, who are more likely to serve pink and green snacks in honor of Wicked than anything else. But it would be nice if a wider variety of cultures were celebrated. However, Wendy’s insistence on calling it “seafood season” over Lent may be a sign that things may, too slowly, be changing. “Seafood season” is something everyone can participate in, not just Christians. “I think after 1700 years of cultural hegemony Christians could do with taking the back seat for a few millennia,” says Popham. Still, Dunkin’ is missing a real opportunity to run some Eid specials.
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Eater Staff / Our Place The Instagrammable cookware brand’s latest tagine is its most interesting release in years, and it benefits the Middle East Children’s Alliance in Gaza When Our Place debuted the Always Pan in 2019, it not only sparked a wave of interest in Instagrammable- cookware brands, but kicked off the increasing speed at which its contemporaries — think Great Jones and Caraway — began whipping up product launches. But now that the aesthetic home goods space is more crowded, to stand out in 2025, brands have to think beyond just cool color choices, and have something to say that feels personal, or purpose-driven — which is exactly why Our Place’s latest cookware launch piqued my interest. Meet Our Place’s newest tagine, which was made in collaboration with Tangier-based Palestinian artist Nina Mohammad: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Our Place (@ourplace) Tagines are traditional Moroccan cookware (named after the hearty dish — a flavorful stew — created within them), and were introduced to Our Place’s product lineup in 2022 under its banner of “Traditionware.” The latest Olive & Clay edition, however, is part of a limited-edition drop that was also designed to provide emergency assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. Explaining the late-February launch, the brand says that the “piece pays tribute to centuries-old Moroccan cooking traditions while celebrating Palestinian heritage — just in time for Eid,” and 100 percent of the profits will go to the Middle East Children’s Alliance to deliver aid in Gaza. Designer Nina Mohammed is the creative director of the Moroccan-based textile sourcing studio Artisan Project, and she chose the olive leaf motif to pay homage to her grandmother, Fatima, “who planted thousands of olive trees in Palestine as a symbol of resilience and peace,” while the clay composition is a nod to the slow cooker’s traditional material construction. The tagine is designed to work specifically with the brand’s popular Always Pan (smart), although you could pair it with any comparable oven-proof cookware that accommodates its 10.9-inch diameter. Our Place’s tagine also requires no pre-seasoning, making it a solid piece for tagine beginners. (Check out Eater’s guide to buying a tagine here.) View this post on Instagram A post shared by Our Place (@ourplace) This is not the first time Our Place has created culturally specific cookware (see: this Persian-inspired flipping platter), nor the first time that it has provided aid to the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which received 20 percent of the profits from its 2024 crescent-embellished Always Pan. While the Always Pan remains the brand’s marquee product, the brand has also come out with a formidable parade of aesthetic cookware and appliances, including a sexy new Always Pan (it’s titanium), and a slow cooker and toaster oven that deserve to be anthropomorphized in a Pixar movie. I would love to see even more of the brand’s heritage-driven pieces in the future, and it is refreshing to see the company amp up its commitment to building a product range that directly speaks to, and benefits, the communities from whence they came. Our Place’s co-founder Shiza Shahid spoke to Eater about that decision last spring, telling Bettina Makalintal, “You have to be specific, because if you’re trying to speak to everyone, then no one will feel like it’s for them. But if you are specific, then other people will see their own cultures in it.” That’s an ethos that sticks out a whole lot more than anything on my Explore page. The Tagine is available at Our Place.
Matthew Kang Fly By Jing chile crisp is manufactured in Chengdu. Trump’s tariffs on China means everything is in flux. Fly By Jing is one of the reasons everyone you know loves chile crisp. The punchy, direct-to-consumer brand was founded in 2018 by Jing Gao, promising to bring a “not traditional, but personal” taste of her hometown of Chengdu to American audiences, with products like Sichuan chile crisp, zhong sauce, and hot pot base. “We want to take Chinese food out of the so-called ethnic aisle and make it part of everyday cooking everywhere,” Gao told Eater in 2022. “Our continually expanding line of sauces, spices, oils, and dumplings is doing just that.” Now, Fly By Jing products can be found everywhere from your local shoppy shop to Walmart. Fly By Jing is proudly produced in Chengdu, China. Which is starting to become a problem. On March 4, President Trump announced a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods from China and Hong Kong, which came “on top of a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods put into effect just one month ago and a variety of older levies, including those that remain from the China trade war in Mr. Trump’s first term,” according to the New York Times. The tariff went up yet another 10 percent on March 8. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average household will pay $1,600 to 2,000 this year on imported goods because the tariffs on imports from China, as well as Canada and Mexico, and food prices overall will go up 1.7 percent. Already, the tariffs are affecting businesses that import Chinese goods, often for Chinese-American customers who can’t find those products or ingredients elsewhere. Fly By Jing achieved its goal of bringing chile crisp out of the “ethnic aisle” and ultimately into Walmart. We spoke to the company’s COO and CFO Matt Dunaj about how it plans to keep Fly By Jing on the shelves in the face of volatile tariffs. Eater: Are these tariffs affecting your business? Matt Dunaj: It’s affecting us in a major way. I’d say up front, we’re expecting more challenges with the costs of our product and how we’re planning for the year. It changes the way that we budget and forecast. It changes the way we think about our ability to do new things. But most of all, the impact is uncertainty. Right now we can’t even know our budget for the year, because we don’t know what the tariffs are going to look like. So it’s extremely hard to make long term plans as things continue to change without any real notice or reason. It seems impossible to keep track of. Right now it seems tariffs were 10 percent on goods from China and Hong Kong, and then on March 8 that was raised to 20 percent. And that’s on top of tariffs that Trump implemented during his first term, that the Biden administration kept. So effectively, our tariffs have doubled in the last month through these new increases. We don’t know how long it’ll last. It seems like nobody knows. But we’re starting to think, which trade shows are we going to attend? What marketing events will we do? What does our team structure look like? We kind of have to wait and see. “We’re sourcing authentic ingredients in Jing’s hometown in Sichuan, China. There is no replacement for these flavors.” At this point, is it changing how much you might produce or how much you might be charging for your products? A price increase would be a last resort. In fact, last year, we were super proud to announce a price decrease, which is quite unprecedented. It takes a long time to change the price of a retail product for a grocery store; it can take up to 90 days from when you change the price to when it’s executed on the shelf. And in that time, the tariffs could change. It’s very difficult to decrease prices. It took the entire team a lot of effort last year to effectively decrease our prices in a way where the savings would pass on to the consumer and not just be gobbled up along the supply chain. So if we were to say, costs are higher, let’s increase our prices to cover it, we may find ourselves in a position where those prices remain elevated and we’re not able to bring them back down. You mentioned the tariffs could stifle your ability to do new things. Can you talk a bit more about how this affects your creativity? We can’t manufacture our product in America without basically bringing all the component ingredients to America in their individual forms, which would be completely cost inefficient. We’re sourcing authentic ingredients in Jing’s hometown in Sichuan, China. There is no replacement for these flavors, and that’s really the nature of our business — our mission is to spread these flavors authentically to people. The tariffs put things on hold and it creates some uncertainty. But it also means that we’re looking at ways that we can innovate to meet the consumer where we think they’ll be. People are very conscious of their grocery bills. We’re trying to innovate into categories that are lower price points for customers. So the newest product that we’re launching is noodles, at a lower entry price. You can buy a jar of our chile crisp for $9.98 at Walmart. The noodles will be a $3 to $4 item. It doesn’t stop what we’re doing. It just pushes us in a new direction. I was going to ask about manufacturing the product in Chengdu, because it’s something you speak of as a real, positive aspect of the product. Why is that still so important? The isolationist perspective of tariffs and the America-first perspective is antithetical to what we’re trying to accomplish, which is to bring people together: people all over the world, people of all countries, of all cultures, not just those who live in America. That doesn’t mean we’re going to change what we’re trying to do, we’re just going to get more creative. We’re going to have to adapt, and we’re going to have to be patient and see what happens. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s time to lose your preconceived notions about what breakfast can be. | Shutterstock Who needs eggs when you can have a bowl of brothy beans instead? In case you haven’t seen one of the 1,004,553 news stories about it, there’s an egg shortage right now caused by an ongoing outbreak of avian influenza. The topic has been so dominant in the news, in fact, that there are equally vast numbers of articles about ways to substitute eggs in your morning breakfast, including tons of vegan products that mimic both their ability to leaven baked goods and scramble up alongside peppers and onions in an omelet. But what if there’s another option: just not eating eggs in the morning at all? This is a question that I frequently face when it comes time to eat in the morning. Eggs and I have a love-hate relationship, meaning that I love eggs until I absolutely cannot stand the sight of them. As such, I spend a lot of time thinking about what the hell I’m going to have for breakfast, especially when my brain has arbitrarily decided that eggs are off the menu. Like most people, I limit my breakfast options to a pretty normal rotating cast of characters — cheesy toast, cottage cheese and fruit, the perfection that is a breakfast taco — but I’m coming to realize that it’s ridiculously limiting to insist that I eat “breakfast food” in the morning. There’s no law mandating that I have to have eggs, bacon, and toast, even if that is largely considered a standard American breakfast. In fact, I can eat whatever the hell I want, regardless of the time of day. I understand, logically, how these made-up rules come to be. It makes sense that many folks wouldn’t want strong flavors or sleep-inducing carbs first thing in the morning, but both of those things already exist in breakfast foods that are common around the world, like pho and congee. Even when eggs are involved in my breakfast, I’m regularly pouring salsa on top or wrapping them in a fluffy flour tortilla, so my insistence on sticking to traditional breakfast foods in the morning just doesn’t make any sense. (See: the aforementioned breakfast taco.) Perhaps this shortage will make me fully break free from the idea that I have to eat eggs in the morning. Maybe I’ll start tomorrow with a bowl of brothy beans laden with herbs and olive oil, or a bowl of teriyaki-marinated chicken and rice. Maybe I’ll take inspiration from the classic Japanese breakfast and pair a soy-glazed filet of salmon with a comforting bowl of miso soup. (I work from home, so there’s no one here to complain about the smell of fish cooking in the morning besides my dog, and I think that’s a development he’d appreciate.) All of these meals are just as satiating and nutritious as the classic combo of bacon, eggs, and toast, even if the flavor profiles are vastly different. I imagine I’m not the only person who ends up stuck in a breakfast rut, or spending entirely too much time thinking about how to not end up hangry while also avoiding eggs. I think the simplest solution to that problem is also the most obvious: just eat something else, even if it doesn’t seem like morning is the “right time” to consume that dish. There’s no food cop who shows up at your door if you eat a bowl of pizza beans or mac and cheese for breakfast, which means that all you have to lose is your own preconceived notions about what a morning meal should be.
Food scientist David Zilber guest stars on the premiere of Top Chef: Destination Canada. | David Moir/Bravo Or does the current political situation actually make it the perfect time to promote Canada? For its 22nd season, Top Chef has headed to Canada. This is the first time the show — not to be confused with Top Chef Canada, a separate competition that has been on-air since 2011 — has set a season in our northern neighbor. But the season, which premieres on Bravo today, arrives at the weirdest possible time in United States-Canada relations: Our typically amicable alliance has taken a nosedive in recent weeks after President Trump announced plans to levy tariffs of 25 percent on Canadian imports and made comments about Canada becoming a U.S. state. Trump’s plans have been a confusing whiplash of foreign policy, now having been delayed and then suspended. The damage has been done, however. Earlier this month, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, a major buyer of alcohol, pulled American-made spirits from shelves. Canadians, who are the largest group of international visitors to the U.S., have been ditching their travel plans. “Canadians feel disrespected, and that’s very challenging to them because we have always been such loyal, loyal partners,” Catherine Prather, president of the travel professionals group National Tour, told NPR. Some Canadians are boycotting U.S. products. The threat of retaliatory tariffs has followed. As of this writing, the official Top Chef Instagram has been business as usual. You wouldn’t guess from looking at it that we’re in an impending trade war with the country it’s promoting. Nor is there any mention of the current situation in early screeners of the premiere, which were circulated among media last month. David Moir/Bravo Paula Endara, Lana Lagomarsini, Vincenzo Loseto, Henry Lu compete in the new season of Top Chef Instead, in the Season 22 Top Chef premiere, famous Canadian culinary figures, including Noma’s former director of fermentation David Zilber, show off a Canadian bounty. For the first elimination challenge, the chefs must cook using pantries inspired by each of Canada’s five regions: Canada’s west coast offers Red Fife wheat and salmon; its prairie region produces canola oil and lentils (Canada is the world’s largest lentil producer); its central region grows peaches and corn; its Atlantic region provides cod and potatoes; and its north region yields oats and Arctic char. Even if the show doesn’t state it outright, it ends up a reminder of how important Canadian agriculture is, including to the U.S., with Canada our largest supplier of agricultural imports. In 2022, Canada supplied 20 percent of our fresh vegetable imports. In the context of the current political situation, the Top Chef premiere feels slightly ominous to watch: We know something that everyone here doesn’t, and it will continue to be that way for the rest of the season. But if anything, current affairs offer a new sense of intrigue to a season that would otherwise be more of the same (a lot more — as with last season, the episodes are still a “supersized” 75 minutes). How bad would things have to get for Bravo to acknowledge the situation? We’ll see! Top Chef is ultimately a promotional opportunity. Tourism boards lobby, often financially, for the show to feature their destination. For this season, Top Chef worked with Destination Canada, the Canadian tourism board. Accordingly, the season will traverse the country from Toronto, home of judge Gail Simmons; to Calgary; Montreal; Canmore, Alberta; and Prince Edward Island. And in this respect, the show is actually arriving at the perfect time: at a moment when, to many, Canada suddenly looks even more appealing than usual. The Top Chef premiere airs Thursday, March 13 at 10:15 p.m. ET / 7:15 p.m. PT.
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Eater Staff Plus, score an authentic key lime pie from Goldbelly’s 31.4% off Pi Day sale on… pies! Ah, March. So far, you have soft-launched spring with another hour of daylight, introduced some rather unnerving tariffs, and prompted us to ask, “in this economy, are hot dog towers the new seafood towers?” It’s not even St. Patrick’s Day yet, and Panera has launched what one can only call a bold bread bowl. But most importantly, spring sales have sprung — and we’re here to find the best deals for you, discount-hunting reader. In last week’s deals roundup, we plucked the best kitchen tools from Nordstrom’s big sales event, shopped for stackable dining chairs, and slashed 21 percent off a Ninja personal blender. This week, we’re tucking into The Container Store’s blowout sale on clever kitchen storage solutions, perusing the parade of pies that are 31.4 percent off during Goldbelly’s Pi Day celebration, and tracking down deals on the cult-fave Le Creuset braiser featured on Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show. Join us! Let’s get cooking. Goldbelly’s 31.4% off Pi Day sale on… pies! Goldbelly’s rich selection of at-home meal kits, baked goods, and more are sourced from across the country (and make for some excellent food gifts). The online food emporium will be slinging pies at a fitting 31.4 percent off in honor of, well, Ancient Greek math advancements. I’ll take it! A humble smorgasbord of pies The key (lime) to your heart The Container Store’s 25% off sale Deals on ceiling rack storage, spoonulas, and fruit baskets? I could hardly contain myself. Everyone’s favorite place to buy airtight plastic bins, aesthetic storage cubes, and other Marie Kondo-worthy storage solutions is having a 25% Off Weathertight Storage Event, which is a bland word salad for saying “our containers are on sale.” But while the name may be lackluster, the deals are not. Don’t sleep on the brand’s ongoing sale section, either, which is filled with savings of up to 70 percent off. Upgrade your Saran and foil wrap cabinet Lazy Susans for better cabinet storage You put chile pepper flakes on everything A chic pair of tongs is the perfect host gift This medieval revival glassware Save 20% on that Le Creuset braiser everyone loves from With Love, Meghan All eyes have been on the new Netflix show by Meghan Markle — or rather, Meghan Sussex — this week, and all of our wallets have been chasing the much-featured Le Creuset braiser from the show, which whips up one-pan pasta, bread, and more. Go for a white braiser like Meghan This Paris-inspired braiser is even bigger (and even more on-sale)
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A Wonder in New York City. | Robert Sietsema/Eater NY Wonder has acquired Tastemade and Grubhub in its goal of building the “super app for mealtime” Wonder, the company that describes itself as “a new kind of food hall,” continues its expansion across the food world: On March 12, Wonder announced its acquisition of the independent media company Tastemade, which owns and operates four lifestyle streaming channels and creates video content. It also boasted a subscription community of over 100,000 paying subscribers, as of December 2024. The move bolsters Wonder’s goal of building what it calls “the super app for mealtime.” According to the press release, the acquisition gives Wonder “access to Tastemade’s robust digital audience” which will “power its retail media business, and enhance its content marketing engine.” Basically, it’ll promote Wonder to even more eyes. This is only most recent acquisition in Wonder’s meteoric rise. In November 2024, Wonder acquired the established food ordering and delivery platform Grubhub. The acquisition made it possible for the company to offer Grubhub’s restaurant partners in its app alongside its existing offerings and made Wonder available through Grubhub. That integration led to layoffs of 23 percent of Grubhub’s corporate workforce in February 2025. With the Grubhub acquistion, the company also announced $250 million in new investments “‘to further its mission and growth,” and that’s on top of the $700 million in capital it announced in March 2024. Over years full of failing chains and struggling food-delivery startups, Grubhub among them, Wonder is emerging as a winner — and it’s barely gotten started. If the company has its way, Wonder will be unavoidable in the coming years, at least in the Northeastern United States. As of this writing, it has 38 open locations and another 15 set to open over the next several months, with most of those in New York City and steady expansion into Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. That trajectory follows the plans that CEO and founder Marc Lore detailed earlier this year: to expand from 11 locations in March 2024 to 35 by the end of year to 90 by the end of 2025. That surge is especially shocking considering that Wonder only started opening physical locations in 2023. As it grows, here’s what you need to know. Who’s behind Wonder? The e-commerce entrepreneur Marc Lore, who ran e-commerce at Walmart from 2016 to 2021, founded Wonder in 2018. Before that, Lore was a co-founder of Jet.com, which Walmart acquired for approximately $3 billion in 2016. Lore was also the co-founder of Quidsi, which ran e-commerce sites including Diapers.com and Wag.com until it was acquired by Amazon in 2010. Lore’s current level of involvement in Wonder is relatively recent: While at Walmart, he initially acted in more of an advisory role, leaving his brother Chad Lore to run the company, before coming on as executive chairman in December 2021 and CEO in October 2022. Wonder also has investment from companies including Bain Capital Ventures, Amex Ventures, and Nestlé. How does Wonder work? What Wonder promises is the ability to order “from multiple restaurants at once.” Instead of a food hall in which every vendor has its own kitchen, each cooking one menu, one physical Wonder location offers the menus of multiple “restaurants” from one kitchen. Some of this food comes from existing brands like the Brooklyn pizza restaurant Di Fara. Others exist only in Wonder, including chef-partnered concepts like Yasas by Michael Symon and Walnut Lane by Jonathan Waxman. According to the trade publication Restaurant Business, the company pays its chef and restaurant partners a fee and stock in the company, which allows Wonder to then use their brands and recipes without royalties. These chefs work with Wonder to make the dishes suitable for large-scale delivery. As of March 2024, Wonder offered “as many as 500 items available for order at a given Wonder, across 28 distinct menus,” according to the New York Times. In this way, Wonder is a part of the rise of virtual restaurants. But unlike the situation with many ghost kitchens — in which the fact that the food is coming from a ghost kitchen, or a known restaurant operating under a new virtual brand, is unclear to the consumer — Wonder is making its singular location and shared kitchen its selling point. How is Wonder different from other delivery platforms? Unless customers are dining in — which is an option at Wonder, though not its priority — these meals are then delivered by Wonder couriers. As Lore told Business Insider last year, Wonder’s benefit over its competitors is that “[w]e’re vertically integrated. We do everything. It’s our app. It’s our delivery, and it’s our cooking. We own the rights to those brands.” (Of course, with the Grubhub acquisition, Wonder will now also be available via Grubhub; the company hasn’t specified if or how it’ll take over delivery.) As Kristen Hawley wrote for Eater in April, what sets Wonder apart is its control of “the entire experience, from recipe to fulfillment, and the company has spent $60 million so far on intellectual property — recipes and restaurant concepts — from its partner chefs.” Hawley also noted Wonder’s “savvy curatorial eye,” explaining that as with the early days of Caviar, when it touted take-out access to higher-end restaurants than other food-ordering platforms, the company offers “proximity” to more elevated experiences. Wonder hasn’t always worked this way, however. Its initial model involved driving Mercedes Sprinter vans to customers’ homes. The food was partially cooked in a Wonder kitchen facility and then finished on-location in the vans, which were outfitted with rapid-cook ovens. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2022, the Wonder vans became contentious in the neighborhoods where the program was piloted, with some residents complining about the vans being noisy and blocking driveways. In January of 2023, Wonder shut down its van program. Lore told Business Insider that the company could scale faster and with better profit margins by shifting to fixed locations. How does Wonder make its food? The basic setup of the van model hasn’t been fully phased out. As the Times explained earlier this year in a profile of Lore, Wonder’s food is prepared and often par-cooked in a commissary kitchen. (Wonder currently has one central kitchen in New Jersey and has plans to open another in Pennsylvania as it adds locations.) At that point, it’s distributed to its restaurants, which finish the food with — in Lore’s terminology — “lightly trained labor” using only a hot water bath, a rapid-cook oven, or a fryer. Because the kitchens don’t have gas stoves or the need for exhaust systems, Wonder kitchens can be built quickly and affordably, the Times notes. Given that slow delivery is one of the problems Wonder is trying to solve, Lore has stated that efficiency in both preparing food and getting it to customers is a big goal now and moving forward. Currently, Wonder reportedly delivers food in around 30 minutes. Is Wonder good? Wonder seems to be about as good as any food hall, which is to say, hit or miss. When Eater NY restaurant critic Robert Sietsema reviewed the Chelsea location’s food in May, he found the pizza to be a solid Di Fara pie, though it lacked the signature basil finish; other options, like the Tejas Barbecue brisket sandwich and Yasas by Michael Symon pepper and feta sandwich missed the mark. Most of what Sietsema tried earned around a B. Grub Street critic Matthew Schneier had similar overall takeaways but a better experience with the brisket sandwich. Where will Wonder go from here? According to the Wall Street Journal, buying Grubhub not only provides Wonder with a new source of revenue, but also gives the company access to Grubhub’s delivery drivers and delivery technology. Per the November 13 press release, Wonder sees the partnership as helping its goal of “re-envisioning the future of food delivery” and making “great food more accessible.” A timeline of major Wonder moments: 2020: Wonder begins piloting its van program in parts of Westfield, New Jersey. By 2021, it had expanded to serve the entire town. October 2022: Marc Lore becomes CEO of Wonder. January 2023: Wonder pivots away from van delivery in favor of fixed locations. February 2023: Wonder opens its first NYC location in the Upper West Side. November 2023: Wonder completes its acquisition of the meal kit company Blue Apron, allowing users of the Wonder app to order Blue Apron kits in addition to Wonder meals. Wonder takes over Blue Apron delivery. February 2024: Wonder opens its first location inside a Walmart store. April 2024: Wonder acquires Relay, a NY-based delivery company. March 2023: Wonder raises $700 million to fund its growth plans. October 2024: Wonder opens its first location inside a Cumberland Farms convenience store. Tony Hoggett, who previously ran the grocery program at Amazon, joins Wonder. November 2024: Wonder announces its acquisition of Grubhub. February 2025: Wonder announces corporate layoffs at Grubhub as Wonder and Grubhub integrate. March 2025: Wonder announces its acquisition of Tastemade.
