Eater: All Posts by Bettina Makalintal

Lenox Is Bringing Back Its Coveted Spice Village Collection

2024-09-12T17:04:54-04:00

The Spice Village collection is available in sets of six as well as the full set of 24. | Lenox

Get ready for the most cottagecore way to store your spices

Lenox, the tableware company, has officially brought back its coveted Spice Village collection, which was out of production for over two decades. The set of 24 porcelain jars is meant to hold spices, with each designed to look like a miniature house. The collection, which Lenox first introduced in 1989 and discontinued in 1993, has become an enviable collector’s item in recent years, with full sets selling for upwards of $1,000 on eBay.

With the Spice Village’s second edition, enthusiasts are in for a bargain by comparison: The full set, which is now available for pre-order and will ship in February, runs $285 and will be available through both Lenox and Macy’s. The individual houses, also available for pre-order, are just $15 each — the same pricing as the original Spice Village release in 1989. Sets of six will also be available.

The Spice Village began to trend again in 2022, thanks, largely, to TikTok: One video, featuring a shopper who found the full set at a thrift store, picked up over 6 million views. As the interior design publication Clever noted at the time, the resurgence of interest in the Spice Village fell in line with the continued draw of the cottagecore aesthetic, as well as of whimsical, kitschy home decor.

As Beth Baer, the vice president of product development at Lenox, told the publication, the Spice Village was born out of consumer interest in the late 1980s in collectibles. Fans would get a new piece every other month, she explained. The original Spice Village collection also included jars meant for condiments and tea, a napkin holder, and trivets. But this interest in collector’s items eventually waned, Baer noted, leading to the end of the Spice Village.

As with low-rise jeans and Von Dutch hats, one generation’s trash always becomes another generation’s treasure. On Etsy, single jars from the collection have been listed around $100. Of course, if the Stanley Cup hoarders are any indication, the urge to collect is strong once again among a certain type of shopper.

Update: September 12, 2024, 3:30 p.m.: This story was originally published on August 2, 2024. It has been updated throughout to reflect the latest information.

Why Republican Politicians Keep Claiming Immigrants Eat Cats and Dogs

2024-09-11T18:21:39-04:00

Former President Trump appears at the Presidential debate in Philadelphia | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image

“They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” former President Trump claimed — with no basis — at the first presidential debate

A few lines stood out from the first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last night — one of them being former President Trump’s bizarre proclamation that: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The former president was, of course, perpetuating a talking point that has been making the rounds among top Republicans this week: that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs. This is despite the fact that Springfield police have received “no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten,” according to the Springfield News-Sun. (The source for the misinformation appears to be a viral post from a local Facebook group that claimed that a person who had lost their cat found it “hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home being carved up to be eaten.”) Debate moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump on this point, presenting the city manager’s statement that this was not in fact happening, to which the presidential candidate replied: “The people on television say ‘my dog was taken and used for food.’”

Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator J.D. Vance, shared similar sentiments on X on Monday: “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” The X accounts of both Texas Senator Ted Cruz and the Republican House Judiciary Committee have also shared related racist sentiments and memes about Republicans protecting cats.

In June, the Biden administration extended the temporary protected status of up to 309,000 migrants from Haiti who are now living in the United States. Following these protections, Republicans have lobbed criticisms at the Haitian immigrant community, reinforcing the GOP’s practice of reducing the lives of immigrant communities to memes and racist political jargon to fuel the party’s policy platform. The Republican politicians circulating the cat-eating myth have essentially turned the highly memed line from the show Community — “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty” — into a campaign talking point.

With this rhetoric, the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering: That immigrants “eat pets” is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority; in turn, it then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration. For those perpetuating this false narrative, the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not “like us” and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives. The dichotomy being created is of white “Americans” with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family, and immigrants as trouncing on that which is held dear.

Immigrants have consistently been subject to this racist food rhetoric throughout American history. In 1883, the New York Times posed the question: “Do the Chinese eat rats?” It continued: “A large portion of the community believe implicitly that Chinamen love rats as Western people love poultry.” The piece in question discussed a slander suit in which a New York City doctor claimed “Chinamen” in New York City had “killed and cooked rats and cats in the yard” — a claim that the Chinese grocery owner in question vehemently denied.

Myths around immigrants and food have persisted in the American political canon. As Soleil Ho writes in the 2018 Taste piece “Do You Eat Dog?,” while some Asian cultures have indeed eaten dogs, it is an outlier of a practice, with most people seeing dogs in a pet-like way. Racist, antiquated narratives hold an outsized shadow over East and Southeast Asian communities in the West, with Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino people often subjected to allegations of eating dogs.

These racist tropes stem, in part, from the Chinese Exclusion Act, which curtailed entry of Chinese workers to the U.S. Passed in 1882, it’s considered a major turning point in the U.S. transitioning from a country with an open immigration policy to one with more restrictions. Tales of Chinese people eating rats and cats and of Chinese restaurants serving “mystery meat” — a bogeyman that pervades — represented growing skepticism about the country’s new additions. As with the rhetoric of immigrants “stealing” jobs today, the Chinese Exclusion Act was largely motivated by economic concerns about the influx of Chinese laborers taking jobs away from American workers.

In a chapter on dog meat in the book Dubious Gastronomy, Robert Ji-Song Ku writes about the cultural deployment of disgust: “The foods — and the people who eat them — we mutually find disgusting can be the source of a social bond that distinguishes the in-group (or our group) from the out group (or their group), a marker for not only preserving ethnic, racial, and class boundaries, but also creating new ones.” This is the political function of accusing immigrants of eating cats, dogs, rats, and whatever else a “good American” sees as beyond the pale.

Food has often been weaponized in this way. Just recall how Wuhan’s wet markets were discussed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when eating bats was often invoked as the cause for the outbreak; it’s a way to point blame and suggest that certain lives — lives of immigrants and people of color around the world — were worth less than others.

When the Igorot people from the Philippines were exhibited at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, their ritual practice of eating dogs — which was a rare event in the Philippines — was emphasized and staged for visitors who saw the Igorots akin to zoo animals. The display’s design was as gawking as it was strategic. By portraying the Igorots as backwards savages, it also put forth the United States as a civilizing force and its people as civilized by comparison. This ideology echoed the precedent set by William Howard Taft, who classified Filipinos as the U.S.’s “little brown brother” during his time as Governor-General of the Philippines, which had just become a U.S. colony.

This ideology also establishes an acrimonious relationship in which immigrants and other countries are, at best, buffoons in need of constant resources and education from the U.S., and, at worst, a dangerous risk to the American way of life.

The experience of Haitian asylum seekers across North and South America has already been dehumanizing. In June 2023, Amnesty International called on Americas to end “anti-Black discrimination, including race-based torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, against Haitian people seeking safety and international protection.” In a 2021 PBS report about racist policies toward Haitian migrants, Nicole Phillips, legal director for the Haitian Bridge Alliance, described a “stigma against Haitians” dating back to the early 1800s, when enslaved Haitian people revolted against France. As NPR has reported, the instability from which many of these people are now seeking asylum has direct ties to the U.S. occupation of Haiti and overthrow of its elected officials.

