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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.

The Best Drying Rack for Everything Is This Baby Bottle Holder

2024-09-12T12:15:10-04:00

Illustration by Jordan Moss

The not-just-for-kids bottle rack has become my solution for drying all those water cups, mugs, wine glasses, and the infinite array of water bottles

Up until recently, I was a lifelong city apartment dweller. Every kitchen I had was tiny and, over the years, I had learned every trick in the book to make the most of the little countertop and storage space that was available. I didn’t yet have a dish drying rack. I hung my pots and pans. The few small appliances I deemed worthy enough to own were relegated to a kitchen cart that squeezed into a nook between the heat and a garbage bin. The shelves all had risers, hooks, or some other form of a Pinterest-recommended organization tool. Everything had a place — until I had a baby.

Friends with kids had warned that their stuff would get everywhere. As a first-time parent, I naively thought they meant clothing and toys, so I was fully prepared for onesies and stuffed animals to pile up in his nursery and even the living room. What I was not prepared for was all the items required to feed him: bottles, pump parts, brushes to clean those bottles and pump parts, and eventually a whole assortment of plates, utensils, bibs, sippy cups, and food storage trays. They got their own dedicated drawer and cabinet space, but mainly sat out on the kitchen counter because we used them so frequently.

When it came time to get rid of things that our baby outgrew, we became ruthless purgers. General advice was to hang onto everything (“In case you have a second!”), but we happily packed bags of hand-me-downs for friends with younger kids. The one exception to that has been the OXO bottle rack that’s been with us from day one.

Purchased after our initial rounds of baby stuff research, the drying rack had earned the “space-saving” title in nearly every best-of list and came with glowing reviews on Amazon. (It currently has 4.9 stars from more than 14,500 raters.) I thought we’d get rid of it once he outgrew the bottle phase, but that has yet to happen and he’s about to enter kindergarten. Instead, it has become the default drying rack for all of our drinking vessels.

While we do now have a standalone dish drying rack that comes with cup holders, I still prefer using the OXO when it comes to drying our drinking glasses, travel mugs, water bottles… you get the idea. For starters, it’s surprisingly sturdy for something that’s made entirely out of plastic. I’ve entrusted it to hold everything from heavy ceramic mugs to delicate stemless wine glasses. It has yet to tip over, even with my giant 35-ounce BruMate tumbler.

The angled pegs not only allow any excess water to drip out — apparently, they slant at a very precise 48 degrees — but are small enough to let air in for efficient drying. And unlike with the metal prongs on my dish rack, there’s no worry of any scratching (or worse) on the interior. Additionally, there are removable trays on the top and bottom to hold straws, lids, and any other parts that need to be detached and cleaned.

True to its name, the drying rack’s vertical profile is indeed space-saving, but the nine pegs are more than enough to hold the various drinking vessels my family of three goes through in a day. It’s tall, but not so tall that it can’t clear the space underneath a kitchen cabinet, plus the rack has a flat back that can sit flush against the wall. The best part is it’s dishwasher safe — I regularly machine wash the trays and have even tossed the entire rack in with no issue.

While it’s technically part of the OXO Tot collection, the bottle drying rack comes in a surprisingly palatable, non-kid color scheme. The white and gray design fits seamlessly into most kitchens without screaming “baby product” and explains why it’s caught the attention of so many guests. More than once, a child-free friend has walked into my kitchen in search of a snack or beverage, only to stop and exclaim that they need something like this for drying their growing collection of reusable water bottles. Fellow parents, of course, laugh and say that they’ve done the same thing. Because if there’s one group who knows what it’s like to wash and dry a whole lot of bottles, it’s parents — and we’ve found the perfect tool for doing so.

Patty Lee is a freelance writer and editor who covers food, kitchenware, and kids’ products.