David Stenega A local Amsterdam food expert’s must-visit spots around the Dutch capital The Dutch capital gets more than its fair share of tourists, but they’re rarely in it for the food. The local cuisine has a reputation for being bland and Dutch restaurants for serving the same iterations on hamburgers, fish, steak, and pasta. Given the city is full of spicy Surinamese and Indonesian flavors (legacies of the Netherlands’ colonial past), I’ve always thought that was an unfair characterization. But a new wave of restaurants and bakeries — serving boiled eggs with North Sea shrimp mayo, seasonal chanterelle eggs Benedicts, and West African tasting menus — has made the quality of Amsterdam’s food indisputable. These openings fit into a scene that’s generally laid-back, environmentally conscious, and accessible to folks with dietary restrictions. Amsterdam is largely below sea level, so concerns about climate change — and local, sustainable ingredients — are ever present. The relative lack of cars makes al fresco dining in the city center noticeably pleasant, and you can bike between every restaurant on this list (though getting to the Bijlmer market would be a workout). Dining culture is largely casual, and it’s not unusual to see someone walk into a trendy wine bar with a grandchild and massive dog in tow. It’s easy to eat all plant-based and even easier to go pescatarian. This diverse and thriving city has a fun, modern food scene to match, and it’s time visitors took notice. In this latest refresh, we’ve revamped our write-ups to include even more relevant info for diners, including a rough range of pricing for each destination — ranging from $ for quick, inexpensive meals with dishes largely under $10 (or the equivalent in euros), to $$$$ for places where entrees exceed $30. Pro-tip: If you’re coming from abroad, bring cash. While Amsterdam is better than most of the country, it’s surprisingly common to find places that only take Maestro cards. Katharine Khamhaengwong is a Netherlands-based writer, editor, and researcher with a fondness for the cuisine of her adopted home country and of Georgia, where she lived and worked for several years.
Martie is like a high-end version of the Marshall’s food aisle — all at up to 70% off — and I can’t stop shopping it Unlike some people (snobs), I have never felt any apprehension about the food section at Marshall’s or TJ Maxx or Home Goods. In fact, I make a beeline there, eager to see what marked-down multicolored pastas and bargain-bin pseudo-gourmet cookies might await me. There is an art to buying food at Marshall’s; I’d never buy coffee grounds there, but I’ve certainly stocked up on Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract for a few dollars less than at the specialty food store. I can’t turn down a discount, and Marshall’s-food-section slander only inspires me to shop there more, somewhat out of spite. But as a New Yorker, in the absence of suburban Marshall’s and Home Goods (which are undeniably superior, both in vibes and in their selection), I like browsing Martie, a website that sells “surplus” packaged food for a discount. It defines surplus food as overstock that won’t sell in a timely manner, products that have undergone a packaging change, and seasonal foods that have passed their moment — it’s basically the food section at Marshall’s, except easy and online. This is food that would otherwise go to waste, Martie clarifies, so in a way, shopping there is doing good. I like scrolling through the section of new additions, which is just as idiosyncratic as the shelves at the stores I love: millennial-branded date snacks mingling with grain-free granola bars and spicy dried strawberries. Some brands are recognizable, like Cheerios, Hippeas, and Fishwife, and others are as bizarre as I’d hope, like a line of pet-themed candles. Sometimes, it even has great skincare and home goods. What clinched my first order was the fact that Martie had my absolute favorite cookies — Annie’s birthday cake bunny grahams — for half the price of the grocery store. I don’t buy these often since a five-dollar box that I’ll finish in half a day feels frivolous, but for that much of a bargain, I ordered four boxes, plus heavily discounted Fly by Jing Zhong sauce, limited-edition Bonne Maman spread, four packages of nice bronze die-cut pasta (for cheaper than my grocery store’s cheapest option!), and the vanilla almond butter I used to love but never see on shelves anymore. The total was way less than it would have been at the shoppy shop. Recently, I revisited Martie and, finding that one-liter tins of nice Tunisian olive oil were just $10.99 each, I had to place an order. I stocked up on three liters for $20 less than the three-liter tins I get from my usual supplier, and the best-by date isn’t even until this summer. While it’s slightly annoying that Martie has a $40 order minimum to unlock shipping, this can also be nice, since it dissuades the impulse ordering I’m prone to doing at midnight. Martie, much like Marshall’s, doesn’t always offer the biggest markdowns and thus requires the same discerning eye. Veggie Stix, for example, are just a dollar less via Martie than from another store, while a 12-pack of Ferrero Rocher is a tempting 56 percent off. But even those not-great deals are still good for hitting the minimum. I’ll indulge the skeptics on one point: I’m slightly suspicious that the items on the shelves at Marshall’s don’t turn over too often. (That’s fine; sometimes my pantry doesn’t either.) For better and for worse, Martie’s selection seems to change pretty quickly. That is to say that, sadly, I haven’t seen discount birthday cake bunny grahams ever again. Of course, the hunt is half the fun.
Masked chefs make pizza in a restaurant kitchen in 2022. | Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Five years after the onset of the COVID pandemic, normalcy is increasingly a fragile concept After seven years of running a pop-up, Jarrett Stieber was finally ready to open his restaurant, Little Bear, in Atlanta. At first he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to keep going in an industry that required such long, grueling hours for little pay. But he thought he could build something better and more sustainable, for both him and his workers. When Little Bear opened, “we were wide-eyed, and bushy-tailed, thinking we’d achieved something great, and we’re going to have a wonderful time running a restaurant.” That was February 26, 2020. Two weeks later, Stieber was spending the $2,000 Little Bear had earned in profit on takeout boxes and disposable cutlery, trying to figure out if menu items like beet egg drop soup or catfish okonomiyaki would travel well. Little Bear would serve takeout only for the next 18 months. Does surviving one disaster, even one as unprecedented as COVID, really give you insight into how to survive the next? Little Bear’s story could have ended in tragedy, an anticipated restaurant wiped out before it even got a chance to try. But it didn’t! Five years later, Little Bear is going strong, experimenting with new menu items and themes, and launching a digital cookbook. “What I originally envisioned is the restaurant that exists now,” says Stieber. “No takeout, a small staff, an open kitchen so we can interact with the guests. It’s definitely been nice to see that dream become a reality.” Especially when so much of its five-year lifespan didn’t resemble that at all. There is never a “good” time to open a restaurant. Margins are tight under the absolute best circumstances, and anyone in the business can tell you most are just one slow week, or basement flood, or fire from shuttering. And yet, restaurants open every day, including the days in which COVID-19 spread into a full pandemic. Against all odds, many are still thriving, having pivoted and reshaped themselves to keep going until something resembling “normalcy” appeared again. But normalcy is increasingly a fragile concept, and in recent years, the cascade of disasters related to climate and environmental change has become its own ongoing crisis. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, in 2024 there were “27 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States,” including hailstorms in Texas, flooding in the upper Midwest, and Hurricanes Debby and Helene. (The latter had disastrous effects on Asheville’s restaurant scene.) Already this year, unprecedented wildfires in California devastated several Los Angeles communities, and, by extension, its restaurant industry; winter storm Enzo forced many restaurants to temporarily close in Houston. Restaurant owners across the country now, with increased frequency, have to apply those early pandemic questions to their business with some regularity: having to consider how to pay employees if the restaurant closed, how to activate and help the immediate needs of staff and community, and how to calculate whether or not, depending on the event, it is even safe to be open. In the face of these onslaughts, it seems like there may be something to be gleaned from restaurants born during those early months of the pandemic. Those restaurants certainly have learned some tricks. But does surviving one disaster, even one as unprecedented as COVID, really give you insight into how to survive the next? Randi Lee and his wife, Jeanette Zinno, took over the storefront that would become Leland Eating and Drinking House in Brooklyn in February 2020, ready to fully demo the space. After their contractor got stuck in Canada, they wound up doing it themselves. When they finally opened that December, the restaurant looked nothing like they planned. “Instead of lunch, we had vinyl hour, a place where you could come and put your laptop up, maybe have a cocktail and some snacks,” says Lee. “Back then we just had snacks and fresh bread. It was unusually warm — like 65 degrees — and we just put tables outside. We didn’t even know what we could do.” An ease with shifting strategies has stayed with them for the past five years, even as they returned to full service. Zinno learned to bartend. They built dining cabins on the sidewalk outfitted with donated heaters. And most importantly to Lee, they leaned on their relationships with local farmers, and took whatever produce or meat they were offered. “The thing that made us survive is that our local farmers were there, more than happy to just give us as much food as we could handle,” says Lee, which led to an ever-changing menu. Gado Gado Thomas and Mariah Pisha-Duffly, along with their son, at the opening of Oma’s. Nimbleness seemed to be a throughline to navigating COVID lockdowns and restrictions. Mariah Pisha-Duffly, owner of Gado Gado and Oma’s Hideaway in Portland, Oregon, opened Gado Gado with her husband Thomas Pisha-Duffly in June of 2019, while also finding themselves about to have a baby. “I gave birth, I went on maternity leave, I came back for like, a week, and then restaurants were required to shut down,” says Pisha-Duffly. The couple agreed Gado Gado’s food wasn’t fit for takeout, so instead, they tried something new. “We decided to put Gado to bed for the moment, and return to our pop-up roots, do something that was a little bit more playful and nimble,” she says. They started Oma’s Takeaway, a pop-up slinging fun, third-culture dishes like Flamin’ Hot chicharrones. Crucially, it was something that could be done with the bare-bones team of the Pisha-Dufflys and two others. Even after the legal lockdowns ended, many restaurants found value in keeping operations small. Kylie North, co-owner of Water Bear Bar in Boise, Idaho, says she and wife Laura Keeler operated with the motto “live tiny, die never,” inspired by the micro-animals their bar is named for. After opening their cocktail lounge in July 2019, they had to pivot to making to-order to-go cocktails (Idaho’s liquor laws forbid premade or batched cocktails), catering outdoor events, leading Zoom cocktail classes, and eventually, slowly letting people back in a table at a time. During lockdown, they figured out how to keep the lights on with just the two of them, plus one bartender who doubled as a chef. They now have a staff of about seven, inclusive of the two of them, about half the size of what they opened with. But now, “we don’t hire specialists,” says North, who is still dealing with the effects of long COVID, opting instead to train the entire staff on both front-of-house and back-of-house operations. That means anyone can jump into any role, especially if someone gets sick. Staying small, training staff to do multiple jobs, and diversifying tactics are all ongoing tricks restaurants continue to use. If Little Bear has to close for a week for a flood, it can still sell its digital cookbook. If bartenders at Water Bear Bar fall ill, at least everyone knows how to make cocktails. If the pandemic taught any lesson, it’s that restaurateurs shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket. But staying small and loose and cautious isn’t a guaranteed roadmap to survival, or even any sort of norm. Lee first responded to the question of what kept Leland afloat with another question: “What about all the restaurants that pivoted and closed anyway?” The Washington Post calculated that “in 2020, about 72,700 more restaurants and bars than normal closed, apparently due to the pandemic, a 95 percent jump over the average annual rate.” And over the past five years, many who have closed restaurants said they never recovered from COVID lockdowns, especially after Congress didn’t replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund in 2022. How many of those restaurants pivoted to takeout or created outdoor seating? How many furloughed their staff while serving cocktails through a to-go window? How many applied for a PPP loan and were denied, while larger chains benefited? Leland Eating and Drinking House Randi Lee and Jeanette Zinno just before the opening of Leland in 2020. Luck, more than anything, appears to be why some restaurants born in the pandemic made it through. Lee notes that he and Zinno have a great relationship with their landlord, who forgave rent for a few months, but plenty of landlords weren’t willing to give their restaurant tenants a deal. Pisha-Duffly says that while looking for a commercial kitchen to expand the retail dumpling business she and her husband started during lockdown, chef Andy Ricker mentioned the former Whiskey Soda Lounge space was open, and at a steal. “We were like, wow, we might never have an opportunity to be able to afford to get into a lease like this again,” she says, and they jumped on the opportunity to eventually open Oma’s Hideaway there — permanently. Stieber also says that while his experience running pop-ups helped, “we had just opened, so we got sympathy orders. There’s no way around that. If we had been open for a year, it wouldn’t have been the same.” During the next disaster, they might not be so lucky. North says she wants to rehire the amount of staff they opened with at Water Bear Bar, but revenue is down, now that more people are working from home and there’s less happy hour foot traffic. “Unless the circumstances of child care change, I don’t see that changing. It really does affect communities with third spaces and cocktail bars, because those people just aren’t walking around,” she says. And Stieber says that while his small, new staff allowed the business to pivot in a hurry in 2020, it’s bigger and older now. Pisha-Duffly says she tries to be adaptable to change and looks for positive opportunities. She participated in the James Beard Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program, and looks to those connections and friendships as “a group of leaders to ask for advice and bounce ideas off.” She’s also become more conservative with money. “We have savings goals that are definitely more aggressive than they were pre-COVID, and we are much more strategic in our spending and budgeting than we ever have been in the past,” she says. “We used to shoot from the hip a lot more and that no longer feels comfortable to me.” But Stieber says it’s difficult to plan for a hypothetical future crisis when just keeping the lights on is hard enough. “If I could build up extra savings for anything I’d be happy. That’s impossible in restaurants realistically, at least ones that aren’t rip-off cash cow concepts. We haven’t put anything proactive in place because I’m not sure what we can do, there’s no way to just magically make and save more money,” he says. “When a disaster hits, all we can do is react and adjust as quickly as possible and hope there’s some governmental support financially.” “We used to shoot from the hip a lot more and that no longer feels comfortable to me.” Both point to larger industry issues getting in the way of restaurants being able to weather literal and metaphorical storms. The COVID pandemic made the lack of a national sick leave policy and low industry wages urgent issues. It seemed like finally the country would be forced to change, but those conversations never materialized into long-term action. There is still no national sick leave policy, no universal child care or parental leave, and minimum wage — especially for tipped workers — doesn’t cover rent anywhere in the country. Restaurant rents keep increasing. An individual restaurant implementing a generous sick leave policy or trying to pay staff a living wage doesn’t create a safety net for the whole business if they have to shut down for months. “If COVID [lockdowns] happened tomorrow, it would be a huge disaster,” says Pisha-Duffly. “I don’t think we’ve had the opportunity to put all of those learnings into practice as an industry.” Change remains the only constant for everyone. Leland offers events like butchery classes, vermouth tastings, and special holiday menus, responding to what diners seem excited about. Water Bear Bar consistently changes the menu based on the interests and skill set of its bartenders. Maybe these restaurants are more comfortable with uncertainty, or maybe their spidey senses would tingle a little bit earlier if something bad seemed to be approaching. But you can’t pivot to takeout if your restaurant burns down. You can’t pop-up if there’s no running water. Under every story of resilience and quick thinking is the fact that these businesses and workers should not have had to fight so hard, including risking actual illness and death, to stay afloat. There are lessons to be learned about staying nimble and embracing chaos. But at a certain point, there’s no substitute for a safety net.
Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock Pumpkin pie, chocolate peanut butter pie, a caramelized onion tart, and more Kat Thompson is the associate editor of Eater at Home, covering home cooking and baking, cookbooks, and kitchen gadgets. You don’t really need an occasion like Pi Day to bake yourself a pie, but it doesn’t hurt to have a day specifically dedicated to crusts and filling (and math, I suppose). Whether you’re a fan of savory dishes, prefer fruit pies, or love the wobble of a perfectly set custard pie, there is a pie for everyone — including Eater staffers. Here are some of our favorite pie recipes to make at home. Pumpkin Pie Heidi Swanson, 101 Cookbooks Of all the pie recipes I’ve made, Heidi Swanson’s pumpkin pie is the one I return to most frequently. I first made it for Thanksgiving several years ago, and then spent the subsequent 12 months dreaming of the day I’d make it again. This is in no small part because Swanson gives you the option to make a graham cracker crust, which is music to the ears of someone who makes traditional pie dough only under duress. Swanson has you add a layer of ground-up hazelnuts between the crust and filling, but I’ve also substituted walnuts, and sometimes skip it entirely. The filling is extremely simple and can be made with coconut milk, which I prefer over heavy cream. The result is exceptionally custardy; I’ve been known to bake up extra filling on its own and just eat it with a spoon. Every time I make this I’m reminded of how odd it is that pumpkin pie is shoehorned into the last part of the year, when really, we should be eating it as frequently as possible. — Rebecca Flint Marx, editor, Eater at Home Curried Cauliflower and Cheese Filo Pie Ottolenghi Test Kitchen In my opinion, the most important thing you can do at a gathering full of sweets — say, a pie party – is be the person who provides the savory option. Consider the phyllo pie, which I’ve brought to many a potluck. My gateway was this Ottolenghi recipe, but it’s very malleable. I’ve run with the idea and used different cheeses, swapped out the curry powder, subbed in some miso, added melty leeks, mushrooms, or even beans and chickpeas, and topped it off with crumpled roses of more phyllo. Phyllo sometimes has a reputation for being hard to work with, but in my experience, phyllo pie is quite forgiving, especially since you’re layering the sheets and you want ruffled messy edges to create crispy bits on the sides. To me, the hardest part is just making sure to thaw it out in advance. But it’s 100-percent worth it: This crispy golden pie is sure to get some oohs and ahhs, and it’s great fresh or at room temperature. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter at Eater.com Buttermilk Pie Tracy Mulder, Allrecipes Since I grew up in Los Angeles and had never heard of buttermilk pie, it may come as a surprise that it’s one of my go-to pies to make. I discovered it seven years ago on a Twitter thread about unique, regional pies and was fascinated enough by this classic Southern dessert to attempt it, trying the first recipe that came up on my Google search. This is that recipe, and it has been consistently easy and perfect since that very first pie I made. The filling is smooth and velvety with subtle notes of nutmeg and a kiss of lemon. It reminds me of dan tat, or Chinese egg tarts, but it’s way less fussy. Yes, you can make your own pie crust, but storebought works well here, too, because the real star is the wobbly buttermilk custard. — Kat Thompson, associate editor, Eater at Home Caramelized Onion & Butternut Squash Tart Vanessa Larson, Food52 When fall comes around, I turn to this tried and true caramelized onion and butternut squash tart from Food 52 over and over again. It’s a perfect savory option to bring to Friendsgiving, Thanksgiving, or any autumnal get together. What I love most about it is that it highlights flavors and ingredients of the season while standing out from the plentiful pumpkin and pecan pies that you’re sure to find at any gathering. To make it heartier, I sometimes add crumbled sausage to the mix. — Terri Ciccone, deputy director of audience development Chess Pie T Knecht, Allrecipes The only thing my mom and I love more than re-invigorating this incredibly simple chess pie recipe is telling the (most likely made up) story behind the name. Trying on my grandmother’s Texas twang, we explain how a server at a diner was once asked the flavor of the custard pie that day. She said, “It’s just pie,” but with her Southern accent that was mistaken as “chess pie.” And so we got this simple custard pie, which is filled with evaporated milk and set perfectly with cornmeal. My mom started experimenting with adding edible lavender oil to the recipe, which has became my favorite way to bake it, but she’s also added a tablespoon or two of my dad’s “Mexican mocha” (spiced hot chocolate) mix to make an incredible chocolate custard pie with a kick. But even plain, this pie recipe is always a big hit. — Emily Venezky, editorial associate No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie Dorothy Kern, Crazy for Crust I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who lovingly make intricately crafted, high-maintenance pies with lattice crusts and the whole shebang, but my personal tried-and-true, always-go-back pie recipe is one I’ve frequently revisited since high school: no-bake chocolate peanut butter pie. I do not know the true origin of the semi-homemade, Sandra Lee-esque creation, but if you stumble upon some version of the five-ingredient recipe that includes Cool Whip, like this one on the blog Crazy for Crust, that’s what I’m referring to. Rest assured that I generally have the taste of a very bougie person — I made a caviar spread with Champagne for watching the Oscars last weekend — but this extremely simple, absolutely-not-healthy recipe is just perfection. It’s sweet, salty, creamy, and simultaneously light, fluffy, rich, and decadent. Whenever I make it for a dinner party, holiday gathering, or potluck, it garners rave reviews (the word “orgasmic” has been used to describe it more than once). — Hilary Pollack, senior editor
At Trina’s Starlite Lounge, the hot dog tower comes with five hot dogs, fries, and sauce | Trina’s Starlite Lounge In this economy, the pricey seafood tower has given way to way to the hot dog tower For Trina’s Starlite Lounge, the longstanding bar in Somerville, Massachusetts, 2024 was financially “pretty rough.” And then the election happened. “We felt a little stuck,” says co-owner Emma Hollander. They’d been serving hot dogs, fried chicken sandwiches, and other Southern-inflected bar foods for 15 years. Enter the hot dog tower, a two-tiered assortment of five hot dogs, fries, and sauce that joined the menu in January. It’s served on branded Miller High Life trays, with hot dogs fanned out like a starburst. Visually, it has a playful appeal that fits in with the bar that’s known for its statements spelled out in childlike magnet letters on a fridge. What began as an easy way to breathe new life into the haunt has become a popular order. Trina’s now sells 40 hot dog towers, which start at $35, in a night — some as casual snacks for big groups, others as the centerpiece of celebrations. The concept fit into the menu of American comfort food that people loved at Trina’s, and since hot dogs and fries were already two of the bar’s best-selling items, the new addition didn’t give the kitchen extra work. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Hollander says. “But we really wanted to do something fun.” Highroller Lobster Co. The hot dog tower at Highroller includes corn dogs. As at Trina’s, the hot dog tower at Highroller Lobster Co. in Portland, Maine is a strategic addition. Hot dogs have always been second to lobster rolls on the menu, and since the restaurant also serves seafood towers, the hot dog tower, which it also launched in January, was “a fun way to repurpose some of the stuff we already had and use,” says co-owner Baxter Kay. It features six corn dogs in addition to six hot dogs, fries, and sauce. While visitors from out of town gravitate toward lobster rolls, locals tend to lean more toward hot dogs and corn dogs, he explains. The rise of the hot dog tower, which is an undeniably unserious idea, is further proof of what my colleague Jaya Saxena has dubbed “LOLfood”: that in times of crisis and instability, diners revert to food that doesn’t require thinking too hard. It’s food that draws on the most basic familiarity and cheap thrill — make Goldfish extra-large, serve a tower of hot dogs. “Everybody, post-election, was really looking for something that made them happy,” Hollander says. Around the country, the hot dog tower is doing just that. Charleston’s Sir Wieners, which serves hot dogs at Lamar’s Sporting Club, popularized the concept when it launched its “wiener tower” in September. The three-tiered hot dog tower features all five of its specialty hot dogs — including a chili cheese “Dumpster Dog” and peanut butter- and bacon-topped “PB Wiener Time” — served with truffle fries and a selection of sauces. The concept was all but guaranteed to become a social media sensation: Like a bottle of pricey booze, Sir Wieners’ tower is brought to the table by servers wielding sparklers. “We wanted something that would capture on social media very well and that would potentially go trending — which it did,” says Sir Wieners owner TJ Dinch. One video of the tower has picked up nearly 8 million views on Instagram since October. In Newport, Rhode Island, Wally’s Wieners serves a hot dog tower in addition to other stunt-y offerings like a giant espresso martini and an espresso martini tree; a video featuring all three bears the caption “this and yap.” It’s food for the TikTok age: ready to star in a video. But it’s also food that speaks to diners stressed out by a constant influx of devastating news and, increasingly, financial worries. It’s easier to ball out with a hot dog tower than to splurge on a seafood version, especially when the latter can still leave one hungry. At Highroller, six hot dogs, six corn dogs, fries, and sauce is $75, compared to the $105 seafood tower. At Sir Wieners, five specialty hot dogs, fries, and sauce rings in at $60. (Caviar service at Lamar’s runs $99, and the “bumps and bubbles?” That’s market price.) At Trina’s, $35 is the base price, though swapping in loaded hot dogs or veggie dogs adds an upcharge. @cookinwithbooze Recipe for a perfect girls’ night out in Charleston: wiener and cocktail tower at @Lamar’s Sporting Club #girlsnightcharleston #charlestonsc ♬ Boogie Shoes - KC & The Sunshine Band Even when loaded, these tend to be relatively basic dogs, not especially bougie ones. Trina’s uses local ones from Kayem — makers of the Fenway Franks — and Highroller opts for red snappers from local Shields Meats. For Dinch, the hot dog tower is about taking “something that usually isn’t looked at as an elevated food [and] making it more of a high-end product” by “presenting it like it’s a VIP experience with sparklers and your own personal server.” Served in the high-energy cocktail lounge and sometimes paired with Champagne, “it’s definitely an elevated experience,” he says. Despite the initial intentions, the hot dog tower has resulted in extra work for one Trina’s employee. While Hollander had pitched it using “those cupcake towers that you see at every thrift shop,” co-owner Josh Childs vetoed them, arguing that he could build better ones. And so he did, turning Miller High Life-branded drink trays into sturdy towers with industrial metal handles. The bar started with three and that quickly escalated into five. “And now he’s making three more,” Hollander says. In a busy bar or restaurant, the hot dog tower has the same effect as sizzling fajitas and espresso martinis: It’s hard to not feel tempted. According to Hollander, “When you bring it out, people are like, What’s that? I want one.”
Eater Staff Why drink from a boring old glass when you can sip from a dragon-embellished chalice? We are living in a renaissance of incredible cocktail glasses. Maybe it’s just that the internet has given folks more access to some of the best unique cocktail glasses the world has to offer, but I feel like I can’t turn a digital corner without falling in love with a confetti-embellished Champagne coupe or a set of old fashioned glasses that look like Barbapapas in the best way possible. During lockdown, my roommates and I would throw weekly fancy cocktail nights with eclectic glassware and pretty, Dalí-esque pearl onion garnishes. Those lockdown moments may have faded, but our collective craving for Personality Glassware has only continued to develop. This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate a no-fuss, workhorse set of cocktail glasses. Stainless steel coupe glasses, for example, are aesthetically spartan and virtually unbreakable, but still manage to bring some Sharon Stone energy to the home bar cart. But I’ve observed an increasing amount of whimsical cocktail glasses that don’t just come from the MoMA Design Store or your local shoppy shop (think Big Night or Coming Soon), but big name retailers such as CB2 or even Amazon. This wave of cool glassware has roots in the souped-up pandemic home decor trends of yore (think, Goober candles and DIY foam mirrors), which served as a visual shorthand to say, “I may be stuck inside, but my personality is still here.” As a collector of cool dinnerware and glassware, I always keep an eye out for unique cocktail glasses that were made by doting human hands (or at least look like it). Individual quirks are chic. Knowing where your stuff was made is always a good idea. When shopping for cool cocktail glasses, ask yourself questions like, would I try and flirt with this cocktail glass at a bar? If the answer is no, it’s probably not doing enough for you. I want my cocktail glasses to look like they could cast a spell on me or speak several languages. The aesthetic could be anything — I love a mishmash of dishes on display in a kitchen hutch — so long as it’s not boring. Below, I have rounded up a small taste of the many unique cocktail glasses out there for every budget and aesthetic. Like Carnival in a glass Someone call John Waters You saw Dead and Company at The Sphere Look for unexpected color combinations You’re a Pinterest-pilled romantic The bow trend looks good in black This expensive-looking set of versatile glasses Part Parker hotel, part Beetlejuice dinner scene You always forget which glass is yours You’re the king of your castle You had an Ancient Rome hyperfixation as a child Tortoiseshell will never go out of style This set of tulip-inspired cocktail glasses Stemless martini glasses (with built-in olive garnishes) Cheers.
Mark Ruffalo as Kenneth Marshall and Toni Colette as Ylfa. | Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures In the new Bong Joon-ho movie, sauce is a metaphor for civilization. That’s also what it is on Earth. Mickey 17 is a rich exploration of technology and capitalism, raising questions about the innate self versus free will. The Bong Joon-ho movie follows Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a sadsack dummy on the run from loan sharks, who decides to volunteer as an “expendable” — someone who can die and be endlessly “reprinted” anew — on a space mission run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo doing his best Trump impression), a failed Earth politician who has vowed to begin his own society on a new planet. It’s also a movie about sauce. (Spoilers ahead.) Marshall’s wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), is obsessed with sauce. “Sauce is the true litmus test of civilization,” she tells the ship’s crew, who all have their gray, unidentifiable food rationed to the calorie to save energy on the four-year journey to the planet of Niflheim. In the Marshalls’ quarters, the meals are far more elaborate than in the communal dining halls, the steaks adorned with vibrant sauce and garnishes. And of course, when they land on Niflheim and find a native species, all Ylfa can do is click her manicured nails together and squeal over sauce possibilities to be made with them. Like much sci-fi, the film is a metaphor about class and race. The Marshalls want to begin a new, “pure” race on Niflheim. They have forbidden sexual intercourse on the ship (too many calories expended), and promise to bring about the orgy to end all orgies once the new society is established, presumably resulting in the birth of this new “pure” population. And yet, in this calorie-restricted ship, Ylfa makes sauce, asking crew members to taste iterations from her pinky finger and smothering her own dinners in the stuff. A sauce is not a necessary food. A steak or a roast chicken or a pile of vegetables can certainly be served without it, providing protein and carbs enough to survive. Sauce is extra. Sauce is for pleasure alone. Sauce is also the backbone of French haute cuisine, which in turn is the backbone of the entirety of fine dining. The five French mother sauces codified by chef Auguste Escoffier at the turn of the 20th century formed the foundation of cooking for French royalty and, later, the bourgeoisie. The style of cooking, with its emphasis on complex technique and rich ingredients, went on to become popular in Britain and eventually fizzled through the world as the standard of fine dining. Haute cuisine was different from the kind of cooking that was found in the more casual bistros and brasseries at the time, establishments that served roasts and cassoulets and other simple, unadorned meals to the less moneyed masses. Anyone could serve a steak. What elevated it to fine cuisine was the sauce. The French are not the only ones to come up with the concept of sauce. There are moles and toums and chimichurris and fish sauces that take as much skill and care as any bechamel. But the codification of French haute cuisine, and its dissemination among British colonizers, all but guaranteed it became the touchpoint for all modern fine dining. If it wasn’t served in multiple courses by trained kitchen staff, and adorned in a sauce, it wasn’t fine dining period. This has begun to change only very recently. But even though chefs are perhaps more free now to present a Mexican or Senegalese tasting menu, culinary schools still drill the techniques of the mother sauces and stocks, and fine dining still often exists through the lens of French haute cuisine: the flavors of India or China or Cambodia, plated in sequence, draped in sauce. So of course Ylfa is obsessed with sauce. It is the clearest signifier of everything she and her husband value — the delineation between high and low, the production of pleasure for the select few on the backs of a hierarchical, exploitative system. It’s apt that when the Marshalls invite Mickey to dinner in their chambers, his gooey-looking steak sits in more of a pool of its own juices than a sauce like the Marshalls and another officer, Kai, enjoy. Mickey is expendable. Why waste a good sauce on him? But the thing about Ylfa’s sauces is they aren’t really sauces, or at least not the one we see her make. A good veloute requires a roux and a meticulously made stock, while a rich mole could require dozens of ingredients. In one scene, Ylfa makes a sauce from one of the planet’s native creatures by merely cutting off its tail, chopping it as it’s still wriggling, and blitzing it in a mini blender. Like most colonizers, she doesn’t care for the skill or craftsmanship required to create the thing she loves. She just blends meat and calls it a sauce, so she can act the part of the educated, refined culinarian without putting in any of the work. By the looks of the food being served to the scientists and pilots and janitors on the ship, I’m sure they would have loved some bearnaise sauce, something to remind them that life exists beyond the intake and expenditure of calories, and that the dying Earth they left was, at one point, a world in which the flavors of the French bourgeoisie and Mughal emperors and Chinese banquets were available to more than just the rich few. A sauce that would perhaps signal that they could build that world again, maybe even a better version, no human printer required.