Food is so mundane and that is exactly its power. What the Republicans are suggesting is: If they don’t eat like us, then how can we trust them? This rhetoric only works to dehumanize immigrants — who are always Black, Brown, or Asian — even further and to ultimately position white Americans as superior, their lifestyles as the ones worth protecting. We’ve heard it all before; the Republicans think we’ll fall for it again.

Two Million Followers Later, Justine Doiron Wants Her Food to Speak for Itself

2024-09-11T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

Practicality is at the forefront of the recipes in the TikTok influencer’s debut cookbook, ‘Justine Cooks’

What you don’t see in the videos are the rolls of tape: one stacked on top of the other, an iPhone leaned inside. This is how Justine Doiron — 2.3 million followers on TikTok, a million on Instagram — gets her shots of sugar and salt sparkling in the sunlight. For overhead clips, she’ll grab her cheap Amazon phone stand. Otherwise, she says, it’s “tape for everything.”

Only recently has Doiron, who’s known across all social media platforms as @justine_snacks, acquired what she calls a “normal” kitchen. The white-and-wood galley-style space is enviable, especially by New York City standards (a dishwasher, ample cabinets and counters, a proper range hood, and a full-sized fridge), but it isn’t quite the unattainable Pinterest fodder of Alison Roman’s wood-burning oven or massive celebrity kitchens with double islands.

So many of TikTok’s food creators built their platforms on relatability, but some have succeeded to the point of rendering themselves unrelatable, with lofty Architectural Digest-esque kitchens and deals with luxury fashion brands. Doiron, while similarly successful, maintains a down-to-earth air; her audience wants a recipe provider, not a lifestyle influencer, she says. Accordingly, “I bought this house because the kitchen was so normal,” Doiron tells me as she films herself preparing the crust for a zucchini tart.

The kitchen in her previous New York apartment was so ugly, Doiron adds, that it was vetoed as a shoot location for her forthcoming debut cookbook, Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen, out October 29 from Clarkson Potter. It also wasn’t the most functional: She had to roll her cart, portable burner, tools, and ingredients to a window, creating a makeshift space in which to cook and film. It led to a somewhat clunky, more complicated approach to writing recipes. “Since I was already carting all my stuff over to another side of the room, I was like, well, what’s another piece of equipment?” Doiron explains. “It felt like fake cooking.”

Doiron’s new kitchen — sunny and bright, nice but not perfect (she spent the first month without a working oven) — has already reshaped how she can think about recipe development. “Even in the two months being here, my recipes are better because I’m thinking like a normal person,” she says. To prep and assemble, Doiron still drags her cart over to the spot with the best light — right in front of the glass-paned door to her backyard — but she can cook on a real stove now, feeling the limitations of a real kitchen as opposed to the ones of her approximated setup.

This is the appeal of the creator class: normality, especially in comparison to the food establishment’s lack thereof. What has drawn fans to Doiron is a sense of authenticity and accountability that has remained consistent even as her follower counts have shot her into FoodTok’s top echelons; she still seems like she could be your friend. A public figure with all the baggage that brings, Doiron is facing the same question that has accompanied her on her rise, but now, with the advent of her cookbook, is especially pertinent: How does a creator grow without losing what made them so appealing to viewers in the first place?

What TikTok has upended, like the food blogs that came before it, is the belief that a cook needs credentials in order to create a following through food. Some of the platform’s most beloved cooks make no pretense about their expertise relative to that of their audience. While Doiron acknowledges that her education at Cornell’s school of hospitality taught her the foundations of cooking, she’s also clear about the fact that most of what she knows came through her social media experiments. Her lack of formal culinary training was a source of insecurity until she realized that “I went through the same crash course that other untrained cooks go through — I just had the opportunity of doing it publicly,” she says.

Like many creators, Doiron didn’t plan to end up here. She found her way to TikTok in 2020, while she was working in public relations at Discovery, a media company. She saw it as a potential platform for her clients, not herself. But she’d played around with recipe development and cooking videos in the past — she had recreated BuzzFeed Tasty recipes for a “millennialcore” YouTube channel — and decided to give TikTok a try.

In April of that year, she posted a video of herself making “five-ingredient flatbreads.” Though the video now has over 27,000 views, it wasn’t an immediate hit, getting just about 500 at the time, Doiron recalls. Out of pandemic boredom, she continued filming herself sporadically. Her early recipes were often “hack”-oriented, like banana pancakes with sneaky cauliflower, but by the end of 2020, she’d differentiated herself through honest voice-overs; in one video, she discussed her history with disordered eating while making French toast. By 2021, the channel had grown to the point that Discovery asked Doiron to leave either TikTok or her job. The rest, obviously, is history. In early 2022, she hit a million followers on TikTok.

On the day of our August meeting, Doiron is doing a test shoot of a baby-zucchini tart, its crust speckled with pumpkin seeds. When I arrive at her Brooklyn home, she’s pulling a tray of blueberry-pistachio cookies out of the oven; it’s their final test and all that’s left is to shoot the photos for her blog. The tart, however, is in an earlier phase of development. “The thing I’m trying to learn today is if cooking the zucchini beforehand will remove enough moisture that the tart cooks through all the way without par-bake,” Doiron says. “I’m also trying to see if I can’t get by without a food processor.”

As it stands, she isn’t optimistic. This gets to the heart of what’s so endearing about Doiron: She’s also just figuring it out and giving her viewers insight into her process. That’s not to say that she takes recipe development lightly; she does two passes on each recipe before sending it off to a final tester in Seattle. It typically takes her week to 10 days between coming up with a recipe and posting the finished video on TikTok, and about 80 percent of her videos correspond to a written recipe on her blog. Recently, Doiron decreased her production on TikTok from three recipes a week to two. “I’m very scared that the algorithm is going to punish me,” she says. “But three high-quality, well-tested recipes a week is too much for me.” (The trade-off: launching long-form videos on YouTube.)

In the fragmented food media ecosystem, this seems to be the strongest sell of the creator class: It is easier to trust an individual like Doiron, with her earnestness and imperfection, over an institution, whose machinations are opaque and bureaucratic. For so many consumers of online cooking content, the implosion of the Bon Appétit test kitchen still feels fresh; nobody wants to get burned again.

Both PR and content creation are concerned with brand-building, but in Doiron’s experience, the biggest difference between the two is that PR is about crafting a story and controlling it, while being a creator is about, as Doiron says, “letting it all hang out.” Through content, a regular person becomes a personality and a viewer finds affinity with that persona — that’s how an audience is built.

For a while, Doiron was synonymous with earnest storytelling. (Of course, what is sweet to some provokes snark in others.) In a series that she called “My Daughter’s Kitchen,” for example, Doiron explored the idea of culinary inheritance. Coming from a family that “did not care about cooking in a family sense,” she didn’t have it, she says, so the series questioned what she could one day provide to her own potential future children.

When we meet, she points out that she hasn’t done a “story” video in months. This is an intentional choice. “I’m trying to rebrand to where my work can stand on its own,” Doiron says. “I was tired of having to tap dance for people to pay attention to my food when I thought, My food’s pretty freaking good.”

In this era of algorithmically dictated feeds, an insidious facet of posting content is the degree to which we — even those of us who do not consider ourselves “creators,” or what we post as “content” — can internalize the algorithm and the audience. What “works,” according to engagement metrics, and what we want to do aren’t always the same thing.