Meet Hannah Crosbie, the UK’s Shitposting Anti ‘Trad Wine Writer’

2024-09-12T12:01:01-04:00

https://punchdrink.com/articles/hannah-crosbie-wine-critic-writer/

Cooking Together Means Complaining Together

2024-09-12T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

Or what I learned when I made my fiance cook with me from ‘A Couple Cooks’

I like to cook in the same way I like to dance: alone. Regardless of whether I’m in a relationship, cohabiting or not, this has always been my preference, my natural state of things. Part of this is due to real estate: With few exceptions, the kitchens in the 13 apartments I’ve lived in throughout my adult life have been of the dollhouse variety — too small to hold more than one person without the threat of internecine warfare. And part of this is because I’m both introverted and moderately selfish: Almost nothing makes me happier than turning on a podcast and zoning out over a cutting board for an hour or two.

The idea of couples cooking has thus never posed any real attraction for me: Like couples massages or couples manicures, it’s an activity that doesn’t inherently benefit from the participation of the person one happens to be sleeping with. In my own household, my fiance, David, and I have a church-state arrangement that plays to our respective strengths: I cook, he cleans. On the rare occasions we have cooked together, we typically end up competing over who gets to use the better cutting board or who has a more rightful claim to the eight square inches of uninterrupted counter space next to the refrigerator.

And yet, even I can appreciate the theoretical benefit of a second pair of (competent) hands in the kitchen, particularly on a weeknight. So when I received the galley for Sonja and Alex Overhiser’s A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together (out from Chronicle on October 15), I was both skeptical and curious. There are a lot of so-called “couples cookbooks” out there, and many of them seem to be geared towards date night or newlyweds. Nourish your relationship!, they cry. Cooking is an act of love! Rekindle your romance through this paella recipe! Interestingly, most of these books don’t appear to be designed for more than one cook: Their instructions are written as though one person will be doing all of the work while the other is elsewhere, presumably waiting for this act of love to be delivered.

A Couple Cooks takes a different approach. Each step of its recipe instructions is accompanied by a symbol that designates Cook 1 or Cook 2, a feature that makes it theoretically easier for two people to be in the same kitchen, working towards a shared goal. This is the second cookbook from the Overhisers, whose popular A Couple Cooks website has successfully monetized the idea that two people in the kitchen are better than one. “Cooking shouldn’t be just about getting food on the table,” they write in the introduction. “It’s about bonding over bubbling pots, chatting over chopping vegetables, and creating memories that last long after the dishes are done.”

It’s a nice idea, right up there with the equally anodyne conceit that food brings people together, and I was in need of some weeknight inspiration, so I figured, why not? When I informed David we would be cooking together, he received this information with a certain wariness. But into the kitchen we went, accompanied by the Overhisers’ recipe for blackened shrimp with avocado lime sauce.

The recipe’s division of labor seemed a bit lopsided: One cook makes the sauce and the shrimp, while the other combines slaw ingredients and warms the tortillas. But given that one cook (ahem) had prepped the slaw ingredients beforehand, this left the other cook with more time to do dishes, so no harm, no foul. Generally, the recipe was smooth sailing, insofar as it was easy for two people to follow, and the shrimp seasoning and avocado sauce were very good. That said, the sauce’s ⅛ teaspoon garlic measurement was mystifying — you might as well just wave a clove in the sauce’s general direction — and the shrimp wasn’t actually blackened but sauteed. This, however, created the bonding experience that the Overhisers promised, as we found ourselves complaining about the same thing, and if that’s not the point of sharing a life with another person, I don’t know what is.

Since I was determined to prolong this experiment until I could find something meaningful to take away from it, we returned to the kitchen the following evening to make the book’s recipe for sticky orange tofu and broccoli. This recipe worked really well, as did the division of labor, which felt evenly weighted. When we started making the recipe, we were sniping at each other about something unimportant, but by the time we were done we were getting along splendidly. The final product was delicious, which also helped. We ate it while watching What We Do In the Shadows, one of the only TV shows we agree on.