-Atlas-Media https://ny.eater.com/2025/3/10/24379452/meow-wolf-nyc-opening-seaport-pier-17-new-york-city-restaurant
Five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our relationship to food and dining has undergone some permanent changes I got COVID for the first time this past February. I was lucky to have a job I didn’t need to be physically present for, no children that needed care, no underlying health conditions, a booster shot, and ample, union-bargained sick leave. So I isolated myself at home, using Instacart for the first time to order vegetables and Gatorade. I lost my sense of taste, spiking my soups with more salt and red chile to try to feel something again. I kind of wished I had a loaf of sourdough. Of course, I spent much of my isolation thinking about this time, five years ago. I was in a restaurant for my mom’s birthday when the World Health Organization declared the spread of coronavirus a pandemic, and, in between sewing my own cloth masks and attending cursed Zoom happy hours, my colleagues and I reported relentlessly on the crisis unfolding in the restaurant world. Most restaurant and food service workers did not have access to sick leave or any other safety net, and yet were deemed “essential.” Ultimately, cooks fell just behind nurses as the jobs with the highest COVID deaths in 2020, with agricultural workers and other food prep workers near the top of the list. At the time, we implored anyone in power to seize the moment, and it seemed like some progress was being made. The federal government started offering PPP loans and created a Restaurant Revitalization Fund for restaurants trying to stay afloat when they weren’t allowed to open their dining rooms. Cities eased permitting regulations, allowing restaurants to expand seating with outdoor dining sheds and transforming city streets into safer and more beautiful spaces. Liquor laws relaxed for to-go drinks, and there were conversations and organizing efforts around sick leave, accessibility, air filtration, and making restaurant work less exploitative. If we must endure this tragedy, we thought, perhaps a transformed world could emerge. We could learn some lessons and make things better. Some things did get better. But others did not, or got outright worse. Some restaurants stayed afloat on PPP loans, but the funds dwindled, and many restaurants closing now say they never recovered from the economic impact. It’s easier than ever to get food delivered to your door, and those workers have fought for fairer wages. But there’s still no federal sick leave policy, and often restaurants still don’t provide workers with health insurance or other benefits. Many cities have all but nixed their outdoor dining programs, and there hasn’t been a push to make the air indoors any safer. Instead, we have a newfound understanding of the precarity most restaurants work within and a sourdough starter probably languishing in the back of the fridge. And in our everyday existence, markers of the early days of the pandemic still endure. When I finally tested negative again, my wife and I went to a Korean restaurant, in the hopes that the gochugaru and kimchi would jog my tongue back to life. On the way, we passed the decimated remains of outdoor dining sheds. We ordered by QR code as deliveristas filed through for their orders. During an after-dinner drink, I noticed our local bar still had a sign about needing to be vaccinated taped on the door, and, blessedly, an air purifier mounted on the wall. Everywhere — including in this retrospective of those pandemic-era pivots that stuck around, for better or worse — there are signs and scars of what the last five years have wrought. And sometimes, hints of a better future. If only we stop thinking of COVID in the past tense. — Jaya Saxena, correspondent Outages and supply chain challenges mean higher prices The early days of the pandemic were marked by unexpected price hikes (a run on flour and yeast) and unpredictably empty shelves (the great bucatini shortage of 2020). Sound familiar? What was initially chalked up to pandemic-related “supply chain problems” has stuck around, with the United States Department of Agriculture reporting last month that U.S. food prices have risen by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024. Just look at the price of eggs, which is only expected to rise in the coming months. According to the USDA, these price increases have been driven by a combination of supply chain disruptions, avian flu outbreaks, the war in Ukraine, and other “economy-wide inflationary pressures.” There’s also the fact that overhead costs on everything have continued to increase since the pandemic: Fast-food chains have attributed their rising prices to higher labor costs, and small restaurant owners, whose margins were already slim, passed some of the burden of their increased operating costs onto customers through higher prices and increased service fees. Of course, corporations looking to increase profits and fewer companies having more control over the food that’s in grocery stores have also impacted prices. A Federal Trade Commission report published last year about COVID-related grocery supply chain disruptions found that “dominant firms used this moment to come out ahead at the expense of their competitors and the communities they serve,” according to former FTC Chair Lina Khan. With tariffs and the growing trade war, it doesn’t seem like prices are likely to come down anytime soon. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter Pop-ups are still popping Prior to 2020, culinary pop-ups existed of course, but they had yet to transform into the psuedo-restaruants we know them as today. The pop up — a temporary location where a chef or vendor serves food — became a mainstay of dining during the early days of the pandemic. For many chefs, particularly those serving food and cuisines less familiar to their local customer base, the pop-up served as a road to success with fewer barriers to entry. The evidence is in the numbers: According to Vox, from 2021 to 2022, pop-ups grew a whopping 105 percent in the US; from 2022 to 2023, there were 155 percent more pop-ups. Pop-ups can either be a final destination for a menu concept, or, for those determined to open a brick-and-mortar spot, a stop along the way to restaurant ownership. Running a pop-up gives a chef a chance to explain their cuisine in their way, and figure out what works and what doesn’t without the pressure of satisfying hyper-critical investors or a landlord, a particular boon for chefs of color and immigrant chefs. And, when social distancing rendered many restaurants inoperable or forced them to operate at a reduced capacity, they were a lifeline. We saw pop-ups, which often relied on largely verbal agreements, open in spacious breweries and outside of bars. During the height of the pandemic, diners in Dallas were introduced to Nathan Bounphisai’s Inusan Onigiri, Chicagoans fell for Tilly Bagels, and Yellow Paper Burgers served smashburgers around Los Angeles. As the industry has returned to relatively standard practices, pop-ups have sustained as a way for chefs to experiment, reach new audiences, and avoid the costs — and risks — associated with building a traditional restaurant. — Kayla Stewart, senior editor Delivery is now the name of the game Before the pandemic hit I was only an occasional delivery orderer on the third-party apps. The fees were too high for operators, the delivery drivers gig workers with no guaranteed wage or any benefits to speak of; tips given to those drivers to supplement their wages were diverted from restaurant staffers. For many in that first year of the pandemic, myself included, ordering off a delivery app involved an ever-evolving calculus factoring in health risks and a desire to support the restaurant industry amid urgent calls to order merch and takeout when possible. But after several months of proprietors sounding alarms about the hidden costs of delivery (and several cities setting caps on the fees delivery apps could charge), and after the vaccine became widely available and dining rooms opened again, I figured that for many (meaning, those who don’t rely on delivery for health and safety reasons, and for whom increased delivery options presented a welcome change), the fervor would die down. After years reading about one of the biggest pandemic stories — the deleterious effects of delivery on independent restaurants — we understood the costs. Didn’t we? But this convenience culture only got worse. A look at a third-party app today shows that I can get straight to my door within 50 to 65 minutes: a dog toy shaped like a water bottle, a ceramic hair straightener, a professional-grade storage container, playing cards, myriad 6- and 12-packs and sake (but no hard liquor; this is still Oregon, after all). Most major grocery retailers in my area, along with many big-box stores, have joined the apps. Ultimately, the pandemic engendered in us a reliance on the gig economy, an system where it’s proven difficult to enforce measures to ensure workers’ rights. And that’s something that will stick around long after the memories of plastic-pouched cocktails fade. — Erin DeJesus, executive editor Everyone’s cooking at home more As officials across the country ordered restaurants to close their doors at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, all of us were forced to become more dedicated home cooks. With all this newfound free time, we baked sourdough and banana bread and stirred together the viral TikTok tomato-feta pasta, all while navigating the chaos of supply chain shortages and less-frequent trips to the grocery store. It was, to say the least, a very educational time. And whether you basically just bumped your knowledge from “consummate DoorDash orderer” to “competent egg-fryer” or really leaned in to mastering Japanese cuisine, there’s no denying that the pandemic has fostered a sense of culinary learning that had, in some ways, fallen out of fashion. Prior to 2020, there was so much hand-wringing over the “death of cooking” as a domestic art, and on some level, it was true that Americans just weren’t cooking as much as they used to. Not to look for silver linings in what was a real shitstorm, but our collective increase in food knowledge has perhaps prepared us for what is to come, both economically and culturally. It also, hopefully, has made us better diners. It’s made us more knowledgeable about the real costs of food, and the labor that goes into making it. — Amy McCarthy, reporter And some of us are still growing windowsill scallions Like many people, I started regrowing scallions and leeks on the windowsill during the pandemic because, yes, it’s cost-effective to regrow herbs and aromatics (and I was cooking the most I’d ever cooked). But also, at the height of the pandemic, observing the scallions growing day after day just added a dose of whimsy and levity to a time that was anything but whimsical and light. When the world felt truly stagnant, plants were still changing. The act of regrowing these alliums taught me, and everyone else who participated in it, the art of allowing change to be slow. It was also a nice acknowledgment of the beauty in the natural world, even in something as simple as a green onion. It’s why I continue to have windowsill scallions five years after the onset of the pandemic; I still appreciate the reminder that we can evolve, even incrementally, every day. Plus it doesn’t hurt to always have extra scallions for garnishing a plate of steamed eggs or Korean braised tofu. — Kat Thompson, associate editor, Eater at Home Home cooks became the big food stars The pandemic helped reshape who is food famous. In 2025, the rising food celebrities are most comfortable in home kitchens, and many of them don’t have the traditional restaurant or culinary school credentials we might have expected from previous food stars. Consider the fact that home-cook-turned-recipe-developer Justine Doiron’s debut cookbook instantly hit No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list, outpacing Bobby Flay’s cookbook that launched the same day. Food culture may have already been heading in this direction, but the pandemic sped up the process. TikTok saw a huge rise in popularity following lockdowns and social distancing, reporting a 45 percent increase in active users between the summer of 2020 and 2021. The platform’s initial appeal was its lack of polish compared to professionalized spaces like YouTube. Any home cook could shoot a lo-fi video with their iPhone and — algorithm willing — find an audience. Accessible food and a relatable approach gave amateur cooks an edge even over established restaurant chefs and traditional media in reaching new viewers. Amateurs no longer needed a middleman, like a TV show or magazine, to gain fans and viewers appreciated direct access to their favorite cooks. Trust in the media establishment had already been waning pre-pandemic. The stunning breakdown of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen in the summer of 2020 only pushed viewers further toward support of independent creators over legacy publications. In recent years, many of the TikTok creators who rose to prominence during the height of lockdowns have gained more traditional markers of success in the form of cookbook deals and food magazine features. As with food delivery apps and turn-the-tablet tipping, that which was disruptive always becomes the mainstream eventually. — BM For better or worse, QR codes have replaced many menus When the pandemic began, not only were restaurant-goers trying to avoid crowded spaces — they were also, understandably, wary about picking up germs from surfaces. So menus, held by hundreds of customers on any given day, were often first on the chopping block. QR codes, which folks with a smartphone could scan to pull up a restaurant’s digital menu, meant no need to pay to print paper, one less thing to clean, and you could update it at the click of a button — many restaurants signed right up, and never looked back. The benefits of the QR code menu are impossible to ignore. While I like a printed menu, I don’t like them at establishments where the menu is encased in plastic, splotched with grease stains, nor do I miss flicking leftover pieces of baked cheese off the menus at some of my favorite dollar-ish slice shops in New York. And yet, despite their new role as a part of dining out now, the QR code is contentious, with diners lamenting the loss of a mainstay of traditional hospitality. When I go to my favorite restaurant, am I happy to see the dishes of the night listed in an elegant font, printed on a fresh sheet of cardstock? Absolutely. But sometimes, when I’m on the go and just want to grab something quick for lunch in between meetings, I don’t mind putting my phone camera up to that amalgam of Black symbols all somehow forming a standard square. And it’s a good thing, too, because like many things birthed out of a harrowing, albeit transformative era, they are here to stay. — KS Parking lot patios continue to be a pandemic silver lining The Hermosillo in LA’s Highland Park was a great neighborhood bar before the pandemic. It was moody and dim, with a killer beer list and a coveted rarity: about eight parking spots in a side lot. When bars shut down in 2020, ownership cannibalized a couple spots to build a small patio. But as shutdowns dragged on, the Hermosillo team gave up the rest of the parking, dropping picnic tables and upright barrels on the blacktop; over time, they added more tables, pulled out wheel stops, put up shade tents and heat lamps, and rolled in two massive trees. Now the patio is a Northeast LA essential, the kind of spot where you’ll always run into a familiar face. In the first year or so of the pandemic, bars and restaurants across the country attempted a similar metamorphosis. Restaurateurs pushed indoor tables onto sidewalks and ate up street space to hammer out plywood parklets. In colder climates, operators built elaborate dining sheds with plastic windows and heating. But over the last couple of years, the relaxed regulations and permitting that allowed these structures expired in many places, and around the country restaurant operators unceremoniously disassembled the sheds and parklets. But not in Highland Park. The continued success of Hermosillo’s patio is a striking example of what’s possible when we prioritize people over parking, and turn private spaces into ones that feel public. Sitting outdoors, on or near the sidewalk with a stream of passers-by, exposes us to the diverse cross-section of people in our neighborhoods. Spending more time in public encourages chance encounters among the community. In an outdoor dining shed, that may mean simple conversation. On a bar patio, it can feel like a block party with better IPAs. Some cities see the continued value in reclaiming space from cars and diverting it back toward human experience. LA’s ongoing Al Fresco Outdoor Dining Program, which started as a temporary authorization, keeps steadily chugging towards permanence. In New York, dining sheds have come down but the Open Streets program is furthering the greater goal. The City Council in Ventura, California, just voted to permanently close a large section of its downtown to cars. Hopefully others follow suit; it might be one of the few purely good things to come out of the pandemic. — Ben Mesirow, associate editor, travel Marcus Eakers’s vibrant works depict exaggerated human experiences that draw influence from surrealism, symbolism, animation, illustration and everything in between.
https://punchdrink.com/articles/hillstone-chain-bartender-cocktails/
Everything you need to know about where to eat, drink, and shop in Paris Last year, Eater published its first guidebooks to New York City and Los Angeles, and this year, we’re bringing our travel expertise to perennially popular Paris. Together with longtime Eater contributor Lindsey Tramuta and our publisher, Abrams, we’ve put together a seminal guide to eating and drinking in a city that never stops thinking about eating or drinking. There are plenty of guides to Paris, but none that go deep on food, drinks, and shopping the way we have. The book is organized into seven chapters based on geography, starting from the center of the city and winding out into the outskirts. Aside from beautifully illustrated maps featuring our favorite food and shopping locations, we’ve also got more nuanced advice for your trip — from dining etiquette to essential parts of the food culture and a glossary of terms you’ll see on menus everywhere. For those who want to go deeper, we dive into Paris’s Southeast Asian cuisines, what drinking culture is like today, how the all-important pastry scene has evolved, and so much more. You’ll need to do something beyond eating and drinking at some point, which is why we’ve also picked out our favorite hotels and overnight trips from the city, plus lots of shops to explore. If your trip is extremely short, we have a 24-hour itinerary that features just the highlights — and will make you want to book another trip ASAP. Paris is a city that never gets boring. Back in 2017, our inaugural guide to Paris won a National Magazine Award for its fun, thoughtful storytelling of the city’s food and dining scene. We’re thrilled to continue our one-of-a-kind coverage of the City of Light with this guidebook, with Tramuta’s deep insider experience and playful illustrations by Alice Des. Pick up this book whether you already have a trip planned, you’re dreaming of your next one, or you’ve just gotten back from Paris and plan to go back as soon as you can. Better yet, buy it for your favorite travel companion as a gift (and a well-intended hint). The book is available for preorder now, wherever you buy books. Get 40 percent off when you preorder using code EATERBOOKS40 on abramsbooks.com — and bonus, the discount works on all our guidebooks and the Eater cookbook. Amazon Abrams Barnes & Noble Bookshop Indigo Rizzoli Learn more about Eater’s debut cookbook here, and sign up for the From the Editor newsletter for information on our next slate of travel guides, coming out next spring.
Getty Images / Elizabeth Beard They’re chic, versatile, and anything but lazy — a turntable can be a serious home-dining upgrade A friend recently started making a lazy Susan a mainstay on their dining room table, and I was struck by how smart the idea was; not only did their checkerboard lazy Susan look cool on the table with a beeswax pillar candle and some sleek salt and pepper shakers, but when it came time to eat, a flight of chutneys and sauces was just as easily assembled on its surface and spun to reach every dinner guest. Plus, it made cleaning the table itself super easy (just lift the Susan). I remember thinking, Why doesn’t everyone have one of these? When I hear the words “lazy Susan,” I usually think of afternoon tea spreads at my grandmother’s house, or of the Lucite lazy Susans in my apartment’s pull-out cabinets. (While there is debate over how they got their name, one popular — although unsubstantiated — theory is that the term was coined by Thomas Jefferson.) However, in addition to circulating cucumber sandwiches or expertly stashing my vinegar selection, lazy Susans — which really should be called clever Susans, given their helpful design — have also become a mainstay of Chinese restaurants in the US and abroad, and deserve to find a center-stage place on your home dining table. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levity Interiors - Vintage & More (@levityinteriors) As someone who is frequently reorganizing their kitchen and dining room, this coherency of form and function has me hooked, and after seeing how much a lazy Susan enhanced my friend’s home dining experience, I was ready to draft up a few requirements for an ideal dining table lazy Susan. The terms were that I should invest in noble or rustic materials such as marble, stone, and wood; reserve the clear plastic lazy Susans for cabinet storage; look for designs that would look great on your table even if they were naked; and remember that you can even layer lazy Susans (think, a 9-inch wood lazy Susan atop a 14-inch marble lazy Susan). Most importantly, remember that a lazy Susan isn’t just your saving grace from “Can you pass the salt?” fatigue. It’s also a place to showcase your bud vases, trinkets, and whatever else your heart desires. Wood touches can look chic (even when they’re affordable) For a lighter look, this bamboo option A gorgeous way to hutch your everyday seasonings A wood lazy Susan with wrought iron-like details A little French charm Check, please A rustic take on check You’d like a little height (but not too much) You love dirty martinis This amber cast glass masterpiece You own a Patrick Nagel print Invest in a table with a built-in lazy Susan Happy spinning.