For Doiron, this was the problem with stories: She started to feel like she was throwing her family under the bus. “I told a few very authentic stories that I wanted to tell and then the TikTok algorithm kept rewarding me, so then I started telling stories that I didn’t want to tell,” she says. “I want people making the recipes. And when I was telling stories, I felt like it detracted from the food.”

Being a recognizable personality is, naturally, profitable. As anti-establishment as TikTok once appeared to be for the food world, freeing creators from the staid culture and gatekeeping of traditional media, it has predictably circled back to it: If you gain a lot of followers, you’re expected to then publish a cookbook with a big publisher, which is still considered a sign of making it and of being taken seriously. So much of the publishing industry today is driven by the misguided idea that followers will translate to sales, and TikTok is a big reason why.

Accordingly, one can argue that there are simply too many cookbooks today; these cookbooks coast on viral moments or prioritize a creator’s popularity over their sense of culinary perspective, assuming there is any perspective in the first place. And whether a creator actually develops good recipes is sometimes beside the point.

For Doiron, this aha moment about how publishing works came in late 2021, when she talked to a literary agent about a potential snack-focused cookbook. At the time, Justine Cooks wasn’t even an idea. “[The agent] was like, Hire a writer, hire a recipe developer, sell the book,” Doiron recalls. She came away from the conversation realizing that “I don’t need to be writing a book if people just want my name on a book,” she recalls. She decided not to pursue it.

In a post-Instagram world, “integrity” and “influencer” aren’t often in alignment. As much as viewers support the creator economy, they are also deeply skeptical of it. Doiron seems — more than most — committed to staying true to her values, even if it comes at a cost, like holding off on a book idea or sitting out a trend. In general, she says, “I think I fall on the sword for myself way more than I do [for] my audience.”

Take, for example, the fact that at the time of our interview Doiron hasn’t yet “made a cucumber,” as she says. She’s referring to the much-copied viral videos in which Logan Moffitt, now known as TikTok’s “Cucumber Boy,” slices a whole cucumber into a deli container and turns it into a salad. But she knows this game as well as anyone: In 2022, a video in which Doiron casually made the “butter board” from Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons cookbook set off a cultural phenomenon that proved as polarizing as it was popular. Though she was already known to TikTok users, it introduced her to the less-online crowd, getting her name into the New York Times and the Guardian.

The crowds even turned against Doiron herself, accusing her of being a shill for Big Dairy. She was, but not in the way that people thought. Though Doiron had previously worked as a paid sponsor for the industry marketing group Dairy Management Inc., she says that the video in question wasn’t a part of the partnership: She just wanted to share an idea that was so easy she was skeptical that anyone would want it.

The butter board video’s success — 8.9 million views and counting — prompted an outpouring of partnership inquiries. Doiron didn’t take them, nor did she do like so many other creators and repeat the viral concept until it became her “thing.” She “resisted the trend,” Doiron says, because she didn’t want old-guard media to lump her with what she considers to be accounts that are just “juicing views” with time-wasting hacks and recipes that don’t work. Resisting trends, she adds, can be a way to maintain trust with viewers: She’s only doing what she’s excited about.

Doiron estimates that she turned down “probably $50,000 worth of brand deals” resulting from the success of the butter board video. Not only was it not her recipe, she didn’t want to make the whipped cream or cream cheese boards that the partnerships would have required of her. “I lose a lot of excitement when I see accounts leaning into everything that’s the ‘next big thing,’” Doiron says. “It feels like it robs you of their point of view. And I think, especially in a world where anybody can be a creator, point of view is so important.”

Justine Cooks is the clearest way that Doiron has let her food speak for itself. The idea for the cookbook, and the feeling that she was finally ready to write one, came in 2022, months after that conversation with the agent about the snacks concept. She sold the book in the fall of 2023.

Unlike some creator cookbooks, which lean into the understanding that their readers are already followers, Doiron’s scarcely mentions TikTok (it appears just once) or even her virality. (The butter board gets a shoutout only in the book’s acknowledgements, in a thank you to McFadden.) Even when she’s sharing stories in its pages, she maintains a level of distance. She isn’t hiding her fiance, Eric, and she memorializes her late father and his cooking, but she also isn’t confessing in the way she did in “My Daughter’s Kitchen.” These choices seem to echo her current approach to TikTok: “There’s so many great chefs out there who have great brands, and I don’t know anything about them,” she tells me.

Instead, the book’s focus is on the food. As much as Doiron’s recipes are inspired by fresh produce, she relies heavily on repeated pantry ingredients and advocates for humble staples like canned legumes. Her recipes are streamlined and unshowy; Doiron wants them to be foundational, not flashes in the pan that were made only because a viewer saw a dish on their feed.

Doiron admits that she’s lost some social media virality in forgoing pizzazz for practicality, but she also recognizes that there have been times when she was trying so hard to be different and interesting that she didn’t think about the practical home cook. On a feed, a creator has to stand out, sometimes to the detriment of the recipe. With a cookbook, “there are certain things everybody’s looking for,” she says.

“It took me about two years of posting to feel like a mature recipe developer,” Doiron says. To her, that means the point at which “I was cooking not just for show, but [that] I was cooking for the kitchen.”

A New Padma Lakshmi-Hosted Cooking Competition Show Is Coming

2024-09-10T17:08:06-04:00

Padma Lakshmi hosted Top Chef for 19 seasons. | Noam Galai/Getty Images for Gold House

The acclaimed ‘Top Chef’ host just signed a deal with CBS

It turns out Padma Lakshmi isn’t out of the world of cooking competitions after all: Deadline reported today that the former Top Chef host and judge is working with former NBCU content chief Susan Rovner on a cooking competition series for CBS.

The idea is still in its early stages, with Lakshmi and Rovner having just “struck a development deal” with the network, according to Deadline. In addition to acting as executive producer, Lakshmi is set to host the show, whatever it ends up being.

It seemed like Lakshmi was distancing herself from the format. In June 2023, she announced her departure from Top Chef after 19 seasons on the show, during which time she not only hosted but also ate “every single thing.” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times about the news, Lakshmi cited a desire to focus on Taste the Nation, her documentary-style food show — the second season of which aired last year — as well the fact that eating at the level of Top Chef was no longer “sustainable” for her.

Despite its success with reality franchises including Survivor and Big Brother, CBS does not currently have a food show or cooking competition among its programming. The market of cooking competitions is crowded, with more shows than any viewer can reasonably keep up with. Netflix alone has a packed roster, with this summer’s Blue Ribbon Baking Championship joining the ranks of Easy-Bake Battle, Five Star Chef, Pressure Cooker, Barbecue Showdown, The Final Table, Is It Cake?, Cook At All Costs, Nailed It!, and so much more.

The concept and execution of this new show will certainly have to be compelling to keep viewers, but that Lakshmi is hosting is a strong sell, given how much her expertise and charm helped make Top Chef the household name it is today.

For Some Cookbook Authors, Nail Art Is Part of the Story

2024-09-10T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

A handful of new cookbooks are making nails — painted, long, over the top — a priority in their pages

“I’ve always been a nail girl,” says the chef and cooking instructor Nini Nguyen. Though she couldn’t partake in getting her nails done as much while working daily in kitchens, her new role as a cookbook author has opened up some flexibility.

