via:
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Monday, March 2, 2026
Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast
When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.
Obama was scheduled to meet with President Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The formula has proved improbably successful.
People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.
Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”
The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.
Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.
At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.
“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.
“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”
As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”
“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.
“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.
“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”
Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”
“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.
Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”
But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]
As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]
In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”
“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.
Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.
People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.
Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”
The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.
Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.
At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.
“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.
“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”
As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”
“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.
“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.
“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”
Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”
“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.
Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”
But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]
As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]
In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”
“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.
Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.
by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.]
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.]
Monday, February 9, 2026
$180 LX Hammer Burger
Super Bowl LX isn’t just about football, it’s about excess. And this year, nothing captures that better than the LX Hammer Burger.
Created by Levy Restaurants, the LX Hammer Burger is the most over-the-top menu item at Super Bowl LX, and only 200 of them are being made for the entire day.
If you manage to get one, you’re not just buying a burger — you’re buying a Super Bowl flex.
What’s on the LX Hammer Burger?
This isn’t your standard stadium cheeseburger.
The Ultimate Super Bowl Food Flex
Every Super Bowl has its viral food item. Some years it’s gold-leaf steaks. Other years it’s absurd cocktails or luxury desserts.
This year, it’s a $180 burger with a bone sticking out of it.
by Don Drysdale, Detroit Sports Nation | Read more:
Yes, it costs $180.
No, that’s not a typo.
No, that’s not a typo.
If you manage to get one, you’re not just buying a burger — you’re buying a Super Bowl flex.
What’s on the LX Hammer Burger?
This isn’t your standard stadium cheeseburger.
The LX Hammer Burger features:
- A juicy cheeseburger patty
- Braised bone-in beef shank, slow-cooked for maximum richness
- Roasted mirepoix demi-glace, adding deep, savory flavor
- Point Reyes bleu cheese fondue, melted and dripping down the sides
- All served on a freshly baked brioche bun
Why Is It $180?
Three reasons:
Three reasons:
- Scarcity – Only 200 burgers are being made
- Ingredients – Bone-in beef shank, premium bleu cheese, and demi-glace aren’t cheap
- Super Bowl Tax – This is the biggest sporting event on the planet, and exclusivity sells
The Ultimate Super Bowl Food Flex
Every Super Bowl has its viral food item. Some years it’s gold-leaf steaks. Other years it’s absurd cocktails or luxury desserts.
This year, it’s a $180 burger with a bone sticking out of it.
by Don Drysdale, Detroit Sports Nation | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Man, that is one ugly burger. Probably a good idea to notify hospital Emergency ahead of time - incoming! No reports on how many were sold. Just stick with any old regular one, which (I'm guessing) would still probably run you $50.]
Saturday, February 7, 2026
The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet That's France's Favourite Restaurant
France's highest-grossing restaurant isn't a Michelin-starred bistro or a Parisian institution, but an all-you-can-eat buffet on the outskirts of Narbonne. Serving everything from pressed duck to truffles for just €67.50 (£58.74), Les Grands Buffets has become a national obsession and a pilgrimage for French food lovers.
As I pulled into a nondescript carpark opposite a McDonald's on the outskirts of Narbonne, in southern France, I didn't expect that in less than half an hour I would be watching one of the most revered rituals of French culinary theatre.
To the swelling soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, a server emerged wearing a crisp white shirt and black apron, holding a whole roasted duck skewered vertically above a naked flame. He presented it to the assembled diners as if bearing the Olympic torch. Then a deep, dramatic voice rang out:
Founded in 1989 by Louis and Jane Privat, Les Grands Buffets has become one of France's most coveted dining experiences – a place many French people hope to visit at least once in their lives. Reservations are made months in advance, and diners willingly make the pilgrimage to Narbonne, a town of around 56,000 people near the Spanish border. The restaurant welcomes around 400,000 diners a year – 86% of them French – and receives some 3.5 million reservation requests annually. With its 2025 revenue totalling €30m (£26m/$34.8m), it's also France's highest-grossing restaurant.
"When we opened, there wasn't a single all-you-can-eat buffet in France," Louis Privat told me as we toured the restaurant before the lunch service. "The concept just didn't exist."
Others had tried, he said, but found the model financially unviable. "Yet, what was very famous at that time was Club Med and its buffet." A qualified accountant, Privat believed he could make the concept stick. "I was a real fan of the formula, and I was sure that the general public would adore it, too."
The French, after all, have long embraced all-inclusive holidays. They are also fiercely proud of their national cuisine. Les Grands Buffets sits precisely at the intersection of those two impulses. (...)
"The restaurant is genuinely done in the spirit of Auguste Escoffier," said Michel Escoffier, the chef's great-grandchild and honorary chairman of the foundation
I was struck by how very civilised it all was. There were no elbows out at the lobster fountain, and people served themselves a respectful half-dozen oysters at a time rather than piling a mountain onto their plates. They queued patiently for hot dishes made to order – an indulgent list that included poached lobster, tournedos Rossini (beef filet with truffle and foie gras) and a south-western French classic, cassoulet from nearby Castelnaudary.