We asked four chefs to share their best food processors for slicing, dicing, and beyond, and for tips on how these workhorse appliances can make cooking way easier When it comes to kitchen essentials, the chef’s knife gets all the glory; it’s romantic, precise, even a little dangerous. But if there’s one tool that quietly does the heavy lifting in many professional kitchens, it’s the food processor. Food processors are perhaps the least sexy of the kitchen appliances. They don’t demand the same level of skill as a knife, nor gleam when the light hits them just so, but for many chefs, they are indispensable — a machine that saves hours of prep and transforms your kitchen’s capacity for efficiency. Cooking is essentially a litany of small, precise, and seemingly endless tasks. It is in these tasks — the chopping, the mixing, the mincing — that the food processor shines. Virtually every element of mise en place can be expedited with a great food processor. I spoke to four Los Angeles chefs about their favorite food processors — and what they use them for. Our experts: Jeff Strauss, chef-owner of OyBar and Jeff’s Table Balo Orozco, chef and founder of Sunset Cultures Kat Turner, chef-partner at Highly Likely Karla Subero Pittol, chef and owner of Chainsaw What should I use my food processor for? What shouldn’t you use your food processor for? Depending on the size and power of your food processor, it can be used for everything from making dips, sauces, spreads, and soups to finely mincing vegetables and herbs, blending batters, and chopping nuts. “We make a ton of aioli,” says Strauss. “Three kinds at OyBar and two at Jeff’s Table. We also shred a ton of cheese for burgers and quesadillas, and cabbage for sauerkraut.” At his restaurants, the food processor is an in dependable helpmate, a machine that streamlines prep work in ways no knife ever could. He’s not alone in that sentiment. Turner’s team at Highly Likely uses their food processor to prep hot sauce for fermentation every week. Pittol has cracked the code on making all her butter crust doughs in a food processor, a shortcut that has saved her untold hours of labor. Orozco, who often prepares food for large events, relies on it for sheer efficiency, saying, “For an event of 60, 100, or 400 people, I’ll use a food processor because it’s more efficient.” Orozco even relies on his for drying and breaking down herbs for kombucha production. Food processors aren’t just about saving time; they can also unlock efficiencies and techniques that would be difficult or impractical by hand. Getty Images Beyond their practicality, food processors also carry a certain nostalgia. Turner’s first memories of a food processor date back to her child. “Growing up, my mother had a special cabinet made with a swing shelf where our food processor lived,” she says. “That was over four decades ago, and it’s still the same food processor that I use every time I visit home.” Strauss recalls a similar childhood moment. “I remember my mom getting her first one in the 1970s—a Cuisinart. When she opened the box, there was this glow on her face like she was staring into the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.” What are the best food processors that chefs recommend? For many chefs, the Robot Coupe R2 is the undisputed king of food processors. Nearly every chef interviewed swore by it as the industry standard. “It’s an absolute workhorse and saves my team a ton of prep hours,” says Kat Turner, chef-partner at Highly Likely in Los Angeles. “If I’m cooking for a friend at home, I might use a mortar and pestle, but for large-scale work, I always use a Robot Coupe,” Oroczo adds. Another big hitter? Breville’s line of Paradice and Sous Chef food processors; Strauss has one in his lineup of daily drivers. The Paradice models are best for large-batch dicing with precision and consistent sizing, while the Sous Chef line is more versatile for slicing, grating, and shredding. What are the best affordable food processors? While a Robot Coupe R2 may be a must-have for commercial kitchens, the vast majority of us don’t have a $1,200 budget for adding a food processor to our arsenal. Cuisinart’s food processors are perhaps the most ubiquitous of any brand’s, found in kitchens minimal and luxurious, lowbrow and highbrow. That’s likely because they’re reliable, versatile, uncomplicated, and super-affordable, with the smallest models starting at under $30. Plus, the bowl can be thrown in the dishwasher for easy cleaning. Ninja, known for its powerful blenders, has also released a popular, powerful line of food processors. At under $150, its 1200-watt Professional XL processor is probably the best bang for your buck for a machine of its size (12 cups!), with ultra-sharp blades that uniformly mix batter, whip up purees, or slice paper-thin vegetables for ratatouille. Already own a Vitamix and don’t want to add another appliance to your crowded cupboards? Vitamix makes a food processor attachment to convert your blender into a processor in seconds, and it’s equipped with Self-Detect technology for safe, seamless integration. Using your Vitamix’s own powerful blades and motor, it can shred, dice, chop, knead, and more. If you’re still salivating over the Robot Coupe, longing for its power, we have a pro tip: the more affordable Magimix is the same brand — Robot Coupe is just the name of the professional line. For smaller batches and tasks, you can pick up the Magimix Le Micro for just $137, and while the 4200XL model is still a cool $449, that’s a significant price dip from the R2 (with comparable power and features). How to care for your food processor For those who do keep a food processor in their kitchen, chefs have a few tips to make the most of it. Strauss recommends a simple cleaning hack: use the machine itself to help clean sticky sauces by pulsing a bit of soapy water before washing. Pittol warns that plastic bowls absorb strong odors — garlic, turmeric — and can stain, so if possible, it’s best to have separate bowls for sweet and savory applications. She also stresses the importance of obeying the maximum fill line: Ignore it at your peril. Do I really need a food processor or can I get away with doing everything by hand? When should I just use a blender? While food processors absolutely make food prep quicker and easier for many purposes, they’re not perfect. Ask a chef what they don’t use their food processor for, and you’ll likely get the same answer: slicing, fine chopping, and making anything that needs to be truly smooth. You’d think for precision the machines would have us beat but when it comes to getting things perfect, the well-trained chef with knife-in-hand still reigns supreme. Turner avoids using hers for onions, garlic, or shallots because “the blade bruises these delicate babies and can cause bitterness in the final product.” And when it comes to silky-smooth purées? That’s blender territory. Orozco doesn’t bother using a food processor for purées at all. “I know a lot of chefs do, but I use it for rough chopping. If I need something smooth, I’ll use a blender.” And definitely don’t try to whip up a smoothie or soup in a food processor; your blender will offer a superior texture for true liquids. For home cooks, the question of whether a food processor is a must-have tool is more divisive. Some chefs insist that every kitchen, professional or not, should have one. Strauss calls it “absolutely” essential, particularly for making aioli or homemade mayo, which he considers a game-changer. Pittol loves its time-saving potential, especially for shredding cheese, while Turner relies on hers for chopping nuts, making pie dough, and whipping up compound butters. But not everyone is convinced. Even Turner, who swears by hers in a restaurant setting, acknowledges that some things are simply better done by hand. “There’s something witchy and magical about grinding spices and aromatics by hand,” she says. At the end of the day, food processors are exactly what the title suggests—a workhorse. They don’t replace knife skills, they won’t give you perfect slices, and they won’t create silky-smooth textures. But for professionals, they’re indispensable, and even for home cooks, they can free up time and make cooking more joyful by taking over the most tedious tasks—if you know how to use them right. To totally misquote a line from Guy Ritchie’s 1998 gangster classic film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: “It’s knives for show, and food processors for a pro.”
https://punchdrink.com/articles/best-new-bartenders-2025-nomination-form/
Andrea D’Aquino New books from Molly Yeh, Hailee Catalano, Meera Sodha, Calvin Eng, and more will whet your appetite for a new season I don’t know about you, but the first two months of 2025 have felt like two years. We live in uncertain and, ahem, interesting times, and as such, small but dependable pleasures have started to assume the role of a life raft. This spring’s roster of new cookbooks is no exception: seeing these titles brings the same hope and joy as a crocus fighting its way out of the hard earth. Publishers seem to know this: that we are collectively in search of something novel, invigorating, and capable of conjuring bright horizons yet to be explored. And so they deliver, greeting the season with a tidal wave of new titles. Fishing out our favorites is always a painstaking but enjoyable task, and this was certainly the case with the following 20 titles. They include highly personal explorations of Pakistani and West African cuisines; a rollicking California road trip; an ode to third culture cooking; a seasonal, vegetable-forward take on Filipino food; smart and wildly creative ways to level up your baking; a paean to tinned fish; and the return of a beloved cookbook author. Taken as a whole, they make an exceptional life raft, one that will not only keep you afloat but also set you on a course for new and welcome adventures. — Rebecca Flint Marx The Fishwife Cookbook: Delightful Tinned Fish Recipes for Every Occasion Becca Millstein and Vilda Gonzalez HarperCollins, out now The appeal of tinned fish lies in its shelf-stable convenience and ease: Pop it open and mix it with mayo for a sandwich, put it atop a cracker, or just eat it straight out of the can. So do we really need a cookbook dedicated to something that’s not supposed to require much… cooking? The Fishwife Cookbook makes the case that we do, much in the way its namesake brand has made the case for premium tinned fish sold in eye-catching illustrated boxes. Written by Fishwife co-founder Becca Millstein and recipe developer Vilda Gonzalez, it’s an approachable book that provides plenty of creative ways for rethinking tinned fish, from a quick meal of radish, butter, and anchovies on toast to more involved dishes like sardine and pesto pasta and a smoked salmon chowder. The cookbook truly clicked for me in its cocktail party section, which inspired me to use tinned fish as an easy yet impressive way to feed a group. Brining anchovies in vodka and using the leftover anchovy oil to infuse the spirit for a martini is inspired, and the salmon and lemon creme fraiche dip I whipped up was far more impressive than stirring ranch powder into sour cream for the same amount of work. A friend brought over the crispy potatoes with herbed yogurt and tinned trout, which was devoured in minutes. One note: Since tinned fish can throw off the salt level, particularly in dishes you’re used to cooking, I recommend tasting often and erring on the side of lighter seasoning until the seafood is incorporated. But overall, this is a fun, playful cookbook, and you’ll get the same joy seeing its spine on your bookshelf as you do seeing a Fishwife box in your pantry. And if you need to substitute a more generic grocery store brand? We promise not to tell. — Stephanie Wu Sweet Farm!: More Than 100 Cookies, Cakes, Salads (!), and Other Delights From My Kitchen on a Sugar Beet Farm Molly Yeh William Morrow, out now Molly Yeh’s third cookbook, Sweet Farm, has everything you’d want in a Molly Yeh cookbook. It is colorful and playful like Yeh herself, but full of thoughtfully produced dessert recipes that celebrate Midwestern culture, as well as Yeh’s Jewish and Chinese background and her husband’s Scandinavian roots. When you consider the fact that Yeh lives on a sugar beet farm, and has always been vocal about her obsession with sweets, it’s hard to believe it’s taken her this long to produce a cookbook solely focused on her passion for sugary treats. In its pages you’ll find recipes for classics like cardamom buns and sprinkle cake donuts, along with originals like a take on the Fig Newton with red bean, black sesame babka, and challah hotteok. There’s also an entire chapter devoted to Midwestern dessert salads, including a version of Minnesota’s controversial grape salad (a recipe that should be attempted and tasted before being judged because Yeh’s take, with thinly sliced grapes, is a work of art). It also wouldn’t be a Molly Yeh cookbook without plenty of marzipan, tahini, and coconut, so if you’re one for nutty flavors, especially in desserts, then Yeh’s latest should not be skipped. — Kat Thompson KIN: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen Marie Mitchell W.W. Norton, out now There are some cookbooks that make you feel like you’re in the kitchen with the author. Such is the case with Marie Mitchell’s Kin, a compelling ode to the diverse recipes and culinary bounties of the Caribbean. Mitchell, who is based in the United Kingdom, weaves personal essays from her Jamaican heritage and influences from the region’s surrounding countries — sharing memories of her wedding in Grenada and of the last trip she took there with her mother — documenting generations of cuisine and the emotions the food evokes. There are many traditional offerings here: Jamaican patties with chicken or vegetables, plantain chips, and rice and peas all have a prominent place. Equally notable are Mitchell’s spicy interpretations of mango chutney, ackee and saltfish fritters served in pattie pastry cups, and a zippy pickled spring onion sauce with a generous heaping of mustard seeds. The sauce paired well with the author’s pepper prawns, as well as every other rice and fish dish I found myself adding it to throughout the week. And be sure to indulge in the desserts chapter, where you’ll find poached pears, stout punch ice cream infused with Guinness, and sweet potato pudding, delectable bites of the region’s varied offerings. — Kayla Stewart Coastal: 130 Recipes From a California Road Trip Scott Clark with Betsy Andrews Chronicle Books, out now “I cook in a rented caboose on the side of the highway,” Scott Clark writes in Coastal. It’s a declaration of truth, but not the whole truth: Dad’s Luncheonette, his Half Moon Bay, California, restaurant, sits on a stretch of the mythical Pacific Coast Highway, and the exuberant food that comes out of his tiny kitchen belies its humble surroundings. Clark is a former chef de cuisine at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Saison, and it shows: While his food isn’t fancy, it betrays considerable care and technique. So it follows that the chef’s first cookbook (written with Betsy Andrews) pays homage not only to California’s Central Coast but also the little details that give his food such verve. Framed as a road trip down PCH, it’s packed with the kind of recipes that invite California dreaming: think Dungeness crab rice, chicken-fried morels with red-eye gravy, kale salad with candied kumquats and toasted buckwheat groats. It’s food that’s hearty, gorgeous, and a little bit wild. I went straight for the hen-of-the-woods sandwich, which I’d devoured a few times at Dad’s. As at the restaurant, it’s a simple, rewarding affair: Mushrooms are pan-fried with a slice of cheddar and an egg, then plopped on toasted bread with a slathering of Dad Sauce, a ruinously delicious mayonnaise riff. Clark’s CA Muddy Buddies, a twist on the classic Chex snack, didn’t work quite as well for me — its method for melting-slash-browning the white chocolate yielded white chocolate pebbles — but I still got something worth eating by the handful. As I stuffed my face, I felt happy knowing that even if I can’t make it back to Dad’s anytime soon, I can take a literal page from its playbook and wind up with (to paraphrase Clark) a damned fine meal I made myself. — Rebecca Flint Marx Ghana to the World: Recipes and Stories That Look Forward While Honoring the Past Eric Adjepong with Korsha Wilson Clarkson Potter, March 11 On Top Chef: Kentucky’s 2018 finale, Eric Adjepong cooked a meal he hoped would “tell the story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and how those flavors migrated to the South.” He was eliminated after the first course. But his new book, Ghana to the World, continues the narrative. Written with Korsha Wilson, it joins a handful of fine dining establishments, as well as books like My Everyday Lagos and In Bibi’s Kitchen, in giving West African food its due spotlight in America, highlighting its history as the backbone of so many American and Caribbean staples, and the variety of deep flavors still unfamiliar to so many. As many cookbook authors do nowadays, Adjepong rejects the authoritative for the personal, insisting upfront he speaks only for himself. “The recipes here are dishes you can enjoy,” he writes, “but they’re also stories about how I got creative with the food I grew up with and incorporated things I’ve seen, learned, and tasted … making dishes that are true to their essence while also reflecting my own story as a Ghanaian American.” He even notes which dishes are more modern and which are more traditional with different symbols: a nea onnim for the former, a sankofa, a bird facing backward but flying forward, for the latter. You’ll find Adjepong’s take on his aunt’s stewed turkey wings, rich with brown sugar and thyme, and glazed carrots with benne seeds, alongside more traditional recipes for kelewele and palm nut soup. And of course there’s his family’s version of jollof rice, a dish that there are more versions of than there are people. Adjepong’s is packed with tomatoes, curry powder, and Maggi seasoning, at once authentic and personal. His book shows the divide between the two is never that big. — Jaya Saxena Salt Sugar MSG: Recipes and Stories from a Cantonese American Home Calvin Eng with Phoebe Melnick Clarkson Potter, March 18 If an egg is a litmus test for a chef’s caliber in a professional kitchen, can an egg recipe be the same for a cookbook? Having cooked Calvin Eng’s extra-plush Hong Kong egg scramble, I’m going to say yes. Paired with his taro-root diner hash browns with sweet-and-spicy ketchup, they were unassuming in concept but over-delivered in satisfaction. I often make hash browns and scrambled eggs, but these recipes offered me easy ways to play with both. The key to the egg was just a little cornstarch, evaporated milk, oil, and water, a technique I’ll certainly continue to use, especially when I want a fluffy but stable scramble. In general, my takeaway from the whole book was that Eng has plenty of approachable ideas to make familiar dishes better or more interesting. Eng, who quickly made a name for himself when he opened Bonnie’s, a Brooklyn Cantonese American restaurant, in 2022, offers recipes that rely on known techniques and dishes, but with clever tweaks and flavor upgrades. Shrimp-paste butter takes charred cabbage to another level. Salt and pepper seasoning and a side of Chinese ranch make pork schnitzel newly interesting. And plenty of people know about the magic of silken tofu zhuzhed with soy sauce and chile crisp, but what about a quick beefy black bean garlic sauce? Some dishes might be familiar from Cantonese restaurants or the Bonnie’s menu, like the string beans with fermented fuyu butter, which are my personal favorite. But the key to the book’s subheading — and point of view — is “home” and not “restaurant.” Some chef-authored cookbooks feel fussy in a way that’s ultimately unfriendly to cooking at home, but Salt Sugar MSG feels cheffy in a more accessible way. You’ll be proud of yourself after making an Eng recipe, and pleasantly surprised by how chill it was to get there. — Bettina Makalintal Family Style: Elegant Everyday Recipes Inspired by Home and Heritage Peter Som Harvest, March 18 It is obvious that Peter Som comes from a fashion background because each recipe in his debut cookbook incorporates robust creativity and is presented beautifully. But Family Style is not a book of style over substance: Most of the recipes are tethered to Som’s Chinese heritage, and although he reimagines dishes with flair, they actually work. Such is the case with Som’s crispy tofu paired with an herby scallion pesto, charred carrots glazed in a sticky-sweet gochujang honey butter, and a decadent interpretation of Hong Kong French toast that swaps the traditional peanut butter center for gooey cheese. The dishes feel familiar, but Som’s unique artistic liberties also make them excitingly new. While there is something for everyone in Family Style, it feels especially pertinent to home cooks who love a twist on classics. — KT Pakistan: Recipes and Stories from Home Kitchens, Restaurants, and Roadside Stands Maryam Jillani Hardie Grant, March 25 If, like me, your eyes light up at a cookbook that devotes so many of its pages to contextualizing its recipes within their foodways of origin, Maryam Jillani’s Pakistan deserves a spot on your shelf. This approach is particularly valuable with Pakistani cuisine: As Jillani notes, the gastronomic traditions of her home country are often corralled into a monolith that also includes the vastness of Indian cooking. This does both cuisines and their regional specialties a disservice. In Pakistan, Jillani takes an extremely personal approach to illuminating the extent and creativity of Pakistani cuisine, folding in childhood memories, snippets from conversations with friends, and scene-setting depictions of just how resourceful and generous Pakistani hospitality is. Punctuating the book with a region-by-region overview, she touches on how neighboring countries, conflict, and the forces of economic globalization have all played a role in shaping Pakistan’s cuisine. Alongside perhaps more widely recognizable foods like mutton korma, aloo tikki, and sarson ka saag sit dishes that speak to the diversity of Pakistani food. There’s nihari, the brothy, punchy mutton stew hailing from Delhi, that in Pakistan is made with beef shank. And mamtu, Hunza-style chicken dumplings that are a likely cousin of Uyghur manti. There’s Afghan pulao with its fragrant raisin- and carrot-studded rice, a result of Pakistan’s influx of Afghani refugees in the ’80s. And patrani machhi, the Parsi fish dish wrapped in banana leaf and steamed with coconut chutney and coriander, which traveled alongside this ethno-religious group’s migration to India from Persia. Pakistan’s sweets section is likewise full of recipes that speak to the influence of Portuguese, British, and German trade routes, with custards, cakes, and trifles alongside sweetened rice and fruit-based dishes. Not only a tool for inspiration in the kitchen, Pakistan serves as a reminder that things are often far more beautifully complex than they may seem. — Nat Belkov Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond Beejhy Barhany with Elisa Ung Knopf, April 1 Carl Sagan famously told viewers in Cosmos, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” I’m a little closer to understanding him after cooking the Shabbat fish stew out of Gursha, Beejhy Barhany’s book of recipes and stories about her family, her Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish community, and her Harlem restaurant, Tsion Cafe. The stew required me to first make niter kibbeh, a spiced compound butter, and kulet, the stew base that’s fundamental to Ethiopian dishes like doro wat, which in turn required I make a berbere spice blend, which in turn required me to source a few Ethiopian ingredients. These recipes, nested like dolls, create a learning curve for unfamiliar home cooks, but