There’s a chapter in A Couple Cooks called Just For Two, which functions as the de facto Date Night chapter that couples-oriented cookbooks are contractually obligated to provide. Its recipes, per the Overhisers, are “fancy enough to wow, but practical” — think Date Night Pizza, truffle pasta, shrimp and scallops, and other animal proteins expensive enough that you don’t want to lavish them on children or guests. I chose the Sweet Heat Salmon, a recipe described as “great for spicing up date night.” It had only six ingredients, and most were pantry staples, which I appreciated (many of the Overhisers’ recipes rely on pantry staples and err on the side of low-key approachability, which makes this a solid weeknight dinner book regardless of whether you happen to be partnered).

Alas, for all its ease, the dish — through no fault of its own — did not wind up spicing up date night. This is because there was no date night; instead, there was a regular weeknight, hectic and lousy with good if unrealized intentions. I made the sauce (butter, hot sauce, Sriracha, honey, and tamari), put it over fish, and we ate it, and it was nice, and that was it. But maybe that’s its own form of romance, a meal that meets your expectations without making you feel bad that you didn’t exceed them.

All of this made me realize that cooking together is a bit like starting a daily exercise practice: It requires determination and conscious decision-making and the development of new muscles, specifically that of accommodation. Could David and I cook together every day? Probably not, at least not in this kitchen. And I don’t think either of us would want to; again, we know our strengths, and we’re good at playing to them. But while I can’t say this experience led to memorably deep conversations or above-average bonding, it was, in its own way, satisfying, especially because cooking together made it a lot easier to clean as we went, which ensured that no one got stuck scrubbing dishes afterwards.

Did cooking together create memories? Well, yes — most conscious experiences do. If anything, it created a new awareness of my own muscle memory: So much of what I do in the kitchen is the result of doing things a certain way over and over again until I don’t really think about doing them. Cooking together is in a sense no different than riding a tandem bike: You have to be aware of how the other person moves and the energy they expend, and adjust yourself accordingly. Eventually, you might just make it to the top of the hill, sweaty and perhaps a little tired, but able to appreciate the view all the same.

In ‘You Gotta Eat,’ You Don’t Gotta Cook

2024-09-12T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

Margaret Eby’s new cookbook is as much about granting permission as it is showing you how to assemble a meal

Most days, my partner and I have something we call egg lunch. At its most basic, it is an egg and rice. Sometimes there’s soy sauce and American cheese, or chile crisp, or the last of a wilting scallion and some other condiment, but sometimes it’s just egg and rice. Because did you know meals come three times a day? That you can’t just eat one big meal and be sustained for the rest of the week like a snake? You just keep needing food. It’s ridiculous.

Margaret Eby’s new cookbook, You Gotta Eat, out November 19 from Quirk Books, opens with a mantra that might seem antithetical to cookbooks: “You do not have to cook.” Sometimes you are depressed. Sometimes you are too broke to buy fresh herbs. Sometimes you are just so busy that suddenly it’s 7 p.m. and your stomach is growling and you are too overwhelmed to even think about following a recipe. You Gotta Eat was written for those moments. It’s divided not into appetizers and desserts, but by what you feel you have energy for. Can you open a can? Here’s how to make a bean salad. Can you work the microwave? Make a baked potato with it. There are some recipes, but mostly, Eby guides you through technique and flavor, whether it’s how to make rice in a mug or doing a choose-your-own-adventure canape recipe (Triscuits with cream cheese and hot sauce can absolutely be dinner).

You Gotta Eat is as much about granting permission as it is showing you how to assemble a meal out of the dregs of your kitchen. Eby notes the absolute mess human society has made of food, from the diet-industrial complex to gendered domestic labor to the welfare of every worker that gets canned beans into your pantry. But despite all that, you can’t just opt out of eating. “When food felt like a chore, I kept reminding myself: The best food is the food that you’ll eat,” writes Eby. We spoke to her about rediscovering the joy in cooking, surprising flavor combinations, and why the microwave is your friend.