In Đặc Biệt, her debut cookbook, co-written with Sarah Zorn, Nguyen has gone all out with the nails: On one page, you’ll find a pointy blue-and-white manicure that’s designed to look like the melamine dishware her family used when she was growing up; on another, sharp blue tips are adorned with hearts and sparkles. In pictures where Nguyen’s hands pull apart bánh bao, or dip mango into nước mắm đường, the nails also stand out.

Nice-looking nails are a common consideration in food photography. Usually, that means relatively nondescript manicures: on the short side, maybe a fun color. Just like wearing jewelry while cooking, nails can be polarizing for viewers on the grounds of perceived hygiene; that the viewer isn’t actually eating the food they’re seeing doesn’t seem to matter compared to the principle. Accordingly, the implied goal of so many nails in cookbook photos seems to be looking polished and clean, without being overly attention-grabbing.

But a handful of new cookbooks are making nails — painted ones, long ones, over-the-top ones — a priority, so they’re as much a part of the styling as the dishware on which the food is served. To their authors, nails are essential for telling the story.

In Alyse Whitney’s Big Dip Energy, published in April, nail art emphasizes the book’s maximalist, kitschy stylings, which are an extension of Whitney’s whimsical personal style. One manicure features both a bowl of dip and portraits of Whitney’s dogs against a landscape that resembles the backdrop on a Hidden Valley ranch bottle; another spells out the book’s title in puffy, colorful letters. The nails round out the impression of who Whitney is.

Nails also help establish the aesthetic sensibilities of Shannon Martinez’s Vegan Italian Food, out in November. This is made clear beginning with the cover, which features a hand wearing ornate gold rings and sharp, long, red nails. The combination brings to mind the recently dubbed “mob wife” aesthetic; it’s no surprise that the book’s marketing materials reference Scarface as inspiration.

For Nguyen, the nails in Đặc Biệt go beyond visuals to the bigger story she wanted to tell with the book. Đặc Biệt is an ode to the Vietnamese community, especially in Nguyen’s hometown of New Orleans. “My love of nails comes from my family,” she says. Between her mom, aunts, and grandparents, “everybody worked in the nail salons.”

Vietnamese workers, most of them women, make up more than half of the nail salon workforce in the United States, according to a 2018 report from the UCLA Labor Center. Because of that, Nguyen says, “it’s something that I felt like Vietnamese people were kind of ashamed of” — particularly the idea that nail tech was something of a “fallback career.”

With Đặc Biệt, Nguyen wanted to shift that perception: to celebrate nails as one of the Vietnamese community’s contributions to mainstream American culture, and to appreciate the people doing them. In addition to highlighting her family’s work in nail salons, Nguyen thanks her nail techs in the book’s credits. “I think it’s one step closer to making sure we matter,” she says. “I want people to be proud of the things that we do.” (Intricate manicures also feature in Tuệ Nguyen’s forthcoming Vietnamese cookbook Đi Ăn.)

And because the book’s title, Đặc Biệt, refers to that which is fancy, special, or extra, Nguyen wanted intricate details, like nails, to assert the over-the-top vibe. The hands holding the po’ boy-inspired banh mi have maybe the most đặc biệt manicure: pointy and painted with chile peppers, limes, and shrimp. Dangling from the middle fingers are two charms, one shaped like a shrimp and the other like a lime wedge.

This idea of nails as representation is also important to the recipe developer and chef Kia Damon. Damon is working on her debut cookbook, an homage to her home state titled Cooking with Florida Water (Recipes, Stories, and History of the Unsung South). She’s been thinking about what kinds of hands she wants to see in its pages. “So much of this book has to do with the cultural aspects of Florida, which is really Black and really Southern,” Damon says. “I need to have folks with different hands in the photos, but also hands that have their nails done, hands that have the acrylics done.”

For Damon, this inclusion is about creating a cookbook that represents reality. Because as much as critics will have something to say about the cleanliness of cooking with long nails, “your mom or your sister or, outside of gender, your friend who likes to get their nails done is probably still cooking at home,” she says. She sees this resistance to long, colorful nails, particularly in the professional space, as rooted in respectability politics and an anti-femme, misogynistic perspective. From Damon’s point of view, “people wouldn’t be able to relate to opening up a cookbook about Florida and then just seeing nothing but plain nails — that’s not what our world looks like.”

In cookbooks, doing justice to representation involves making considerations like these: details that can seem small on their own, but matter to the people making and buying cookbooks. Whether through the nails or the plates or the backdrops — like Vietnamese newspapers and lacquered wall hangings — on which the plates are set, Nguyen wanted everything to look like a meaningful representation. “It’s not only about Vietnamese food, but I [also] really wanted to depict Vietnamese culture,” she says.

To Nguyen, the nails also spoke to how she wanted the book to feel. In other cookbooks, “the hands look so boring,” she says. “I want my hands to look as happy as my food.”

Three New Cookbooks for People Who Want to Eat More Beans

2024-09-09T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

Whether you’re a vegetarian or want to diversify your protein sources, these cookbooks make strong arguments in favor of the magical legume

Like tinned fish, beans have gotten a glow-up in the past few years, going from a taken-for-granted pantry staple to an ingredient of borderline-fetishistic renown. There have been many arguments in favor of eating more beans — namely, their affordability relative to other protein sources, their environmental benefits, and their wholesome nutritional breakdown. Still, there’s room for persuasion: As the writer Bee Wilson recently asked in the New York Times, “[H]ow can millions of people divert some of their love for meat toward beans?”

Three new cookbooks make strong, but slightly different, arguments in favor of more — and better — bean consumption. None are particularly pedantic; instead, each one approaches beans primarily through the lens of deliciousness: Why wouldn’t you eat more beans, when beans can be so good?

The Bean Book: 100 Recipes for Cooking with All Kinds of Beans, from the Rancho Gordo Kitchen

Steve Sando with Julia Newberry

Ten Speed Press, September 10

Who better to trust with beans than Steve Sando, whose beloved company Rancho Gordo boasted a 2022 waitlist of 40,000 people interested in its Bean Club? If you want to know about eating better beans, Sando is your guy. Rancho Gordo heralds new-crop and heirloom beans, like rare black chickpeas and dappled vaqueros; these, like heirloom tomatoes, offer more flavor than their commodity counterparts, which have been bred to maximize yield. The Bean Book aims to demystify beans, especially for eaters whose experience with beans might start and end with their less flavorful canned form.

This is the book for cooks who want to know the most: One section details the differences between 50 different bean varieties, and you’ll also find a consideration of phytohaemagglutinin, a toxin that can be present in some beans. Complete with historical information about bean cultivation and cookery, The Bean Book is a comprehensive primer on not just how to cook beans but also why. “Your simple act links you to your ancestors and the land around you,” explains Sando, who wrote the book with Julia Newberry. Because not every batch of beans cooks the same, Sando argues, making a pot requires paying attention and being truly connected to your food.