once surmounted, they provide big rewards: Barhany writes her base recipes in massive quantities, which left me with enough kulet to make various stews with meat and beans all week. The layered recipes also neatly reflect the layers of Barhany’s own story, which she unfurls in the book: her youth in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, her family’s flight from political violence in 1980, their time as refugees in Sudan, their aliyah to Israel, and her eventual move to New York. The foods that sustained the chef throughout her personal journey (and now bring in customers at Tsion Cafe) are interwoven with Barhany’s odes to family members who transmitted culinary traditions and influenced her cooking. Reading and cooking through the book is like constructing her universe from scratch. — Nick Mancall-Bitel Dinner: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes for the Most Important Meal of the Day Meera Sodha Flatiron Books, April 1 For me, a new Meera Sodha cookbook is like a new Nicole Holofcener movie: an occasion I eagerly await and make plans to enjoy as soon as possible. Dinner is Sodha’s third cookbook, and her first in five years. It marks a triumphant return in more ways than one: “A couple of years ago,” Sodha writes, “I lost my love for food. I didn’t want to shop. I didn’t want to cook. I ate for necessity, not pleasure.” It took months for her to find her way back, and when she did, it was through the act of making dinner for her family, rather than cooking in constant pursuit of new dishes and ideas. Sodha’s focus on dinner is a gift for home cooks like me, who similarly view dinner as the most important meal of the day but sometimes run out of ways to keep the spark alive. If I cooked from this book alone for the next year, I doubt I’d ever get bored. Sodha orders it by ingredient but provides alternate tables of contents that group the recipes by season, dish category, and degree of preparation (Quick, Bung It in the Oven, Curries). As an eggplant fiend, I first gravitated towards her recipe for miso eggplants with salt and vinegar kale, then made my way to her tofu, coconut, and green bean curry and her miso butter greens pasta. The latter picks up where Joshua McFadden’s famous kale sauce left off, sauteing the kale in butter with some broccoli, fennel seeds, and chile flakes, then pureeing it with miso into something even more luxurious than its inspiration. Every recipe I tried was simple in execution and complex in flavor and texture, the kind of straightforward, satisfying cooking I’ll return to as often as possible. Welcome back, Meera. We’re glad you’re here. — RFM Third Culture Cooking: Classic Recipes for a New Generation Zaynab Issa Abrams, April 1 The term “third culture kid” was originally coined in the 1950s by the professors John and Ruth Hill Useem, who were studying children living in expat communities. They observed that the children’s behaviors and cultural norms did not align with those of their country of origin, nor necessarily with those of the country they were living in. Instead, there was a third culture, or really, a melding of cultures and norms by those who grew up in between them. “America itself is a third culture nation; especially considering many of us who’ve ended up here and planted roots can’t actually trace our bloodline to this land,” writes Zaynab Issa, former associate food editor at Bon Appétit. “Most of us have a story of migration — if not you, then maybe your great-great-grandparents, but this reality remains: The culture of your homeland has mixed with the culture of others here, creating an entirely new one.” Third Culture Cooking is her ode to her own specific third culture — influenced by her Tanzanian and Indian family — Bushwick restaurants she misses, and flavors she just likes even if there is no obvious biographical connection. Issa’s recipes are mashups of everything you’d want to eat, like red curry orzotto (an easier risotto made with orzo), or coconutty corn inspired by East African makai paka. But what makes the book genius is her guide to cooking through it, separated by mood, cooking time, and menu. Feeling lazy and have an hour? Try the tortellini en preserved lemon brodo. In the mood for something more fun? Make the maple za’atar kettle corn. Planning a brunch? Make Turkish-ish eggs and baklava granola. Issa’s approach makes cooking feel more like a choose-your-own-adventure. But as all third culture kids know, it always was. —JS Snacking Dinners: 50+ Recipes for Low-Lift, High-Reward Dinners That Delight Georgia Freedman Hardie Grant, April 8 The recipes in writer Georgia Freedman’s Snacking Dinners are mostly focused on assembling a bunch of really great ingredients, and that’s by design. The book describes these “snacking dinners” as both “low-lift, high reward” and “the ultimate form of self-care,” and it’s not wrong. It’s wildly simple to arrange frozen Tater Tots, crisped in the oven, on a plate, then shower them in classic okonomiyaki toppings for a dinner that takes about 20 minutes to prepare, but also seems like it could’ve been served at your favorite hip neighborhood restaurant. Freedman’s inclusion of an entire section on creative toasts, which are often where my mind goes when I’m too lazy or tired to even think about dirtying a bunch of pots and pans, is especially compelling. Her book’s salami and white bean toast is an instant addition to my lazy-dinner repertoire, even though it doesn’t taste lazy at all, and I eagerly await the opportunity to make Freedman’s pimento cheese and tomato finger sandwiches during peak tomato season. My one minor quibble with Snacking Dinners is that its recipes require a pretty well-stocked pantry — I didn’t have okonomiyaki sauce for the tots, for example — and I would’ve appreciated a little more detail on what to substitute (or, even better, how to make it myself). Ultimately, though, Freedman’s recipes feel like a really fresh update to what some might call “girl dinner” — instead of subsisting on multiple handfuls of popcorn, you can now reach for an upgrade. — Amy McCarthy Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake Nicole Rucker Knopf, April 8 I have to admit that I went into Los Angeles pastry chef Nicole Rucker’s new cookbook with a whole lot of skepticism. I was skeptical of her “Cold Butter Method,” in which she incorporates the butter in her cookie recipes into dry flour instead of using the traditional method of creaming butter and sugar together — until it produced the fluffiest, chewiest snickerdoodles I’d ever baked. Rucker’s second cookbook is positively replete with classic desserts — vegan chocolate cream pie, sunken fruit cake, and high-protein banana bread among them — that make use of counterintuitive techniques and lessons learned from a long career in the pastry kitchen, and they’re all worth a try. I was also skeptical that Rucker’s unique recipe for London Fog brownies, in which white chocolate is whipped into a fluffy, tea-infused base and nearly a full cup of chopped dark chocolate is scattered on top, would work out. But they were a revelation, complex and full of flavor and boasting a dreamily tender texture. Rucker’s book repeatedly proved that my skepticism in her unconventional wisdom was totally misplaced. If, like me, you just trust her, you’ll produce some incredibly compelling bakes. — AM By Heart: Recipes to Hold Near and Dear Hailee Catalano Clarkson Potter, April 8 Hailee Catalano is one of my favorite cooking creators. Catalano’s restaurant background comes through in her technique and her recipes, which have sophisticated flourishes and a strong sense of self. The hallmarks of a “Cafe Hailee” dish? Pecorino Romano, Calabrian chiles, herbs, crunchy vegetables, basting, good bread. Catalano’s skill and sincerity come through in By Heart, a cookbook that feels neither showy nor trendy but timeless. By Heart is made up of many recipes that I can see becoming staples in my cooking, like a creamy, spicy pasta sauce made of steamed-then-blended carrots; cumin lamb-inspired beets with cumin-seed butter, chile crisp, and black vinegar; and slow-roasted salmon with fennel two ways. I think a lot of cooks will have similar reactions to By Heart. Catalano excels at juxtaposition, often finishing a heavy or creamy dish with something tart, bright, or crunchy, which keeps her food interesting even many bites in (that carrot pasta, for example, calls for turning the carrot tops into a lemony finishing sauce). There’s enough variation in By Heart that you could make this a cookbook that you work through for weeks, with chapters on snacks, pizza, sandwiches, sweets, and sourdough bread. In all, it’s a highly cookable book with recipes that’ll give you something to be excited about every season — fried squash blossom mozzarella sticks in the summer, pot roast au poivre with charred onions in the winter — and enough emphasis on technique and efficiency to make you feel like you’re becoming a better cook. — BM In the Kusina: My Seasonal Filipino Cooking Woldy Reyes and Fujio Emura Chronicle, April 8 Filipino food is not often described as light, which you might chalk up to the fact that many of our most famous dishes, especially abroad, are meat-centric celebration foods. The New York City-based chef Woldy Reyes, however, is known for his refreshingly light, vegetable-forward approach to Filipino flavors and cuisine. He employs lots of fresh herbs, crunchy vegetables, and creamy, often coconut-based sauces in the catering that he does for stylish brands and events. In this, Reyes’s debut cookbook, he offers recipes and tips for bringing his approach into your home kitchen — a perspective that I think will give exciting new insight to both pre-existing fans of Filipino food and people who love fresh, seasonal vegetables and want ways to work with them. I found Reyes’s vegetarian riff on bagoong, the fermented Filipino seafood paste, particularly illuminating: Reyes makes it with slow-cooked garlic, porcini mushroom powder, and coconut jam, and then uses it to fortify a coconut milk-based spaghetti sauce or serve as a dip for crudites. As many cookbooks do, Reyes takes a flexible approach to eating mostly vegetables: There is no meat or seafood here, but he does occasionally call for fish sauce. Reyes’s book is structured around seasonal produce and he uses it well. Filipino spaghetti — usually a meaty, heavy dish — has the requisite banana ketchup, but burst cherry tomatoes give it levity and natural sweetness. Depending on the time of year, Reyes’s lumpia is made with chickpeas, asparagus, or kabocha squash that’s flavored with spicy miso. And instead of braising green beans to make adobo, he chars them on a grill and finishes them with adobo vinaigrette. Reyes might be taking Filipino food in a lighter direction than what many of us are familiar with, but throughout In the Kusina, he proves that this doesn’t have to come at the expense of big, bold flavors. — BM The Regional Italian Cookbook: Recipes From the Silver Spoon The Silver Spoon Kitchen Phaidon, April 10 Tradition taught by way of regional variances takes the lead in the Silver Spoon’s Regional Italian Cookbook, where early sections like “Italy is Pasta,” assure the reader that they’re up for a master class in the inner workings of a proper Italian recipe collection — with soft images to place you in the lush European country to boot. A journey through Sicily and Italy’s north, south, and center are accompanied by flavor guides defined by region, and the recipes that have endured within them for generations. For a comforting weeknight dinner, I recommend perusing recipes found in the country’s south, preserved in regions like Molise, Campania, Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata, and Abruzzo, where “cooking is what it used to be,” and regional tradition is repeated in chitarra with meatballs and “the seven virtues” minestrone made with legumes found in the pantry during spring cleaning. The cookbook has handy green symbols that indicate whether a recipe is vegetarian, vegan, gluten-, dairy-, or nut-free, making it easy for readers who follow alternative diets to find the dish that works for them. Among a wide selection of recipes that detail the variances of the country’s cuisine, you might consider an aromatic and indulgent saffron risotto inspired by the rich land of Lombardy, or sweet and sour sardines from Veneto. For a forthcoming celebration, I have my eye on an option that equally prioritizes beauty and taste: The Festive meringue cake, typically made on Good Friday and enjoyed on Easter Sunday, is dotted with colored sprinkles and appears worthy of the most jubilant gatherings. — KS Tanoreen: Palestinian Home Cooking in Diaspora Rawia Bishara Interlink Books, April 22 In the heart of Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge is Tanoreen, Rawia and Jumana Bishara’s ode to their homeland of Palestine. The mother and daughter have become household names for their generous, cross-cultural menu, which is home to delicacies like lamb kibbeh, cheesy, sugary kanafeh, and a beautiful fried cauliflower steak. This expanded edition of Rawia’s first cookbook, Olives, Lemons and Za’atar, is published by Interlink Publishing, a Palestinian-owned publishing house based in Massachusetts. Its recipes detail Rawia’s upbringing in Nazareth and the lessons she picked up as she migrated to her present home in Brooklyn and built a community there. I was comforted in the early morning weekend hours by her take on meat and eggs: a creamy, gently spiced, brunch-friendly creation Rawia remembers her dad making on Saturday mornings. I enjoyed the earthy egg and lamb mixture as I read more about her culinary perspective, which takes inspiration from her Palestinian heritage and the friendships she’s cultivated across the Middle East. Important cooking tips lay within Bishara’s headnotes; she tells you, for example, how to ask a butcher to process a lamb leg, and which types of onions will work just right for Palestinian couscous, so do take heed of her guidance. — KS Tahini Baby: Bright, Everyday Recipes That Happen to Be Vegetarian Eden Grinshpan Avery, April 22 A recipe developer-cum-lifestyle influencer in the mode of Alison Roman and Molly Baz, Eden Grinshpan first landed on the map with her Cooking Channel show Eden Eats, but grew a bigger following on Instagram. (She’s also the host of Top Chef Canada.) Now she’s out with her second cookbook, Tahini Baby, a vegetarian-by-accident volume dedicated to tahini and its sibling Middle Eastern ingredients. Like those published by Roman and Baz, the book leans on Grinshpan’s aspirational brand of laid-back cool-girl cooking, one that combines an approachable voice with a swoony sun-dappled aesthetic. Yet for all the lifestyle-influencer clichés, Grinshpan has carved out her own space as the millennial cool girl of the Israeli Jewish culinary cinematic universe. Some home cooks will be familiar with — and perhaps initially unexcited by — what Tahini Baby seems to offer, with its takes on hummus, zhoug, toum, maqloubeh, and other Levantine staples. Like Jerusalem, Zahav, and Falastin before it, Tahini Baby calls upon ingredients like pomegranate molasses, sumac, za’atar, harissa, Aleppo pepper, and Grinshpan’s beloved tahini paste, to an almost repetitious degree. But Grinshpan’s recipes — spread across a daunting 300+ pages — are genuinely good, bringing those well-loved ingredients together in new ways for delicious results. Grinshpan’s Moroccan harira soup is brighter and zestier than those with Moroccan grandmothers may expect, in a good way; her take on asparagus uses crispy za’atar oil, toasted walnuts, and a tangy tahini vinaigrette that elevates what could otherwise be a ho-hum veggie side dish. Sometimes the simplicity of Grinshpan’s recipes is deceptive, with ingredient lists stretching to Ottolenghian lengths and recipe steps nested within other recipe steps; and sometimes the millennial food-speak can overwhelm (“garlicky,” “herby,” “tomatoey,” and even “pickle-y” make appearances). But for those who love Middle Eastern flavors and are running low on ideas for what to do with that harissa, zhoug, or tahini in the pantry, Tahini Baby is a fun, fresh, aesthetically pleasing entrant to the category. — Ellie Krupnick Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War Hawa Hassan Ten Speed Press, May 13 In Hawa Hassan’s second book, the author and owner of Basbaas Foods takes readers on a journey through eight countries — Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, and Yemen — impacted by war, displacement, resilience, and community preservation and development. It’s a structure similar to the one Hassan used in her first cookbook, the James Beard Award-winning In Bibi’s Kitchen, where she guided readers through eight African countries that touch the Indian Ocean through the lens of grandmothers. In her sophomore work, Hassan leans on her own experience with displacement and migration, beginning with her origins as a four-year-old in war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, and taking home cooks on a journey to her current home in Brooklyn. She pairs her own experiences traveling in each country with important historical context explaining their various internal conflicts. Along the way she meets a host of compelling individuals, including families, entrepreneurs, street vendors, and activists who offer superb recipes for dishes such as Afghan mantu stuffed with beef or lamb; madesu, a hearty stewed red bean dish from the Democratic Republic of Congo; and halabessa, a hot chickpea broth popular in Egypt that “lands somewhere between a soup and a drink.” Hassan carries both the personal understanding of what many of her sources have experienced and the culinary expertise necessary to take home cooks on an emotional journey through the stories and recipes carried across home, border, and time. They add up to a flavorful compendium of global recipes, all of which illustrate the abundance found in countries that are far too often defined by horrors endured rather than beautiful histories, communities, and cuisines preserved. — KS What Can I Bring?: Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life Casey Elsass Union Square, May 20 For anyone who thinks pulling up to a gathering with just a bottle of wine or six-pack of beer is boring but doesn’t know what else to bring, Casey Elsass has answers — lots of them. His latest cookbook is broken up into eight sections with 75 recipes perfect for every type of party: late-night ragers (bring the cocktail Jell-O shots), a pleasant brunch with your book club (gochujang and cheddar scones are perfect in this scenario), an elegant dinner party (the lemon bar cake will wow here), and a game day tailgate (any dip in the dip section will do). What Can I Bring is a solo endeavor for Elsass, who has previously co-authored or ghostwritten over 20 cookbooks like Dolci! and Second Generation. With his experience as a cookbook veteran, Elsass ensures that his recipes are approachable — there’s even a cornbread where the batter is entirely made in a blender — but still possesses a wow factor that is sure to please a crowd. His book’s last chapter, Present Moment, is also all about homemade food and drink gifts (for the stubborn host who insists you don’t bring a plate). It features recipes for plum and walnut jam, hot fudge, and even oyster crackers. Perhaps the best gift, however, is a copy of the cookbook itself. — KT Andrea D’Aquino is an illustrator and author based in New York City.
Eater Staff They’re easy to clean, easy on the eyes, and, of course, they’re like security guards for your tabletops As a nesting enthusiast who made it through most of my adult life with a collection of passed-down and thrifted furniture, protecting wood surfaces has never really been my top concern. But now that I’m in my 40th year on Earth — and the owner of a brand new coffee table — I’m happy to say that while some parts of my personality have mellowed, others have been sharpened to a fine point, chief among them being my instinct to make sure there’s a coaster under every glass. Now, I’m following my party guests around, coasters in hand, just daring them to set down a sweaty glass for more than a second, lest I tank the value of my newly acquired table. It follows, then, that I would spend hours of my time exhaustively researching coasters that not only fulfilled their duty to the wooden tabletop but provided the perfect adornment to my well-curated tablescape, too. My goal was to find coasters that protected surfaces, released easily from the glass, were easy to clean, and looked fabulous. I discovered stellar examples in materials that ranged from felt to terracotta to tumbled marble. The chic, practical coasters I found combine form and function to keep your coffee table or any surface ring-free while looking absolutely charming. You want to feel like you’re in a Nancy Meyers movie Is it cake, or is it coaster? You love a retro conversation pit vibe Get in on the chrome dishware trend These stoneware coasters are little works of art Scalloped edges can really frame a glass You’re looking for a workhorse coaster set Start collecting beautiful tiles It’s the Year of the Snake For the extra dirty martini-lover You yearn for the romance of Italy You love minimalist look of the Getty Museum
Netflix Meghan Markle fans can anticipate more episodes of the recently released Netflix show later this year Was there ever a doubt that With Love, Meghan, Meghan Sussex’s (née Markle, tyvm) Netflix homemaking show, was going to get a second season? Whether you love it or think it’s a tragic attempt at relatability from someone who is thoroughly isolated from everyday life, Sussex is a bona fide celebrity that people clearly can’t get enough of. So yes, there will be a Season 2 this fall, as Netflix announced today, and as Sussex noted on her Instagram with an ASMR montage of Season 1 highlights. (Sorry to everyone with misophonia.) Viewing figures for With Love haven’t been released yet (the company says those will arrive March 11), but initial reviews have skewed negative. While some have appreciated the Californianess of it all, others say it hasn’t delivered on its own stated goals of relatability and fun. “Meghan comes across as constantly worried about what people will think, and because of it, the show can neither flaunt her unusual life, nor can it embrace legitimate ordinariness,” writes Kathryn VanArendonk in Vulture. Daniel D’Addario of Variety says, “there isn’t enough here to justify the running time, nor its star’s belief we’ll keep watching.” As royals reporter Patricia Tremble noted in a Substack review, it seems designed to be background TV. None of that really matters though. In 2020, the Sussexes signed a $100 million deal with Netflix to produce shows and movies for the next five years. As Hollywood Reporter notes, however, their output hasn’t been that impressive — aside from Harry & Meghan, the docuseries that covered the couple’s relationship and departure from royal life, they have not produced any major hits, and one animated children’s show was cancelled before it even aired. But given that background TV is exactly what Netflix wants, it’s no surprise that the show will be back for a second season. As the Wrap puts it, “You either know that this is the show for you or you’re not interested, and all of that will be wrapped up in your preconceptions of a woman who has come to symbolize more than one mere mortal ever should.” Sussex also recently updated the site for her product line, As Ever (formerly American Riviera Orchard), with soon-to-be-available items like crepe mix, tea, and jam, though prices aren’t listed yet. Already, the Standard reports that British grocery store Waitrose has seen a spike in searches for the ingredients featured on the show, including a supposed 3,200 percent increase in interest for “truffle salt.” We’ll just have to wait to know how much a tin of As Ever “flower sprinkles” costs — and whether they get yet another moment in the spotlight in Season 2.