Eater: There’s a whole genre of cookbook purporting to make cooking easy, but yours feels really distinct from that. What did you want to do differently?

Margaret Eby: One of the things I think about with easy or simple recipes is: Easy for who? Recipe development is a translation project that requires you to make so many assumptions about the person using the recipe: What their skill level in the kitchen is, what kind of equipment they’re working with, what’s in their pantry, and how comfortable they are with various techniques, and with recipes in general. “Easy” means something radically different to different people. What I was hoping to do with this book is to break things down to a starting place that was as unintimidating as possible. So before we even get to the stage of chopping an onion, ask, ok, what are you up for? Do you have time and energy to turn on the oven at all, or is today an assemble-things-from-cans kind of meal day? Do you have time and bandwidth to boil water or do you just want to figure out how to make a cheese sandwich slightly more exciting? What are the things that feel hard to you in the kitchen for whatever reason, and how do you avoid them when you can’t face them?

So many of those cookbooks make these assumptions, like, all you need to do is dig up fresh herbs you’re supposed to have on your patio. I’m like, I have wilted spinach, half a jar of peanut butter, and this is my energy level. What I need is someone to talk me into not ordering delivery again. I really admire a lot of those cookbooks, and I took a lot of inspiration from them. There’s no knock against them. But I really wanted this to be so accessible, and give people permission to use what they have, and take it easy on themselves. Do what you can with what you’ve got.

There’s this fallacy in food media, where you and I are both participants, that every meal should be the best meal you’ve ever had. No, some meals are frozen burritos, and that is fine. And I know also from experience, many of the people putting together the beautiful and aspirational food and making the photos look gorgeous are like, Well, I have 20 minutes for lunch, so I’m going to eat a cheese rind and an orange.

Reading your book made me realize just how many expectations are in other “easy” cookbooks. They all seem to think I have fresh lemons around, and I just don’t.

Another big thing was I wanted to make sure not to introduce an element of shame. What’s actually in people’s pantries is so varied, so dependent on their lives and how often they get to go to the supermarket, or how much time and money they have to devote to fresh produce versus frozen things. A lot of these casual assumptions end up boxing people in rather than actually helping and being instructional.

You talk a little bit in the introduction about the life and health things that can get in the way of cooking, like depression, or just being overwhelmed with other things. Was there a moment when you realized this book needed to be made for those moments?

During the pandemic, when I was working for Food & Wine, I was in this exact scenario. There was a lasagna on the cover of the magazine and it was completely gorgeous. And it took literally two days to make, doing the noodles from scratch. It was a real showstopper recipe. Meanwhile, I was so anxious and stressed out, and so tired of cooking. The only way for me to get through was to eat like a child. I bought an economy-sized bag of Bagel Bites, because it’s technically food and it’s delicious.

Being in that place, and having a lot of people who aren’t in food come to me for advice, made me think a lot about this aspirational branch of food media. Like the Martha Stewart image, or this idea that food people have secret knowledge that regular people do not have that allows them to constantly make beautifully plated lunches. I can do that, and I can tell you how to do that, but I was also amazed how much it helped people when I was just being very honest with them about where I was at. I can tell you how to make that lasagna if you have the energy, but I’m making cheese toast.

Speaking of shame, you talk about all the ways that we’re told our instincts are wrong in the kitchen. How did you start to get over that? Because even reading it, I had this immediate gut reaction when you said something about putting beans in tuna salad. I was like, You can’t do that! And then thought, Actually that sounds good, why do I think you can’t do that?