The Bean Book positions beans as a staple for cooks of any diet, which is to say that its recipes sometimes call for fish, meat, and lard; white beans on toast get a (optional) topping of lardo, for example. Useful and wide-ranging, the book categorizes its 100 recipes by dish type (i.e. bean stews), and from there, the recipes take global inspiration: Italian tuna and white bean salad; Brazilian caldinho de feijão, or black bean soup; Mexican carne en su jugo. While The Bean Book does ultimately highlight ways to use Rancho Gordo’s specific beans, its recipes are also written with substitutes to keep more commercially available beans as an option. Beans, after all, are for everyone.

The Yearlong Pantry: Bright, Bold Vegetarian Recipes to Transform Everyday Staples

Erin Alderson

Hardie Grant, October 22

The creator of the blog Naturally Ella, Erin Alderson makes a vegetarian argument in favor of beans. Unlike vegetarian books that prioritize fresh vegetables and tether their utility to the seasons, Alderson focuses on year-round pantry staples, arranging her book around the categories of grains, legumes (which beans belong to), and nuts and seeds. These are recipes that position legumes (or grains or nuts) as central, and adjust their fresh elements depending on what’s in season. She suggests adding sweet corn to her greens and lima beans gratin in the summer; in the winter, you might swap in broccoli instead.

Alderson explains that when she first became vegetarian, she began to eat more beans but still viewed them through a “meat-centric” lens, tossing chickpeas in Frank’s RedHot, for example. But as she gained experience in the kitchen, she writes, she “shed [her] initial understanding of beans.” While her book features an In-N-Out-inspired black bean smash burger, she’s more interested in relying on the inherent deliciousness of well-cooked beans (on that point, she offers useful guidance) in recipes like charred chimichurri ayocote beans over whipped ricotta, or big beans in tomato-miso broth. The legumes chapter offers recipes for beans, chickpeas, lentils, and soybeans, the latter primarily in the form of tempeh.

The focus on grains, legumes, and nuts makes the recipes in The Yearlong Pantry satisfying on their own — there is no need to think about how to bulk a vegetable dish into a full meal because Alderson has already done the work by, for example, pairing romesco Mayocoba beans with polenta or serving her harissa baked bean toast with a salad dressed with creamy feta. While Alderson’s book is clear about its vegetarian orientation, its emphasis on making the most out of the pantry — serving barley like risotto, or turning chickpea flour into Shan tofu — will be useful for anyone who wants another source of protein or simply to cook more frugally, sustainably, and creatively.

Justine Cooks: A Cookbook: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen

Justine Doiron

Clarkson Potter, October 29

“Beans, a full sentence,” proclaims recipe developer and TikTok star Justine Doiron in one chapter of her debut cookbook, Justine Cooks. “I think it’s okay to say I have a mild bean obsession.” Doiron takes an of-the-moment approach to dietary restrictions: She’s pescatarian but tries to “keep that on the DL,” she writes, having learned that when she doesn’t call it out, people don’t usually notice. In another chapter, she classifies tofu and fish as “my kind of proteins.”

Indeed, for some recipe developers, Doiron presumably included, this approach can be a way to get cooks excited about vegetables — or beans — on their own merits, without bringing the baggage of dietary exclusion to the table. Doiron’s recipes make beans satisfying on their own and even casually exciting; consider the way she tosses canned butter beans in seasoned flour, roasts them until they’re golden brown and crispy, and serves them with nutty zhug. This is one of those little tricks that makes a good cookbook so useful: From there, the crispy beans can become a formula to be used with another bean or sauce. Or consider the book’s cover star: beans sizzled with olives and topped with crispy sage and ricotta salata. It’s another way that Doiron shows how beans can be simple yet satisfying all on their own, and serve as an anchor protein in a varied diet.

Throughout Justine Cooks, Doiron’s recipes are simple but no less delicious: The familiar, easy concept of beans and escarole gets new life with gochujang and black vinegar; lentils are zhuzhed up with “sticky shallots” and dukkah. The recipes that aren’t beans — admittedly, the majority of them — focus on produce and have a home-cook-friendly eye towards restraint and reusing pantry staples. It’s through her accessible yet unconventional recipes that Doiron sneakily makes an argument for a more varied and flexible diet, one in which meat doesn’t have to be a given when there are so many other proteins, beans among them, to be excited about.

Three New Cookbooks Put the Spotlight on the Vietnamese Diaspora

2024-09-09T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

The cookbooks explore personal stories, family history, and both tradition and playfulness that can be found in Vietnamese recipes

Some of this season’s most exciting new cookbooks highlight the food of Vietnamese American chefs, whether it’s with the inflection of New Orleans, the impact of Oakland, or the influence of translating Vietnamese cuisine to an online audience via TikTok.

It’s perhaps easier than ever to cook Vietnamese food at home: While it “once require[d] a trip to an Asian market,” that is no longer the case, as Andrea Nguyen wrote for the Washington Post in 2019: Thanks to demographic changes and growing curiosity from younger cooks, staples like fish sauce, rice paper, and lemongrass are just all-purpose staples now.

This new ilk of cookbooks relishes this relative familiarity of Vietnamese cuisine and flavors in the United States today, and the potential it opens up for exploring personal stories and family history. Together, they tell the story of a diaspora that’s changing but forever paying homage to its roots.

Đặc Biệt: An Extra-Special Vietnamese Cookbook

Nini Nguyen with Sarah Zorn

Knopf, out now

“Đặc biệt,” chef Nini Nguyen explains, means something special, distinctive, fancy, or — for the younger Vietnamese generation — extra. Accordingly, Đặc Biệt, Nguyen’s debut cookbook, is bold, colorful, and party-ready; many of its photos suggest a boisterous family gathering just out of frame. Its recipes prioritize deliciousness over simplicity, and true to the book’s title, Nguyen recommends ways to make a dish đặc biệt whenever possible. Should you choose, you can top mực nhồi thịt, stuffed squid, with caviar; add extra lump crab meat to the meatball mixture for bún riêu; or wrap chả giò in net-like rice wrappers instead of standard egg roll wrappers.

Of course, Nguyen also offers straightforward recipes for staples like phở ga and bún bò huế, some of which don’t call for any additional đặc biệt upgrades. There is no shortage of flavor here, even with quick dishes like tôm rim me, shrimp caramelized with tamarind. But the specificity of Nguyen’s perspective — she was born and raised in New Orleans — is clearest in recipes like her Southeast Asian jambalaya (where lemongrass replaces celery in the trinity), her Viet Cajun seafood boil, and her sticky fried shrimp bánh mì, a Vietnamese bánh mì made through the lens of a New Orleans po boy. About that last recipe, in which fried shrimp are breaded in cornmeal and then drizzled with fish sauce caramel, Nguyen writes, “it’s a true hybrid, like me.”

Dac Biet is varied in its proteins (as with the following cookbooks, vegetarians might prefer something like Andrea Nguyen’s Ever-Green Vietnamese), but seafood earns special affection. Vietnamese workers make up a significant portion of the Gulf Coast’s seafood industry; Nguyen’s own grandmother shucked oysters, while her dad and his family were fishermen. “It is hard to buy seafood in America that has not been touched by Vietnamese hands,” Nguyen writes. In this way and others — such as an aside, along with photos, honoring the Vietnamese influence on the nail industry, and the presence of bottles of Cognac and Vietnamese newspapers styled around the dishes — Đặc Biệt is a vibrant, loving celebration of the Vietnamese community of the American South.