Lille Allen Our expert gummy tasters provide a definitive ranking of the absolute best gummy candy one can experience, from classic (Haribo) to niche (Peelerz?) Who ever could guessed how vast, varied, and devout the world of gummy candy would become? According to one analysis, the gummy candy category is already worth nearly $500 million, and it’s expected to grow into a $750 million business by 2032, proof positive that our obsession has no signs of slowing. And what’s not to love? They’re sweet, they’re chewy, dentists hate them (or maybe love them, since candy gives them business), and they’re impossible to stop eating, especially for anyone who loves sinking their teeth into that QQ texture (a Taiwanese term for that bouncy, boba-esque chewing experience we love). So, how does one rank the “best” gummy candies, when there are literally thousands of varieties out there? Well, Eater is home to a few enthusiastic and judgmental gummy aficionados. At every gas station and airport candy store, for instance our staff writer Amy McCarthy is on the hunt for the best — and weirdest — gummy candies from the United States and beyond. She has a deep appreciation for German confectioner Haribo and its iconic gummy bears and really enjoys the current proliferation of foamy, sour Swedish gummies. Meanwhile, our senior commerce editor Hilary Pollack is straight-up otaku about hard-to-find gummies, ordering them from strange corners of the internet and falling deep into #CandyTok for tips on lesser-known varieties. As such, we feel highly qualified to bestow upon the internet this highly opinionated ranking of the best gummy candies out there, listed in descending order. Factors we considered: Flavor (balance of sweetness and tartness; realism of fruit flavors); bounciness and chewiness; and overall texture (overall mouthfeel when not chewing). Disagree? Too bad, make your own list. 15. Haribo Goldbears This classic really sets the standard for what a gummy bear should be, which makes sense considering that Haribo founder Hans Riegel invented the gummy bear in 1922. The texture is a little toothier than your average generic-brand imitator, and the pineapple (clear) flavor is especially compelling. Iconic and timeless! — Amy McCarthy, reporter 14. Trolli Sour Brite Crawlers If you’d asked me to make this list 20 years ago, when I was a mouthy 17-year-old with a penchant for candy, I’d have put Trolli’s Sour Brite Crawlers at the top of my list. And while my palate has expanded since then, there’s still no denying the appeal of these dual-flavored worms coated in sugar and citric acid for the perfect amount of sour-sweet punch. — AM 13. Haribo Happy Cola Cola-flavored candies have long been popular in Germany, and in 1965, Haribo introduced its Happy-Cola candy, and an icon was born. These dense, stretchy gummies do taste shockingly like a fizzy can of Coca-Cola, just without all the burps — with a tangy, caramel flavor that’s pure nostalgia. — AM 12. Life Savers Gummies (Wild Berries, specifically) When Life Savers Gummies were first released in 1992, I was a very small child with a dad who was addicted to classic butterscotch Life Savers hard candies, so I was practically born allegiant to the brand. The five-flavor Life Savers Gummies did nothing for me even as a kid, but the Wild Berries mix has always been exceptional, and, in my opinion, severely underrated in the modern candysphere. The Wild Berries flavor developers went above and beyond; this isn’t just blueberry, raspberry, and cherry, or whatever. There are six flavors in this mix: strawberry, red raspberry, blackberry, black raspberry, white grape, and cherry berry. It’s very femme, very romantic, very 1992, actually — this was the year that Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” and Celine Dion’s “If You Asked Me To” topped the charts and that doesn’t feel like a coincidence, astrologically or culturally. Beyond the flavor, the texture is flexible, stretchy — unafraid to be a little rubbery. You’re at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and need a mood boost, these are going to save you. And put Annie Lennox on when you get back in the car. — Hilary Pollack, senior commerce editor 11. Bubs Goody Sour Ovals The Swedish candy trend shows no signs of slowing down, and that’s a good thing — the Swedes know a thing or two about making excellent gummy candy, especially if you’re into sour stuff. But my actual favorite are Bubs Sour Ovals, a soft, foamy gummy available in tons of compelling flavors, including banana-caramel and strawberry-pomegranate. — AM 10. Albanese Peach Rings Those few weeks each year when fresh peaches are abundant and in-season are all too fleeting, and the rest of the time, I have to make due with peach rings. The fake peach flavor in peach rings is, somehow, better than most other fake fruit flavors, and Indiana-born candy purveyor Albanese makes the very best. Their peach rings are perfectly chewy and boast a more sophisticated, peachier flavor than the average iteration of this beloved gummy candy. — AM 9. Sour Patch Kids An OG in the American gummy scene, Sour Patch Kids have been on the market since 1985, and they still hit. In middle school, I peeled off the inside of my mouth countless times sucking all the citric acid and sugar from these sour-then-sweet candies, and I regret nothing. Now, I’m more likely to grab the Sour Patch Kids watermelons, an improvement on the original Kids in both texture and flavor. — AM 8. Haribo Sour S’ghetti The real innovation in Haribo’s Sour S’ghetti is its now-beloved shape — long, noodle-y gummies coated in sour sugar. Slurping actual spaghetti noodles is fun, sure, but it’s even better when the noodles are made out of candy. — AM 7. Amos Peelerz Amos are more new-school innovators in the candy world, producing some very interesting products such as jelly-filled Mermaid Jewels and “4D” strawberries that are dazzlingly beautiful (although I find those gummies a bit too firm, which is why they’re not on this list). Peelerz are really Amos’s greatest offering, and as their name suggests, they are gummies that you peel like a fruit, albeit not terribly easily. They can also be eaten whole, and the texture is phenomenal — a very smooth, silky gummy — and the fruit flavors are very true to form and potent, especially the mango, which suggests an Alphonso. One of the top ingredients is mango jam, which is impressive, given that the vast majority of gummies on the market are artificially flavored. That being said, I’m gonna warn you right now: They are weird. While oddly satisfying, there is also something surgical about the peeling process that makes me feel a bit weird inside. That being said, they are a very original gummy. — HP 6. Haribo Watermelon Yeah, there’s a lot of Haribo on this list — and that’s because Haribo gummies are among the best. Few gummies can compete with Haribo Watermelon, which combine the fluffy texture of a marshmallow with the classic bouncy interior of a gummy bear into a candy that’s dangerously easy to eat an entire bag of in one sitting. — AM 5. Haribo Pico Balla What sets Pico Balla apart from other Haribo gummies is that it’s basically a finely cut-up fondant-filled licorice tube. Yes, you get the chewy exterior of the tube offers the gummy experience you seek, but it’s the creamy, sugary filling (dare I say it’s marshmallow-adjacent?) that provides a truly lovely, luxurious-feeling contrast. Each tiny candy actually has two distinct fillings combined, so you might get one bite that’s lemon-banana and another that’s apple-raspberry. Sensational, truly. (Yes, Haribo is really dominating this list, but it’s a story about gummy candy; what do you expect?) —HP 4. Albanese Gummy Bears Haribo may have invented the gummy bear, but Albanese perfected them. The flavor assortment, which includes watermelon, pink grapefruit, and mango, is much more compelling than the usual cherry-orange-green-apple offering, and the soft, bouncy texture is extremely satisfying. — AM 3. Kasugai Muscat Gummies When it comes to QQ texture, Kasugai gummies absolutely reign supreme in my book. They are soft and pillowy with excellent bounce and a silky outer coating, and the flavor selection is also unparalleled, with lychee, yuzu, and kiwi among the offerings. It is the muscat, however, that I originally fell in love with as a child, and to which I remain most loyal; for those who have not had muscat grapes, they are larger, more floral, muskier, and far sweeter than an average green table grape, with a complex aroma that is as akin to a lychee as it is to what we think of as “grape flavor.” The muscat flavor is refreshing yet conveys yearning, with a mouthwatering, honey-like quality. These gummies are truly elite status. — HP 2. eFrutti Apple Trio You think you’ve had good gummy candy, and then you stumble upon eFrutti’s Sweet & Sour Apple Trio and your whole life changes. While apple wouldn’t necessarily my go-to flavor for any candy, here, it is the truly appley appleness that makes this candy inconceivably good. It is not one, but three apple varieties combined in each pouch (thus the Trio): Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. You can actually distinctively taste the different floral notes and sweet-tart moments of each distinct variety. I have zero interest in eating a Granny Smith apple whole, but here, I come to appreciate its edge in tartness, while also appreciating how it refreshingly balances the more sugary apple flavor of Honeycrisp. Also, great bounciness, great QQ, a real sink-your-teeth-in gummy texture. Do not sleep on these. — HP 1. Nerds Gummy Clusters Sitting atop this assortment of excellent gummies is the One True Gummy King: Nerds Gummy Clusters. The flavors are great, yes, but the combination of crunchy Nerds and chewy gummy center is a revelation. And sure, you might say these are just chopped up bits of Nerds Ropes, but real gummy enthusiasts know that Gummy Clusters are the pinnacle of the form. — AM It’s hard to describe the alchemy that makes Nerds Gummy Clusters such a transcendent candy. They are the true manifestation of what I was promised by watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory as a child. They are crunchy yet yielding, chewy yet multidimensional, undoubtedly sweet yet also tart and oddly balanced. They are “fruity,” and yet a flavor all their own that’s like the elusive payoff I always imagined drinking strawberry watermelon Bath & Body Works body spray would taste like. I would give anything to have been a fly on the wall (or actually, a taster) for the research and development phase that resulted in this candy. Greater than the sum of its part, and a triumph. — HP There you have it: the one true ranking of gummy candies. Now go stock your candy drawer.
Lille Allen/Eater Whether it’s air-fried in filets or roasted in large pieces with butter, salmon is a reliable home kitchen staple Kat Thompson is the associate editor of Eater at Home, covering home cooking and baking, cookbooks, and kitchen gadgets. Diners in the United States can’t get enough salmon: It’s generally right behind shrimp as the country’s most-consumed seafood. Quick-cooking, flavorful all on its own, and amenable to all kinds of marinades and cooking styles, it’s no wonder salmon is such a reliable fish to have on-hand. Whether it’s for a weeknight cooking or an impressive dinner party main, these are the salmon recipes Eater editors love the most. Air Fryer Salmon Lisa Bryan, Downshiftology Salmon is the thing that got me to understand why so many people love their air fryers so much. (That, and making the crispiest nuggets very quickly.) I generally follow an approach like this one from the blog Downshiftology: cook for about 8 to 10 minutes at 400 degrees, or until the salmon just flakes apart and is kissed with a slight brown crust. I love that I don’t have to wait around for the air fryer to heat up, unlike the oven. I also appreciate the technique of brushing Dijon on top of the fish, though the same cooking parameters work even if you swap out the Dijon for another glaze or opt for a marinade instead. If all the air fryer did well was nuggets and salmon, both perfect and quick, I think I would still love it. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter Sesame Salmon Bowls Kay Chun, NYT Cooking With two young kids in the house, there aren’t many meals that satisfy everyone in my family. Either I’m pushing something a little too fussy, or — as is more often the case — I’m eating some form of chicken finger or pasta every night. This staple recipe is one of the few exceptions, and is somehow also chock full of nutritious stuff and simple enough for a busy weeknight. It’s a real unicorn of a dish, and well-worth its permanent spot in our weekly repertoire. There’s nothing to it, really: The salmon cooks right on top of the vinegary rice, and then it’s all scooped into bowls topped with avocado, cucumbers, and a sesame slaw. I now improvise by adding whatever crowd-pleasing veggies I happen to have on hand: edamame, shredded carrots, roasted broccoli — so far, nothing’s failed. Garnished with torn toasted nori sheets (I use store-bought seaweed snacks), the flavor profile hints at sushi, which we all love, and is endlessly flexible. I’ve even taken to adding a squiggle of Kewpie and sriracha sauce to drive the point home. — Lesley Suter, special projects editor Salmon with Lentils and Mustard-Herb Butter Shelley Wiseman, Epicurious This recipe, which is on a semi-regular rotation in my household, is the one by which I judge other salmon preparations. While there’s not much downtime in the prep, the recipe is accurately timed to 40 minutes and reads like a cascading waterfall, with each step flowing seamlessly into the next. Most importantly, it offers a lovely balance of flavors, thanks in part to the butter that’s incorporated into each step of cooking (and gives the salmon a nice, buttery crust), as well as the compound butter that tops everything off. Each velvety bite concludes with a sharp hit of lemon and mustard. Although the recipe calls for unsalted butter, I like to use salted. — Brenna Houck, cities manager Buttered Salmon with Red Onions, Capers, and Dill Alison Roman, A Newsletter I like to call this recipe “Party Salmon.” It’s one of my go-to’s when I want to make a show-stopping centerpiece for a few guests — there’s something special and intentional about going to a fish market to choose a large piece of fish for an occasion. One of the recipe’s unique qualities is that (as Roman implies) it’s bagel-inspired, as it uses generous portions of capers, dill, red onion — and who doesn’t love a good bagel? If you’re new to cooking fish, rest assured the recipe is hard to mess up. After you simmer the toppings in a pan you put the fish into the oven for a short period of time. It comes out looking beautiful; all you have to do is top it with dill. The salmon’s unctuous taste and buttery texture combined with tang from the capers, lemons, and onions gives it a luxurious feel, and I always get many compliments from my guests when I make it. — Terri Ciccone, deputy director of audience development Lemony Salmon with Fennel and Orange Salad Adeena Sussman As someone who looks for excuses to sneak preserved lemon paste into almost everything, I felt as though I’d found my personal Xanadu when I came across this recipe in Adeena Sussman’s first cookbook, Sababa. The salmon portion of the recipe involves two main ingredients, salmon and preserved lemon paste, the latter of which is spread over the former. The whole thing is garnished with preserved lemon slices and a little paprika, baked until it’s cooked through, and then parked under the broiler to develop some color. When people say a recipe could not be simpler, this is what they mean. Even if you make the accompanying fennel and orange salad, which I recommend, the recipe is still a low-lift endeavor, one that offers rewards disproportionate to the initial investment required. Salmon, lemon, and salt make beautiful music together, and this recipe broadcasts it in surround sound. — Rebecca Flint Marx, editor of Eater at Home Gochugaru Salmon with Crispy Rice Eric Kim, NYT Cooking I want to bathe myself in the buttery gochugaru-and-maple syrup glaze that is the star component of Eric Kim’s gochugaru salmon with crispy rice. This dish is all about textures — stickiness from the sauce, crispiness from the toasted rice, and crunch from the bright addition of cucumber ribbons — but the flavors are robust, too. There’s a mild heat and syrupy sweetness with rich, buttery notes, all mellowed out by the tang of vinegar. The first time I made this dish, I couldn’t get over how easy it was, and how much the glaze enhanced a simple filet of salmon. It’s a recipe I return to over and over again when I want to feel fancy without exerting too much effort. — Kat Thompson, associate editor of Eater at Home
Robb Report via Getty Images https://austin.eater.com/2025/3/7/24379674/austin-sxsw-south-by-southwest-free-food
Eater Staff Dive into this week’s big deals on HAY’s colorful tablecloths, Collina Strada’s sparkly water bottles, and Zwilling’s futuristic coffee machine Welcome back to Eater’s weekly symposium on the best kitchen and cookware deals — the first of near-spring, no less! Last week, the deals went heavy on soup dumplings, restaurant-quality ceramics, and Momofuku noodle packs. This week, we’re diving into sales on items big and small that feel like a spring refresher when it comes to your at-home coffee corner, hibernating patio, or barren dining table. My version of spring cleaning starts with a thoughtful purge and a trip to Goodwill, and it ends with the acquisition of some beautiful stuff that hopefully will not only make my life a little easier, but a little bit cooler. Sure, there will be some painstakingly boring purchases (Vacu Vin wine stopper fans, rise), but they also include small ways to elevate everyday rituals and goals; drinking more water is way more fun when you get to do it out of a bedazzled to-go canteen, and hosting a party in your tiny apartment is less stressful if you have decent (stashable) seating to do so. Let’s find you some finger-licking deals. Nordstrom’s best kitchen and home goods deals Nordstrom isn’t just hallowed ground for Barefoot Dreams blankets and Jeffrey Campbell pumps. The retailer/iconic tomato basil soup purveyor has a robust kitchen and home decor selection online, and many of its best knife sets, tablecloths, and Stanley Quencher lookalikes are on sale right now. Save $131 on this extremely attractive knife set Get 29% off this Stanley Quencher competitor HAY’s color-popping tablecloth is 40% off Save $50 on Zwilling’s sleek coffee maker Collina Strada’s bedazzled water bottle is 40% off The Industry West Outlet Sale is on, with up to 50% off Industry West is home to some beautiful, investment-worthy dining furniture (think, Ubald Klug-esque modular sofas, bar stools that don’t feel like an afterthought, and stackable dining chairs), so when there are some nice picks in the Outlet Sale section, my Amex perks up. Get $85 off the trendy metal Tivoli chair Save $240 off this Frasurbane stool This charming bistro table is $115 off This personal Ninja blender is 20% off A powerhouse appliance for those with limited storage Happy shopping.