I think in my head I had for a long time — and kind of still do, to be honest — this idea of a secret cabal of “real” food people who are constantly judging me. Maybe that’s just an anxiety thing. I came into the food world as an entertainment journalist who was just interested in food, but I hadn’t worked in restaurants. But I put myself through French culinary school, very duck l’orange and mother sauces, and it started to dismantle the cabal. They don’t exist, but even if they did, who cares? In real life, people are like, You put Doritos on your sandwich? Nice. Maybe Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud would think it was gross, but I don’t know them.

It made me realize how much I had internalized this Eurocentric, patriarchal idea of food. People have been making food for themselves for as long as people have existed. Why are they wrong? Why is it wrong to approach a problem differently than a man in the 1800s who was cooking for a French king? The more I realize that, and the more I talk to actual people who work in restaurants who are mostly enthusiasts and weird nerds, the more I see these rules are made up. What you really need to be able to do is take care of yourself in whatever way you can. I was really hoping to make it more useful than something that felt like it was holding people back, to explain why you add butter to stuff or where you can add a bunch of salt, as opposed to being like, Oh, you don’t know how to make a bechamel sauce?

Is there a recipe or flavor combination that shocked you when it worked?

The one sandwich that always makes people freak out at me is the mayonnaise and pineapple one. Everyone is going along with the ride, and then I’m like, Have you tried canned pineapple and mayonnaise? And everyone’s getting off the train. But you try it and it’s pretty good! It feels very like born of the Great Depression, or maybe a stoner thing, but it is a flavor combination that really works,

How else did your friends react when they were helping you try out these recipes?

One of my first readers is my wonderful friend, Jett Allen, they’re a cartoonist. I was like, you’re a regular human, will you please read this book and tell me if these are food things that are helpful to you or make sense. And I was so happy with their response, because they read it, and they gave me a few notes, and then they made nachos. Nachos are limitless, and you can do whatever you want with them. I wanted to be a pep talk from your friend about what you should make for dinner when you’re not feeling up to it, but you want someone to convince you not to order takeout.

I know that the point of this book is allowing yourself to do less when you need to do less. But I’m curious if there are any kitchen appliances that have come in handy for cooking like this.

For a lot of the book I come off as this midcentury small-appliance evangelist. Like, have you heard of the microwave? But it’s really amazing how much it helps to have a microwave or a blender or a food processor, and also to not feel like they are less legitimate ways of cooking something. My aunt is the queen of cooking eggs in the microwave. You can just use it to make your life better. But also, I had a recipe in the book for crispy garlic that you can make in the microwave, but you can also buy crispy garlic. There is often this mentality that if you can’t do it with a cast iron skillet and a knife, you are inadequate as a cook, and that’s stupid. It’s fine to embrace newer technologies. Mine are maybe a bit old-fashioned. I love my toaster oven. I love my blender. I love my microwave. And I use my rice cooker every day.

You mentioned crispy garlic. Are there other ingredients that yes, you can technically make, but store-bought really is fine?

This whole book is absolutely the mantra, store-bought is fine. There’s a green sauce recipe in there, because I love making random science-experiment green sauces, but jarred pesto, totally fine. Similarly, you can make noodles from scratch, but you absolutely do not need to, because box noodles exist. I always have a stack of tortillas in my fridge. Could I make my own tortillas? Yes. Have I made my own tortillas? Yes. Are they as good as the ones that I buy? Maybe, but they’re like, 3,000 percent more effort. There’s a wonderful Mexican market down the street from me that makes hot corn tortillas every day. If it’s worth it for you to make it yourself, then don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t. But also, if you have decided that your time investment in this thing is less valuable to you than having tortillas immediately, then that is absolutely legitimate.

Kevin Hart’s Ambitious LA Vegan Chain Suddenly Closes All Locations

2024-09-11T18:33:01-04:00

Hart House

https://la.eater.com/2024/9/11/24241170/hart-house-kevin-hart-plant-based-vegan-restaurant-closing-los-angeles

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.