The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between

Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho

4 Color Books, September 10

Having escaped Vietnam in their early twenties, chef Tu David Phu’s parents landed in another coastal region: the Bay Area. There, Phu’s father, like his ancestors, worked as a fisherman, while Phu’s mother, who came from a family of fish sauce makers, worked in sweatshops. Memory and its preservation guide Phu’s debut cookbook, co-written with Soleil Ho. Phu explains in the introduction that, when he was growing up, his family’s history in Vietnam was one of “gaping nothingness: a series of silent head shakes, pursed lips, and changed subjects.” That is, until Phu began talking to his parents about food: “The kitchen was the safest place for me to ask, ‘I remember this flavor; can you tell me more?’”

Phu organizes his recipes by theme: There’s a chapter for seafood recipes from Phú Quoc, the island near Cambodia where his parents met; another for dishes that exemplify, to him, diasporic resilience (cá kho, or fish jerky, for example); another for dishes that represent Phu’s personal journey (“lobster boba” — a nod to the Asian American Millennial obsession). Phu’s recipes are guided by an immigrant approach to sustainability. This means sometimes relying on less-common ingredients and cuts, like tuna bloodline or de-filleted salmon carcasses, or learning how to break down your own fish. But his recipes offer great variety, encompassing both homey dishes like stir-fried bitter melon and eggs and more bougie projects like sawed-off egg shells stuffed with chawanmushi.

On the page, the partnership between Phu and Ho — who, in their former role as San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic, was known for using restaurant reviews to question broader systems of power — yields compelling results. The Memory of Taste is perhaps the richest read of these three books, full of storytelling that could stand its own even if there were no recipes anchoring it. Phu reflects on war and famine because, he writes, “if you’re gonna talk about Vietnamese food and culture, you have to talk about the suffering, too.” But to Phu and Ho, telling these stories and preserving these flavors is of utmost importance, a reassurance that “whatever comes, humanity will find a way to survive — and we’ll find pleasure and comfort wherever and however we can.”

Di An: The Salty, Sour, Sweet and Spicy Flavors of Vietnamese Cooking with TwayDaBae

Tuệ Nguyen

Simon Element, September 17

Tuệ Nguyen, better known as @twaydabae, has made it her goal to educate viewers about Vietnamese food and culture through TikTok, where she’s sometimes lovingly referred to as “big sis.” Di An, her debut cookbook, extends this goal past the confines of social media, taking an approach that targets less experienced cooks and those who aren’t very familiar with Vietnamese cuisine. “You’ll find simplified recipes that still pack the bold flavors that encompass the essence of the Vietnamese dishes I know and love,” Nguyen writes. “I believe in accessibility, in the knowledge that anyone and everyone can learn how to cook.”

Existing fans of Nguyen’s are the most obvious audience for her book. One chapter features Nguyen’s internet-famous recipes, like the unexpectedly viral fried rice that kicked off her current career; another highlights the food Nguyen has served at pop-ups, like chicken tenders with tamarind glaze. But Di An provides a streamlined explanation of Nguyen’s life: She emigrated to the United States at eight, went to culinary school instead of becoming a nurse as her parents wished, and made it big on TikTok without expecting to. Still, even readers without existing familiarity will be pulled in by recipes like Nguyen’s Vietnamese coffee creme brulee and fish sauce wings. Di An balances its more effortful recipes (bò kho “birria” tacos) with plenty of anytime dishes (a surprisingly quick honey-glazed shrimp). With mostly simple ingredients and lots of easy recipes, Di An feels well-suited for the random weeknight dinner, so long as your pantry is well-stocked.

Di An is a cookbook that speaks to the changing food culture. It’s one in which interest in a cuisine can be built broadly and suddenly via videos on a For You page, and one that gives individual cooks more power than ever to directly educate viewers and build an audience, even without the assistance of traditional media. Nguyen has already proven that a lot of people want to learn about Vietnamese food from her; with Di An, she’s making her mark in the establishment.

After Two Years, ‘Chef’s Table’ Is Making a Big Comeback

2024-09-04T12:01:00-04:00

Chef’s Table: Noodles will be a deep dive like the show’s previous seasons on pastry, barbecue, and pizza. | Netflix

The first of three just-announced seasons will focus on noodles

Netflix announced today via press release that Chef’s Table, the food documentary series created by David Gelb, is coming back for three more seasons, beginning this fall. The show’s last season — which centered on pizza makers in the United States, Rome, and Japan — aired in 2022.

Chef’s Table: Noodles, a single topic-focused season akin to the show’s previous deep-dives into pastry, barbecue, and pizza, premieres on October 2. It’ll feature Evan Funke, the Los Angeles chef known for his handmade pasta; Guirong Wei, the London chef who specializes in Shaanxi cuisine; Peppe Guida, the Italian chef behind the Michelin-starred Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa; and Nite Yun, the Oakland chef who has championed Cambodian cuisine in the United States.

Following on November 27 — right in time for Thanksgiving TV watching — is Chef’s Table: Volume 7, which will go back to the show’s roots of spotlighting chefs who cook all kinds of foods. It’ll include Nok Suntaranon of Philadelphia’s Kalaya; Kwame Onwuachi of New York City’s Tatiana; Ángel León of El Puerto de Santa María, Spain’s Aponiente; and Norma Listman and Saqib Keval of Mexico City’s Masala y Maíz and Mari Gold.

Netflix

Noodles of all kinds will appear in the newest season of Chef’s Table.

Chef’s Table, which first aired on April 26, 2015, followed David Gelb’s widely loved Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Its artistic approach and behind-the-scenes looks into the top echelons of the food world earned it acclaim as well as many imitators (it’s been called “the most beautiful show about food, ever”). The show also helped fuel the idea of chefs as “singular visionaries” and as celebrities across mainstream culture. Having faced criticism for its failure to highlight women and people of color, the series has made a concerted effort in recent seasons to course-correct.

And with 2025 marking the show’s 10-year anniversary, Netflix has also announced plans for Chef’s Table: Legends, which the release notes will include “people who have shaped the food world and transcended borders,” though its lineup hasn’t yet been released. Given that the show has already featured so many high-profile and hugely influential chefs — including Massimo Bottura, Alain Passard, and Grant Achatz — it’ll be interesting to see how it defines the term “legends” in this season.

Fans of Chef’s Table have a lot to look forward to: Of course, the trailer promises the same dramatic, slow-motion cinematography and soaring score that have come to define the series.

The Godparents of the Filipino Food Movement Say Goodbye

2024-08-29T14:26:54-04:00

Amy Besa surveils the Purple Yam dining room on the Wednesday evening of its final week of service.

Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan are closing their beloved Filipino restaurant Purple Yam, which helped shape the modern Filipino food scene

On August 30, Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan will — for the last time — serve food at Purple Yam, the Filipino restaurant in Brooklyn that they opened in 2009. Running a restaurant has become a challenge for the couple both physically and financially. Besa remembers, for example, the days when she and Dorotan used chanterelles and other foraged mushrooms generously; the pancit bihon at their previous restaurant, Cendrillon, was once full of them, but wild mushrooms are unaffordable now. “Especially in these economic times, it’s very hard to do what we were doing,” Besa says. “That’s why we think our era is at an end.”