Le Severo Eater’s local restaurant expert shares the bistros, cafes, and fine dining spots that serve the best meals right now Paris has changed a lot since Eater started rounding up its essential restaurants in 2016. Over the last nine years of writing this map, I’ve watched as the city’s entrenched food pyramid — a top tier of haute-cuisine, followed by dressed-up bourgeois restaurants, and finally a base of bistros and brasseries — has flattened out. Today, you can find outstanding contemporary French cooking at reasonable prices all over Paris. Across the board, modern Parisian menus are trending toward vegetables, with meat playing a supporting role to local produce from sustainable producers. But even as they embrace the new, many Parisians remain rooted in rock-of-ages French comfort food, which is available at a wave of traditional bistros; highlights include the very popular Bistrot des Tournelles in the Marais and thriving stalwarts like Le Petit Vendôme. Tasting menus also remain popular, as at Datil, where chef Manon Fleury turns out a menu that puts her among a class of talented female chefs (including Eugénie Béziat at Espadon at the Hotel Ritz and Soda Thiam at Janine) who have taken Paris by storm. Most recently, a tectonic shift has allowed the 9th Arrondissement to become the new Saint-Germain-des-Pres, an arty bohemian Paris quartier par excellence. This well-heeled food-loving neighborhood brims with small under-the-radar restaurants serving beautifully cooked modern French comfort food to a clientele of local regulars. In this latest refresh, we’ve revamped our write-ups to include even more relevant info for diners, including a rough range of pricing for each destination — ranging from $ for quick, inexpensive meals with dishes largely under $10 USD (or the equivalent in euros), to $$$$ for places where entrees exceed $30. We update this list quarterly to make sure it reflects the ever-changing Paris dining scene. New to the map in February 2025: P’tit Bon, a modern bistro with a shifting menu and a welcoming atmosphere; and Pristine, a vegetable-focused bistro with an industrial design aesthetic. The guide is organized by arrondissement, spiraling out from the 1st. Alexander Lobrano is a well-known Paris restaurant expert, has written Eater’s best restaurants map to Paris since 2016, and is the author of Hungry for Paris, Hungry for France and My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris. He writes often for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
For two brothers inheriting their father’s Philly corner store chain, and the drug empire behind it, family is everything — for better or worse At the beginning of Deli Boys, the new Hulu series from writer Abdullah Saeed, brothers Raj (Saagar Shaikh) and Mir (Asif Ali) are having one hell of a bad week: First, their dad dies in a (freakishly comedic) golf accident. Then, they find out that their late father Baba (Iqbal Theba), a Pakistani immigrant who founded a chain of successful delis, was also a drug kingpin, a development that comes with some major consequences — and raises some major questions — for the Dar brothers. Now that they’ve tenuously inherited this drug operation, what happens next? The only guarantee? Pure chaos. The first thing viewers see is a mostly naked man, bloodied and with a paper bag over his head, running out of the ABC Deli. We quickly learn that Baba immigrated to the United States with just $3 in his pocket, building an empire of ABC Delis in Philadelphia and beyond on the back of the Mega Glug, a gallon-sized, reusable mug that can still fit into a car’s cup holder. All the while, Baba was building an equally large illegal business, importing cocaine from Peru, and engaging in a whole host of fraudulent activities in pursuit of the American dream. His sons, of course, couldn’t be more different from their father — or each other. Raj is a pot-smoking, shaman-dating bon vivant, and Mir is a neurotic over-achiever who can’t stop talking about his Drexel University degree and his desire to be named CEO of his father’s company, DarCo. They’re both spoiled brats entirely unaware of their father’s illicit business, making them ill-prepared to step up into his role as a fearsome drug lord. Fortunately, they’ve got their tough-yet-glamorous auntie Lucky (Poorna Jagannathan) to show them the ropes, even though she thinks they’re both idiots and has her sights set on taking over Baba’s business herself. It’s this tenuous, and unsubtle, ally who shows them how their father came up with the ingenious idea of stuffing kilos of cocaine into pungent jars of achaar, or South Asian pickles, to confuse the noses of drug-sniffing dogs. Things get even more complicated when the FBI busts into DarCo headquarters, arrests Auntie Lucky, and accuses the late Baba of engaging in decades of fraud and tax evasion, shutting down the delis entirely. That’s all before the brothers find out about “dark DarCo,” the hidden side of the business in which the delis are used as a front for a sophisticated cocaine operation. With the delis out of commission, Lucky, Raj, and Mir are tasked with developing a new distribution route for their cocaine. Mir has the brilliant idea to run the jars of achaar through an Indian restaurant, which he says wouldn’t raise suspicion. However, he quickly runs into his family’s own anti-Indian racism — and a really shrewd restaurant owner — as they try to negotiate the deal. From there, the hijinks only go further off the rails as the brothers Dar try to dodge rival gangsters with an eye on their territory, the cops, and their own incompetence. Throughout its 10 episodes, Deli Boys proves itself to be a deeply Philadelphia show, frequently going well beyond the TastyKakes on the shelves of ABC Deli to use food to illustrate its love for the city. There’s a philosophical meditation on the cheesesteak (an argument asserting it as the true exemplar of something that’s more than the sum of its parts), and it’s surprisingly profound. At an Eagles-watching party in another episode, fans of the reigning Super Bowl champions will notice a soft pretzel sculpture in the likeness of Nick Foles, the quarterback who helped the franchise win its first Super Bowl in 2018. In keeping with other Philly-set shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Abbott Elementary, Deli Boys revels a bit in its home city’s gritty, rough-around-the-edges reputation. If you love the breakneck intensity of The Bear, which also airs on Hulu, Deli Boys will likely be right up your alley. It is decidedly a dark comedy with no shortage of gore and violence, most of which are played for laughs. Stabbings, shootings, and even dismemberment will inspire a chuckle or two in most people watching, but anyone who’s a little more squeamish will probably be turned off by its gratuitous use of fake blood. What the two shows achieve, though, is an exploration of sibling dynamics and family expectations against the unrelenting chaos of running the family business. It’s just that in this case, the family business also involves running drugs. The show also takes an irreverent look at the expectations heaped onto the shoulders of the children of immigrants, who are sometimes expected to live a version of the “American Dream” that just doesn’t feel possible anymore. It somehow manages to deftly navigate turning heavy issues like racism, assimilation, and Islamophobia into the butt of many jokes. There are no flat “model minorities” or other stereotypes here, just a bunch of complicated (occasionally terrible) people trying to figure out how to sell a little cocaine. What really sells the slapstick jokes and gratuitous violence, though, is the show’s cast. For all the violence, this is really a meditation on what it means to be family, and there’s a whole lot of heart between the gunshots and cocaine-cooking. Poorna Jagannathan is excellent as the tough-as-nails aunty whose backstory with Baba is more complicated than Raj and Mir know. A feat only achieved because the on-screen interplay between Raj’s stoner sensibilities and Mir’s neuroses is just that good. I could believe that Saagar Shaikh and Asif Ali were actually brothers in real life based on the nuances of their seemingly long-simmering grudges and ill-timed spats. Even its brief performances, like Queer Eye fashion expert Tan France’s surprising turn as a gun-wielding gangster and the hopeless bumbling of FBI Director Simpson (Tim Baitz), are equally compelling. While Deli Boys is not explicitly a food show, which actually feels a little refreshing in this context. It doesn’t use platters of biryani to convey its cultural competence, instead employing inside jokes and “if you know you know” references to explore the layered identities of its characters. There are still some great food moments, though — the aforementioned pretzel sculpture truly is a marvel — to get you through the rest of the mayhem and violence. Deli Boys is streaming on Hulu on March 6.
Photo illustration by Lille Allen; see below for full credits. The recipe on the back of a Bob’s Red Mill package can be made entirely in a blender While it’s hard not to love the fresh slices of beef and robust salad bar at a churrasco or Brazilian barbecue restaurant, the real star of the show is the pão de queijo. These cheesy Brazilian breads, which are typically served as an appetizer, arrive piping hot with a crisp exterior and chewy, mochi-like interior. I can (and have) easily put away at least five of them before eating anything else. At all-you-can-eat spots like Fogo de Chão, this may not be the most cost-effective approach, but if you’ve also tried these breads, then you know how hard it is to stop yourself from just one more bite. So when I saw that Bob’s Red Mill has a recipe for pão de queijo on the back of its tapioca flour bag, I knew I needed to attempt to bring these cheesy breads to my own kitchen. The recipe is extremely simple and relies mostly on pantry staples; the only thing you may have to buy is the bag of tapioca flour itself. Otherwise, all you need are shredded cheese, salt, a single egg, milk, and olive oil, all of which I already had in my own pantry. The instructions tell you to throw everything into a blender and let it rip before pouring out the batter into greased muffin tins. Since I don’t have a blender I whisked everything together in a mixing bowl. This takes slightly longer, and requires a bit of elbow grease to fully incorporate the tapioca flour with the liquid ingredients, but I’d say it was no more than two minutes of stirring. The wonderful thing about working with tapioca flour is that it’s gluten-free, so there’s no need to worry about overmixing here. The batter looked questionably watery by the time everything came together, but I trusted the process, and used a cookie scoop to portion the batter into each muffin tin. (If you mix it in a blender, you can just pour it.) As the batter was quite wet, it was a bit of a balancing act, but I managed to fill each tin save forone. The recipe states you’ll get 12 rolls, but I wound up with 11. Once the tins are filled, the buns need a mere 20 minutes in a 400-degree oven, so the recipe took me only roughly 30 minutes from start to finish. I cleaned up the kitchen and washed all the dishes while the rolls baked; by the time I was done, they were, too. The pão de queijos came out hot and crispy, and very fragrant with the smell of melted cheddar and olive oil. Despite an extremely wet batter, they puffed up into near-perfect spheres in between the size of a golf ball and baseball. Steam escaped as I pulled them apart, revealing a stretchy interior filled with pockets of cheese. Within 10 minutes of taking them out of the oven, I had eaten four. I don’t think this recipe is perfect, but it’s close, and as a base for pão de queijo, it is foolproof. To improve the recipe next time, I’d increase the salt from a half to a full teaspoon, as the bread tasted a little undersalted to me. I also think it would be fun to switch up the cheeses or do a combination. There’s no way that a cheddar and parmesan blend would be bad, or pepper jack paired with some chopped, pickled jalapeños. I’m curious if add-ins would affect the bread’s rise, but even simple additions like garlic powder or smoked paprika could add dimension without weighing down the batter. Quibbles aside, I truly believe anyone can make this recipe at home with great success, even those who are intimidated by baking. The pão de queijo would make impressive appetizers at a dinner party, an ideal addition to a potluck, or a perfect side to chili or tomato soup. And if you don’t eat them all in one sitting like I certainly will, they also freeze and reheat perfectly. Additional photo illustration credits: cheese bread photo by Kat Thompson
Netflix https://la.eater.com/2025/3/5/24378571/meghan-markle-duchess-of-sussex-with-love-meghan-netflix-los-angeles-love-letter
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The stunning dining room and bar at Goodbye Horses. | Goodbye Horses The best meals in London, from Michelin fine dining to beloved street food, according to a longtime restaurant editor The story of the London food scene is one that includes dim sum, Sunday roasts, curries, pizza, sinasir, rarebits, banh mi, udon, pepper pot, sweetbread suya, and natural wine. Across cuisines, neighborhoods, and price points, all these dishes and drinks place London among the very best and most diverse places to eat in the world. This guide, which I’ve been compiling and iterating on for the better part of the last decade, aims to reflect the best food and most important restaurants in the capital. As of winter 2025, London is enjoying the emergence of an increasing number of classically French-inspired restaurants, while diners — perhaps a little jaded by the status quo of the post-pandemic cookie-cutter opening — are revisiting old classics, many of which either maintain consistency through years of habit or just get better with age. I want this map to help you navigate a city in which it is all too easy to eat poorly, but in which it is increasingly inexcusable to do so. It will showcase a mix of over three dozen restaurants, which have all done outstanding things in extraordinary times: emerging, surviving, thriving, and continuing to enrich the city and its food culture through more than half a decade of unprecedented change and tumult. In this latest refresh, we’ve revamped our write-ups to include even more relevant info for diners, including a rough range of pricing for each destination — ranging from $ for quick, inexpensive meals with dishes largely under $10 USD (or the equivalent in pounds), to $$$$ for places where entrees exceed $30. New to the map in March 2025: Ambassador’s Clubhouse, an over-the-top Punjabi restaurant fit for a party; Ikoyi, a two-Michelin-starred special occasion restaurant serving ultra-modern West African tasting menus; and Goodbye Horses, a thoroughly stylish new-age wine bar with an immaculate wine list and avant-garde small plates.
Lille Allen/Eater These seaweed chips are crunchy, spicy, and sustainable I am a snacky person by nature. My pantry is always fully stocked with chips, cookies, and crackers; I am very much not a part of an “ingredient household.” As a food editor, a lot of different snacks come across my desk: There are bags of remixed Chex mixes, bars of chocolate, sour candies coated in plum powder, almond flour crackers. Although those are all well and good, only one thing has truly captured my attention as of late: Taokaenoi’s chicken larb-flavored seaweed chips. Eating seaweed as a snack is not revolutionary by any means. It’s something I’ve been enjoying since childhood; my mom felt sheets of algae were a healthier option than bags of potato chips (sodium aside, she’s probably right). Seaweed is also a highly sustainable food source, which is a bonus. But Taokaenoi makes their seaweed even better by coating the sheets in a tempura batter and frying it off, creating something crunchy enough to stand up to potato chips. I’m not going to purport that this version is healthier than other snack options, like chips, but I also will not deny that their ample crunch and salty, briny flavor has me hooked and unconcerned with their nutritional value. What takes the chips up another notch is their larb seasoning. Taokaenoi is a product of Thailand, so you can trust that they nail the flavor of larb: the chips are slightly spicy and zippy with citric acid, and there’s even a nuttiness from toasted rice powder that is a signature component of larb. Paired with a frosty beer, a plate of them is heavensent. I’ve been consuming the chips straight out of the bag with reckless abandon, but I imagine that crushing them over a plate of hot rice and fried eggs would be magical, like a DIY version of furikake. They’d also make a great topping for ramen, or a nice addition to a bowl of poké. The problem, for me, is that I’m eating them too fast to find out.
A variety of instant noodles from different countries From ultra-umami sesame noodles to super-spicy ramen, these 24 tried-and-true picks are affordable, easy to make, and — most importantly — insanely delicious Some people fill their shelves with books and photos and other sentimental tchotchkes. Mine, however, are lined with colorful stacks of instant noodles: The special edition of Mala Bibimmyun my friend brought from Korea. Cute packs of Asha noodles decorated with Sanrio characters and Hello Kitty. A pile of unique cup noodles I’ve collected from Jeju Island. What started as a light interest as a noodle-slurping child has become a full-blown fascination, and a core part of my identity. When I first moved to America in 2008, I remember how excited I was to find Shin noodle soup — the same kind my mom cooked for me in Korea — at Walmart. Today, the American instant noodle market is massive and continues to grow, with more brands and styles available than ever before. And where the US instant noodle market once relied heavily on imports from countries like South Korea, Japan, and China, today’s offerings include exciting entries developed by young American entrepreneurs, some with unique focuses around nutrition, cuisine, and design. My bursting shelves can barely contain all the new options. It can be overwhelming, but sorting through the noodle noise is a job I was born to do. As a semi-professional noodle slurper and collector, I’ve eaten hundreds of noodles in my life, but I have a particular soft spot for one type, specifically: the instant kind. You know, those hard squiggly bricks of dried, fried noodles with accompanying seasoning packets that have long been the foundation of the American collegiate diet, and more recently, the mukbang crowd. I love instant noodles for many reasons: They have a nearly indefinite shelf life; they are an easy breakfast, snack, or — with the right bolstering — a full meal; and, they come in a panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, and colorful packaging styles. The best instant noodles and ramen When it comes to instant noodles, there are three components to consider: noodles, seasoning packets, sauces, and any additional toppings, such as flavored oil or dried flakes. From there, you can find infinite variations: Noodles can be round or flat, fried or dried. The sauces and seasonings can be liquid or dried, spicy or mild. After a lifetime of study, I’ve found it’s most useful to divide the world of instant noodles into four main sections: Brothy, Saucy, Extra Spicy, and Mild and Non-Spicy. The best brothy noodles The selling point of these instant noodles is the savory broth. The noodles are cooked in the broth, resulting in a richly flavored noodle soup in about three minutes. The best saucy noodles From spicy to savory, these saucy noodles are highly slurpable and make a fantastic base for all different types of toppings. The best extra spicy noodles The frenzy around extra spicy instant noodles doesn’t seem to be dying down. Be warned: these are no joke, though there are plenty of tasty additions that can tame the spice, from cheese to silken tofu. The best non-spicy noodles Umami lovers rejoice. These soup styles lean heavily on savory flavors, not spice, with broth so good you’ll want to add rice once the noodles are gone to relish every drop. How to elevate and upgrade your noodles While there is nothing wrong with eating instant noodles according to the instructions, it’s their versatility that’s made me a devoted fan. Here’s how to mash-up, deconstruct, and upgrade the dorm room staple. Mom’s Dry Noodle has dried ribbon noodles which have ideal textures for the sauce 1. Load up on protein Yes, many instant noodles come with their own packets of dehydrated vegetable or meat flavoring, but they rarely provide much real taste and add zero in the way of texture. Supplementing your own additional proteins will do a lot to make your instant noodles more satisfying and nutrition-rich. Try simple items like ground meat, sausage, tofu, and leftover fried chicken — or my personal favorite ramen topping, pork char siu. One pro tip: Just crack an egg. You can stir it right in to create an egg-drop soup effect, or poach the egg gently in the soup broth to enjoy breaking the creamy yolk. Chicken-flavored ramen with garlicky sautéed kale, roasted chicken legs, and carrots. 2. Go big with toppings Going nuts with the add-ons at ramen restaurants can mean spending $30 on a bowl of noodles (toppings normally cost between $1 and $3 each.) But at home, you can have as many toppings as the inventory of your fridge’s produce drawer allows: scallions, corn, mushrooms, kale, you name it. Not sure about what to do with all those weird greens in your CSA farm box? Add them to your instant noodles! Fact: There is no such thing as a lousy topping for instant noodles. Chapaghetti goes well with fried egg 3. Deconstruct everything Each element of the instant noodle package is a multi-purpose cooking superstar. The seasoning packets add a pop to stir-fried vegetables. Broken into bits, the uncooked noodles are an excellent crunchy topping for a salad or even another non-instant pasta dish. Do yourself a favor and add some ramen seasoning to mac and cheese, or how about using those instant noodles to make buns for an at-home ramen burger? Tseng noodles with black sesame sauce 4. Switch up the liquid To deepen the character of the soup, try cooking the noodles in vegetable or chicken broth instead of plain water. There are plenty of wilder recipes out there, including this one I’m skeptical of that uses milk, but homemade stock is a safe jumping off point. 5. Mash up different styles Mixing different instant noodle styles and seasoning packets is a culinary art form in itself, and can have big payoff. Jjapaguri (also called ram-don), the famous dish from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, is actually just a hybrid of two different kinds of instant noodles — Neoguri and Chapaghetti — and has become one of Korea’s national dishes. The magic comes from mixing Neguri’s spicy seafood powder with Chapaghetti’s savory black bean powder, which ignites a lethal umami bomb. But jjapaguri is just the start. Try mixing Neoguri and curry noodles to create an exuberant, spicy curry broth. Combining super spicy noodles with something cheesy is also 100 percent never a bad idea. There you have it — the ultimate guide to the best instant noodles and ramen. Slurp on.
Eater Staff Teetering on the arm of a sofa with your bouillabaisse? Let’s find you a real chair If you have ever been to my apartment for a dinner party, I may owe you an apology. I have likely required you to shovel chicken Marbella in your mouth while squatting on an antique milking stool like a Bruegel painting peasant, or to squeeze onto a floor poof while sipping a glass of red wine. Not very elegant, and not very convenient for non-finger food gatherings (exempting the New York Renaissance Faire). To be fair, hosting is hard in a big, expensive city like New York. Unless you live in what my friend group calls a “house-house” (city speak for any non-divided brownstone or multi-level building), you will have to figure out a clever way to comfortably seat your precious guests for a sit-down meal. Recently, Eater senior reporter Bettina Makalintal wrote about embracing more casual, potluck-style gatherings as a workaround to formal sit-down dinners. But for holidays, more formal gatherings, or any occasion when you want everyone to dine comfortably and at a proper table, you’ll need real seating — and for us small-space event hosts, the solution is foldable or stackable chairs that you can store in a closet or corner when they’re not in use and unfurl as needed. But that doesn’t mean you have to skimp on design, and many of So, what should you look for in impromptu seating and stashable chairs? Aesthetics factor in, of course, but so do durability, space-saving features, comfortable seats, and the ability to blend seamlessly with other attractive decor. Armless folding chairs might be the most versatile choice, but for other table configurations or apartments, stools might be a better choice. Below, please find some vetted, verifiably appealing stashable seating including the best foldable and/or stackable dining chairs and even some of those honorable-mention stools. (Looking at you, Alvar Aalto dupes.) The Best Foldable Dining Chairs A touch of rattan caning Rattan, but make it moodier For a cozy Japandi feel You’re a 70s design buff The Best Stackable Dining Chairs The perfect indoor-outdoor chair Integrate corduroy fabrics for visual interest You’ve been eyeing Cesca chairs Don’t forget to check secondhand sites Honorable Mention: Stashable, Stackable Dining Stools If you’re an Alvaar Alto fan This set turns into a side table Now invite some friends over for raclette already.
Denise Neil A longtime local restaurant journalist’s can’t miss (can’t flyover) meals in Wichita Kansas is often labeled a flyover state, and it gets a bad rap as a place with nothing much to do and nothing much to see. Its residents are subjected to unending Wizard of Oz jokes. But with a population of more than 400,000, Wichita offers many of the perks found in the big cities, minus the traffic: It’s large enough that residents don’t feel isolated from art, culture, and entertainment, but small enough that they run into someone they know every time they leave the house. People who live in Wichita often say that it’s a “big small town” — one full of worthy, vibrant restaurants. Some of the country’s most famous restaurant chains actually got their starts in Wichita, including Pizza Hut, White Castle, and Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. A longtime urban myth is that Wichita has more restaurants per capita than any city in the country. Though that may not actually be true, eating out is definitely one of the city’s main pastimes — which I’ve enjoyed while covering the local food scene here for the past 25 years. As you might expect from a city located in the middle of cattle country, Wichita is a good place to get a great steak. But it’s also home to Lebanese, Vietnamese, and Mexican communities who have filled the city with top-rate eateries. Here are 17 of my favorites.
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