The 10 Must-Try Dishes at Houston’s 2024 Southern Smoke Festival

2024-09-11T11:32:41-04:00

Daniel Ortiz

https://houston.eater.com/24240730/houston-southern-smoke-festival-chris-shepherd-food-dishes

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.”

Restaurant Math Isn’t Working

2024-09-11T09:30:00-04:00

Lille Allen

Six chefs and restaurant owners from across the country explain why restaurants feel so expensive right now, and how they’re coping with high prices and customer complaints

Dining out involves calculating the intangible: What is hospitality worth to you? On the one hand, you get the possibility of technique and flavor you cannot, or don’t want to, create yourself, plated and served with attention. On the other hand, going out to a restaurant means risking mediocrity or outright unpleasantness for which you still have to pay. Every meal is an attempt to solve for this unknown, with a different equation each time.

Lately, the calculus is becoming more complicated. Or maybe the answer just keeps shaking out in one direction. Everything feels so expensive. Every check is a shock. My friends and colleagues can’t stop talking about it, our personal and professional budgets strained to the breaking point. We are eating out less often. We are ordering less when we do. We recommend new places with caveats. “The food was great,” we say, “but.” Was it worth it?

As diners complain of expensive bills and stick with the familiar, restaurateurs feel their own squeeze. Margins are tighter than ever as restaurants try to balance higher costs of rent and ingredients, reservation site fees and insurance premiums, and paying fair wages, all while trying to keep prices at a level customers will actually pay. By many accounts consumer inflation is down, and sure, the GDP is up, but something isn’t working on either side of the restaurant equation. This isn’t a problem of one city or class or demographic. Things are feeling more expensive everywhere. That the price of food feels high is an issue acknowledged at even the top level of politics. We spoke to restaurants around the country about what their books are looking like: what costs more, who’s coming in, and how they’re making it work — or whether it’s working at all.

“There’s a cultural expectation in America around how much Vietnamese food should cost”

Vien Dobui, chef and co-owner of Công Tử Bột, a modern Vietnamese restaurant in Portland, Maine

“I’m going to be completely transparent; we filed for bankruptcy in December 2023. We might break even this year. Most of our costs go to labor; our restaurant is actually unionized, so our labor percentage is almost unsustainably high, around 50 percent. And that’s by design. When I am pricing our food, I generally take the highest-cost ingredients, and multiply that by a factor of three and a half to four and a half, and that usually captures my labor costs.

“That’s still not quite enough. Because there’s a cultural expectation in America around how much Vietnamese food should cost, especially if it’s not presented as fine dining. Right now, our bowl of pho is $26. We use chicken from Joyce Farms, and our broth takes three days. But if you look at our negative reviews they’ll say it’s $26 for pho, when they can get “comparable quality” for $10, which is just not true. Recently, we had a fried rice dish that was popular that used chinese sausage and red hot dogs made by a local company using nice beef, which were $9 a pound. And I couldn’t charge appropriately for it, because the expectation is that hot dogs are cheap. So we had to change it to shrimp, which is the same price per pound, but people were more willing to pay $27 for the dish.

“I’m not saying there’s not space for $10 pho, but there should be space for a range. And some of the most vocal critics have been Asian. I’m always like, Don’t you want us to get paid? It’s hard to showcase the value. And everyone is feeling the pinch. Recently, my wife and kids and I went to Applebee’s, and the four of us ate for $75. I felt good about the value. But I also knew someone along that chain is underpaid.”

“It’s important for us not just to be the expensive spot”

Cody McCain, co-owner and general manager of Elvie’s, an all-day cafe in Jackson, Mississippi

“Because we’re doing something more elevated, we do get a little bit more play with what the price is — we’re not trying to beat people to the bottom price-wise. Obviously prices have gone up in the past couple of years, but it’s helped us to focus more locally on what farmers have around us. Getting our ingredients locally has helped us with food costs, because it’s less affected by national trends. Our local eggs used to be more expensive than your typical eggs from a distributor, but now that margin has gotten slimmer, so it makes more sense to dive into what’s around us.