The Filipino food scene that Besa and Dorotan are leaving behind is completely different from the one that existed when they started. Today, ube is everywhere; Kasama in Chicago has a Michelin star — the first for a Filipino restaurant. But when Besa and Dorotan first expressed interest in doing Filipino food in New York City, they were met with resistance: Nobody would get it.

There is a common sentiment among the Filipino food community across the United States today: What we do now has been made possible by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. “I feel like Amy and Romy are like the ninang and ninong of everything that’s happening now,” says Genevieve Villamora, who was an owner and operator of Washington D.C.’s Bad Saint, itself a force in pushing Filipino food forward. In translation: Besa and Dorotan are the modern Filipino food movement’s godparents. Their legacy lives in every kamayan dinner and every ube dessert, as Filipino cuisine in the U.S. continues to transcend even the diaspora’s wildest expectations.

Before Purple Yam, Besa and Dorotan opened the Soho restaurant Cendrillon in 1995, with Dorotan in charge of the kitchen. When Ruth Reichl reviewed Cendrillon for the New York Times, she hailed Dorotan’s approach to Filipino food, calling it “extraordinary, looking backward and half a world away while leaping forward.”

Though Cendrillon is often now remembered as a Filipino restaurant, Besa and Dorotan never intended to call it one. They knew from the start that their food wouldn’t be traditional, and opted for a “pan-Asian” label as an attempt to shield themselves from the complaints they knew would be inevitable — that Filipinos would look at Cendrillon’s food and say, “That’s not my mother’s.”

Though the menu at Purple Yam skews more classically Filipino than Besa and Dorotan’s previous restaurant, the couple has always taken liberties with the cuisine.

“As contemporary Filipino American chefs, we’re often faced with the reality of tradition versus authenticity,” says Nico de Leon, executive chef and co-owner of Los Angeles’s Lasita. Lasita was born out of Lasa, a pop-up-turned-restaurant that, in the mid 2010s, exemplified modern Filipino cuisine in LA. For Dorotan to do Filipino food with this “nonconformist” approach was “something we needed to see: that we could take our cuisine to the next level,” de Leon says. “Romy was that person.”

But non-Filipino diners’ lack of familiarity with the cuisine posed its own challenges. Even those in the food world who respected Dorotan’s cooking pushed back against the concept of a Filipino restaurant. “They said, ‘Don’t do that. Nobody will come,’” Besa recalls. While today’s Asian American chefs now have the freedom to be unapologetic in their approach — to say fuck you to all that, as Besa puts it — “we still came from the immigrant mode,” she says. “There was that barrier, that glass ceiling.”

The name Cendrillon, which was borrowed from a French Cinderella ballet, not only distanced the couple from the constraints of tradition but also spoke to how they perceived their position in the food world. “That resonated with us: We were the Cinderella of Asian food,” Besa says.

Still, Cendrillon succeeded, offering dishes like oxtail kare-kare, roasted duck with mango chutney, and black rice paella. Its reasonable prices for the neighborhood earned Besa and Dorotan loyal fans, both Filipino and non. Filipinos, even those outside NYC, talked about Cendrillon with pride, and the restaurant scored Dorotan an appearance on Martha Stewart Living. The year of its 10th anniversary, Frank Bruni, having stepped into the role of Times critic, reviewed Cendrillon. He, like Reichl, hailed Dorotan’s innovation, writing that Cendrillon didn’t “cook or act in predictable, populist, homogenized ways.”

Villamora recalls eating Besa and Dorotan’s food in the late ’90s: a splurge New Year’s Eve visit to Cendrillon with her sister when she was a recent college graduate. With its Soho location and its modern but warm interiors, the restaurant felt special from the start, Villamora says: “I remember thinking, Wow, I’ve never been in a Filipino restaurant like this.”

Diners enjoying a final meal at Purple Yam.

Having grown up within Chicago’s large Filipino community, Villamora was no stranger to Filipino home cooking nor no-frills turo-turo joints. The food at Cendrillon felt simultaneously familiar and new. “It gave me the sense that the cuisine was really alive,” Villamora says. “That it was still evolving, and that it could change — and I could still recognize it and still enjoy it.”

Besa and Dorotan ran Cendrillon until 2009, when rent in Soho became prohibitive. The couple eyed Ditmas Park in Brooklyn for their next move. After 9/11 and the 2003 citywide blackout, they wanted the ability to walk home if they had to. “This time we will embrace our culture — let’s name it Purple Yam,” Besa says of the new restaurant, which opened in late 2009.

Dorotan had been using purple yam in everything — pizza, ice cream, noodles. Better known by its proper name, ube, the vegetable is now a global sensation that has transcended the boundaries of Filipino cuisine alone. In 2009, the name Purple Yam won out because Besa thought people would butcher the pronunciation of ube.

Bobby Punla, chef of the modern Filipino pop-up Likha Eats in the Bay Area, fondly recalls being a regular at Purple Yam around 2013. He’d visit a few times a month on early dates with his now-wife. The restaurant felt welcoming, like being in Besa in Dorotan’s home: Besa would be telling stories; Dorotan would be in the kitchen, emerging to present new flavors of ice cream for dessert. Indeed, Sam Sifton once called Purple Yam “a perfect neighborhood restaurant.”

Dining at Purple Yam marked a turning point in Punla’s interest in Filipino food. Working in fine dining at the time, “I was like, I don’t really know how to cook my own culture’s food,” Punla says. At Purple Yam, he tried certain dishes — like beef tapa — for the first time, associating the restaurant with finally connecting him to his roots.

The publication of Besa and Dorotan’s cookbook Memories of Philippine Kitchens in 2006 expanded the couple’s influence even further. (It received an update in 2012 but is now out of print.) As Besa writes in the introduction, the book was guided by a “desire to document traditions, to bring Philippine food into the twenty-first century while preserving the strong foundation of our past.”

Before Memories of Philippines Kitchens was published in 2006, there were few resources on Filipino food published in the US.

Memories of Philippine Kitchens became the de facto primer to Filipino food. The book tells family stories and explains in great detail the ingredients, techniques, and heritage of Filipino cuisine. De Leon recalls discovering it as a young cook. “That book became our bible, more or less. We referenced it almost daily when we were writing menus,” he says.

For Ken Concepcion, owner of the Los Angeles culinary bookstore Now Serving, Memories of Philippine Kitchens was the first time he’d seen an American cookbook put Filipino cuisine in the spotlight. “To see my own heritage reflected in something that anybody could pick up and learn about was really special,” he says. “It was like a watershed, landmark book.” It established the cuisine in the American cookbook canon.

In recent years, the shelf of Filipino cookbooks published in the U.S. has grown full. These are books that are specific about their positioning within the diaspora (take Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan’s Filipinx) or that prioritize riffs over replication (take Abi Balingit’s Mayumu). “The books out now, I really feel like they wouldn’t have been there — or it would have been a lot tougher to get written and published — if [Besa and Dorotan’s] book wasn’t there before,” Concepcion says.