“It’s important for us not just to be the expensive spot. We want to be approachable. A lot of Mississippi, and Jackson specifically, is a food desert, so what’s sustainable is to be able to reach the people that are around us, to meet needs in our community. So we have to be creative on our menu. Instead of a filet for steak, we use a butcher cut that people aren’t as familiar with. But it’s cheaper for us to buy, and benefits our butcher to use cuts that are harder for them to sell. Customers are generally more attuned to the way restaurant pricing works, but you do get people who are upset that we’re charging for bread and butter. We have a local guy that makes our sourdough bread, and we make our own onion butter, and they’re like, ‘But I can go to this chain and eat bread for free.’ In those situations, it opens up some good conversation. You may disagree with how we price this, but here’s why we’re doing this.”

“I’m not going to start cutting quality as a way to roll back into profit”

Peter Hemsley, chef at Aphotic, a seafood-focused tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco with a Michelin green star

“San Francisco is going to skew a bit abnormal in terms of what you’re seeing around the country or even in other affluent areas. We’ve held ourselves back in terms of hiking the price of the menu, even though in the past year, we have done significant menu increases due to our reputation after earning a Michelin Green Star, and also, what we feel is the true value of the service that we’re providing: We went from $135 for a 10-course tasting menu to $200. To get our sustainable seafood, you have to physically get out there, establish contacts, provide materials, and communicate. It becomes exponentially more expensive. But [if] you take a look at the competition, our menu is actually on the lower end of that scale.

“People are still sticker-shocked. I think it just has to do with the appetite for spending on restaurants. We’ve definitely seen a downtick in a more happy-go-lucky, free-wheeling kind of clientele. But my fundamental belief is I’m not going to start cutting quality as a way to roll back into profit. We’ve only increased the quality of the plates we’re buying, the material assets that create the experience. When diners are spending that kind of money, they want an amazing experience. We have to compensate for that in whatever way we can with hospitality — hot towels, scraping crumbs off the table, never making a mistake about still and sparkling water — so they have that perception of value.

“I will say, we had a weird month when California legislation flip-flopped on a legislative mandate where hidden fees, including service fees, were going to be done away with, and we reverted to this old-school system of tipping. In that one month I saw some really bad tipping, because if you give people the choice to tip, they’re stingy. They will not go beyond a certain point.”

“When you’re the only vegan chocolate business in the game, everyone has to pay what you’re charging”

Lagusta Yearwood, owner, Lagusta’s Luscious Cafe, a vegan chocolate shop and cafe in New Paltz, New York

“I picked chocolate [to sell] from the beginning because I really wanted to overtly talk to customers about why it costs more — because you’re paying not to have child slaves, you know? So it was interesting when we got news that the price of our chocolate will go up 34 percent this fall. Even Hershey’s is going to have to raise their price, it’s an across-the-board thing, but the big three chocolate makers constantly say they’re working to end forced labor in their supply chain, and I’m sure this will be yet another excuse to not work on those programs. All of our chocolate is from Peru and Ecuador, which isn’t experiencing the same climate issues as Africa, but the global market is still being affected.

“I wrote a cookbook for vegan confections that came out in 2019, and in the past few years there’s been a real boom in plant-based food. As a vegan I love it, it’s like the world I wanted to see. But there are so many more players in the vegan confections space, so we’ve done a lot of soul-searching. There’s a lot of cheaper stuff available now, and we’re never going to compete with people who have a $10 million investment. So we’ve been contracting, seeing how we can be sustainable within our communities, and pay our workers well. I think we always provided really good jobs. We want our starting wage to be $24 an hour. But the cost of living has skyrocketed in the Hudson Valley in the past few years. When we first opened, everyone who worked at the shop lived right in the village of New Paltz and walked to work, and now a lot can’t afford that.

“With these chocolate price increases, it looks like we’re going to be increasing the prices of our pieces from $3 to $3.25. That much for a tiny piece of chocolate is a lot. When you’re the only vegan chocolate business in the game, everyone has to pay what you’re charging. But now that there are more options, you find out: Are people still attracted to that homemade, ethical ethos?”

“We can’t tell our guests we have to raise the price of food because rubber gloves are more expensive”

Garrett Benedict, chef and owner of G-Love, a vegetable-forward restaurant in Portland, Oregon

“Our check averages are usually between $60 and $70 per person. Our labor costs are about 38 percent, all of our costs are really within industry standards. But our food is on the expensive side. To me, that means we have to deliver on quality 100 percent of the time; that’s what will set us apart and create value.

“Our prices have risen substantially since 2020. Pre-pandemic, I was really proud of the fact that there was no food item on the menu at G-Love that cost more than $20. And now I would say 45 to maybe even 50 percent of our dishes are over $20. Protein prices have gone up exponentially. It’s good for us, because we’re a vegetable-focused restaurant, but there are other costs too. I remember in 2020, nitrile gloves went from costing $70 a case to over $400 a case. But we can’t tell our guests, ‘Hey, we have to raise the price of food because rubber gloves are more expensive.’

“We’ve been able to keep the same level of guests coming in the door and keep our revenue going because we’re so laser-focused on quality, instead trying to cut costs and compete with everyone on the cheap end. Like, we have a $25 roasted pork dish on the menu, but we serve 4 ounces, not your standard 12-ounce pork chop. People see the price and think it’s not too bad, and then they get it, and it might look a little bit small to them. But once they eat it, they forget completely about the price. I think people understand the value there.

“There’s definitely been part of our customer base that’s been turned off by price increases, but we have to do what we have to do. In the summer, because of our outdoor space, we’re operating at around $270K to $300K in revenue a month. But in winter that’s a much different story. We can’t operate at a loss. If that ends up alienating about 10 percent of our past guests, that’s the price we have to pay. Hopefully, we can find new guests that don’t have those concerns and are excited about the quality.”

“We can’t lose money”

Gehad Hadidi, owner of La Bonne Soupe, a classic French bistro in New York

“La Bonne Soupe was opened in 1973. It was a very simple concept, a casual French bistro mostly serving the Midtown lunch crowd. We always say we’re where workers go when they’re paying for their own lunch, not when they’re expensing it on the company card. So that limits our ability to increase prices much as some of our neighbors. But we pay people the same as everyone else, and our food costs the same as everyone else’s food. So it has been challenging.

“We’re known for our French onion soup, but the price of cheese has gone up so much — Gruyere has gone up over 50 percent since 2019. But also staples like canola oil, butter, and potatoes have become more expensive, by double-digit percentages. And we have to eat these prices. We probably have fewer people working at the restaurant than we did in 2019. Our staff’s prep lists have gotten a little bit longer, servers might have an extra table or two, and less support on some days. But we can’t lose money.

“We’re off Fifth Avenue, and near Central Park, so we have tourists that are coming. We get a lot of the office crowd. But it’s usually people looking for a cheaper meal than what else is in the area. But also, the office lunch crowd has changed a lot. You have more people doing flex work and not coming into Manhattan. And for the people that are here, they’re ordering dessert a little bit less, or being more cautious about having a second glass of wine, or not having a drink at all. You can tell people are more cautious of how much they’re ordering.

“One thing we implemented about two, three years ago, is a 2 percent kitchen appreciation fee. It’s printed on our menus, and 100 percent of that goes towards our kitchen team — in New York, the law is that tips can only go to front-of-house staff. But as an individual restaurant, there’s only so much we can do to really change the model. If there’s going to be a change to the industry, it probably has to come from government regulations that all of us have to follow at the same time. Otherwise, no one is making heavy margins, because if they do, people will see it as a rip-off and go to the place next door.”