Becoming the de facto spokespeople for Filipino cuisine on the global stage was, for Besa and Dorotan never the goal: They simply wanted to make unique food with integrity and with advocacy for Philippine ingredients and history. Look at Italy, Besa explains: You can taste it through the imported olive oils, cheeses, and pastas; you understand heirloom production and terroir. “I wanted the same thing for the Philippines,” she says.

Besa and Dorotan were the first commercial partners of Eighth Wonder, which sold heirloom rice from farmers in the Cordillera region of northern Luzon. The mountainous area in the northernmost part of the Philippines is known for its verdant rice terraces. But with the Philippines, a predominantly white rice country, heirloom rice varieties were at risk, says Mary Hensley, who founded Eighth Wonder. The goal of Eighth Wonder and its associated Cordillera Heirloom Rice Project was to “to preserve the cultural connection of these Indigenous people to the rice and preserve the rice terraces,” Hensley says.

Not only did the couple bring attention to Hensley’s work by serving the rice in their restaurants, but Besa also connected Hensley with other Filipino chefs. “The visibility that Amy and Romy gave to my rice was huge,” Hensley says. The couple used Cordillera heirloom rice until 2019, when Hensley ended her business. “It really fits into, what I think is [Besa’s] personal mission of resurrecting or honoring or trying to keep alive a number of Indigenous foods from the Philippines, whether they’re the old vinegars and souring agents, or the way they used to make salt, or the heirloom rice varieties that still exist.”

Besa and Dorotan chose Ditmas Park, Brooklyn for Purple Yam because they wanted something close to home.

Besa and Dorotan’s approach to Filipino cooking — and to the very idea of a Filipino restaurant — “made an indelible imprint on me in terms of thinking about, How do we talk about our own food?,” says Villamora of Bad Saint. For so long, perspectives on Filipino food had felt exoticized or superficial. In pop culture, “it wasn’t often Filipinos talking about our own food,” she says. Besa and Dorotan offered a perspective of context, curiosity, and care.

Eating their food on subsequent occasions, “I had this sense of something profound happening,” Villamora says: that the new incarnation of Filipino food before her was the result of “deep understanding and deep thinking about what our food can be.” This kind of thinking influenced Bad Saint, where Besa and Dorotan’s influence also played out in the decision to name dishes in Tagalog or their regional language, or in the context with which they explained dishes to guests.

It comes down to the idea of lineage — the way that Besa and Dorotan have always brought history and complexity into their cooking, but also the way their advocacy of the cuisine and its ingredients has allowed Filipino food to flourish today. “Even if people are not necessarily replicating the approach that Amy and Romy have taken, even if they’re doing ube shakes with burgers and fries, whether they know [it] or not, that is possible because of work that Amy and Romy have done,” Villamora says.

In 2018, Ligaya Mishan wrote in the New York Times that Filipino food had “found a place in the [American] mainstream,” pointing to the broader success of restaurants such as Bad Saint, Lasa, and Nicole Ponseca’s Jeepney and Maharlika in NYC. It turned out that wasn’t even the apex. What has happened in the years since has been remarkable: the rise of diasporic bakeries and fusion takeout spots, the establishment of Filipino fine dining as its own category, the adoption of Filipino ingredients in non-Filipino cuisines. Filipino food has gone from a rarity to another part of the culinary landscape; we don’t have to do quite as many introductions. The sense that any one chef or any one restaurant must speak for the entire culture has dissipated — so many more perspectives are in the spotlight.

That the cuisine has reached the heights it has today is “more than what I had hoped for,” Besa says. Still, in recent years, she could sense that this boom was coming. “You could feel the hunger and the thirst of so many Filipinos and Filipino Americans wanting to express their love for their culture through food. How do you express that? You open up a restaurant.”

As much as Besa knows that younger Filipino chefs see her and Dorotan as inspiration, it was never their goal to tell people how to do things. “Whatever inspires you, you take that and then you own it,” she says. “You do it your way.”

Though the restaurant is closing, Besa and Dorotan hope to continue to be involved in the food world in some way.

Jutharat ‘Poupay’ Pinyodoonyachet is a New York-based photographer.

Buy Yourself One Fancy Little Plate

2024-08-29T10:45:00-04:00

This stainless steel platter cost less than $5. | Bettina Makalintal

Break the monotony of everyday meals

No matter how much I cook, no matter how much I post pictures of my food online, I cannot will myself to spend a lot on dinnerware. My dishes are cheap, durable, and basic — almost all from Marshalls or TJ Maxx.

I peruse pricier ones, sure: I love the whimsical prints of Bitossi Home, the luxurious colors of East Fork, the vintage appeal of Ginori, and the trompe l’oeil absurdity of Gohar World. But then I do the math on what it might cost to outfit my apartment with a set when a single plate costs upwards of $40. Though I don’t have dinner parties often, I’ve internalized my mother’s old-school guidance that a good home cook should always be ready to host a crowd. By this point of view, special dishware sets largely exists for being shown off to others; it is why newlyweds load up their registries with collections of nice china that’ll collect dust outside of the rare special occasion.

The affordable alternative: Buy yourself just one fancy little plate. The fancy little plate does not even have to be, as mentioned above, expensive. It just has to be a piece that represents a break from the monotony of everyday life. One of my fancy little plates — a rustic, speckled ceramic number — came out of a seconds bin at a holiday market: maybe $10. The artist clearly wasn’t proud of it since they didn’t sign the bottom, but I love its rough imperfection regardless. That it’s a one-off makes it feel even more special; anyone with money can buy Ginori.

My other fancy little plate is, in fact, even cheaper: a stainless steel platter that I got at a restaurant supply store for, if my memory serves me right, under $5. When I eat my buttered toast on it, I imagine a cool and timeless L’Appartement 4F vibe. My five-minute plate of grapes, sliced cheese, a nectarine, and olives goes from evoking Lunchables to feeling right out of a Dutch still life, like I’ve puckishly snuck a platter out of a Dionysian feast and then returned to my desk to work. Even when the meal gets messy — the platter smeared with mayo or drizzled with oil — it looks chic.

The fancy little plate is ultimately not about the price of the thing but about the feeling of worth that you confer to it: Fancy is a state of mind. I use mine only every so often, primarily when I want my meal to feel a little more intentional, or a little more special in some way. To use the fancy little plate daily would be to decrease its perspective-shifting power. Today I put a sandwich on it, just because.

If you cook for a partner, maybe buy two. Or don’t: Let the fancy little plate be your quiet, solo treat, or use it without any prompting to show them a little extra love on occasion.

Eater: All Posts by Bettina Makalintal

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Three New Cookbooks for People Who Want to Eat More Beans

The Bean Book: 100 Recipes for Cooking with All Kinds of Beans, from the Rancho Gordo Kitchen

The Yearlong Pantry: Bright, Bold Vegetarian Recipes to Transform Everyday Staples

Justine Cooks: A Cookbook: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen

Three New Cookbooks Put the Spotlight on the Vietnamese Diaspora

Đặc Biệt: An Extra-Special Vietnamese Cookbook

The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between

Di An: The Salty, Sour, Sweet and Spicy Flavors of Vietnamese Cooking with TwayDaBae

After Two Years, ‘Chef’s Table’ Is Making a Big Comeback

The Godparents of the Filipino Food Movement Say Goodbye

Buy Yourself One Fancy Little Plate

Fancy plates to buy