Around 150 dishes are drawn directly from Le Guide Culinaire, each annotated with its original page number. I was careful to pace myself as I didn't want to miss out on cheese and dessert; luckily, diners are given time to let courses settle. For the lunch service, guests arrive in 15-minute increments from noon and can stay until 16.30. At dinner, doors open at 19:00 and close at midnight.
As I pulled into a nondescript carpark opposite a McDonald's on the outskirts of Narbonne, in southern France, I didn't expect that in less than half an hour I would be watching one of the most revered rituals of French culinary theatre.
To the swelling soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, a server emerged wearing a crisp white shirt and black apron, holding a whole roasted duck skewered vertically above a naked flame. He presented it to the assembled diners as if bearing the Olympic torch. Then a deep, dramatic voice rang out:
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the ritual of canard au sang, a tradition conceived in the 19th Century. The duck is roasted on the spit and then brought to the table, where the duck master uses a silver duck press to crush the carcass, extracting the blood and natural juices, which are then incorporated into the sauce."
I watched as the duck was filleted on a marble workbench; the bones placed in a silver press and crushed. A dark liquid, unmistakably blood, trickled out, was flambéed and poured back over the meat.
However queasy it made me feel, there was no doubt that this is one of the great classics of French gastronomy – and one that rarely appears menus today, let along prepared with such ceremony. In fact, there is only one restaurant in France that serves pressed duck at every lunch and dinner service. And that's exactly where I was: Les Grands Buffets.
Literally translated as "The Big Buffets", Les Grands Buffets is exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-eat restaurant – and the largest of its kind in the world. Yet it's about as far removed from the suburban buffets of my Australian childhood as it is possible to be. Those certainly didn't feature a seven-tiered lobster fountain, nine varieties of foie gras, more than 50 desserts or hold the world record for the most varieties of cheese commercially available in a restaurant (111, to be precise). All of this comes for a fixed price of €67.50 (£58.78/ $79.17) per person.
I watched as the duck was filleted on a marble workbench; the bones placed in a silver press and crushed. A dark liquid, unmistakably blood, trickled out, was flambéed and poured back over the meat.
However queasy it made me feel, there was no doubt that this is one of the great classics of French gastronomy – and one that rarely appears menus today, let along prepared with such ceremony. In fact, there is only one restaurant in France that serves pressed duck at every lunch and dinner service. And that's exactly where I was: Les Grands Buffets.
Literally translated as "The Big Buffets", Les Grands Buffets is exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-eat restaurant – and the largest of its kind in the world. Yet it's about as far removed from the suburban buffets of my Australian childhood as it is possible to be. Those certainly didn't feature a seven-tiered lobster fountain, nine varieties of foie gras, more than 50 desserts or hold the world record for the most varieties of cheese commercially available in a restaurant (111, to be precise). All of this comes for a fixed price of €67.50 (£58.78/ $79.17) per person.
Founded in 1989 by Louis and Jane Privat, Les Grands Buffets has become one of France's most coveted dining experiences – a place many French people hope to visit at least once in their lives. Reservations are made months in advance, and diners willingly make the pilgrimage to Narbonne, a town of around 56,000 people near the Spanish border. The restaurant welcomes around 400,000 diners a year – 86% of them French – and receives some 3.5 million reservation requests annually. With its 2025 revenue totalling €30m (£26m/$34.8m), it's also France's highest-grossing restaurant.
"When we opened, there wasn't a single all-you-can-eat buffet in France," Louis Privat told me as we toured the restaurant before the lunch service. "The concept just didn't exist."
Others had tried, he said, but found the model financially unviable. "Yet, what was very famous at that time was Club Med and its buffet." A qualified accountant, Privat believed he could make the concept stick. "I was a real fan of the formula, and I was sure that the general public would adore it, too."
The French, after all, have long embraced all-inclusive holidays. They are also fiercely proud of their national cuisine. Les Grands Buffets sits precisely at the intersection of those two impulses. (...)
"The restaurant is genuinely done in the spirit of Auguste Escoffier," said Michel Escoffier, the chef's great-grandchild and honorary chairman of the foundation
That spirit continues to shape the menu. Late last year, Les Grands Buffets introduced truffles, making it the only all-you-can-eat buffet in the world to serve the prized and pricey ingredient, according to Privat.
"Since Escoffier presents 1,200 truffle recipes in his repertoire, we felt that if we are to continue to be recognised as the global showcase of his cuisine, we had to feature truffles," he said.
At the dedicated truffle station, I picked up a truffle and foie gras soup topped with puff pastry, as well as a plate of organic scrambled eggs finished with generous shavings of black truffle. The dish was cooked in front of me at a wide, polished wood counter.
"Since Escoffier presents 1,200 truffle recipes in his repertoire, we felt that if we are to continue to be recognised as the global showcase of his cuisine, we had to feature truffles," he said.
At the dedicated truffle station, I picked up a truffle and foie gras soup topped with puff pastry, as well as a plate of organic scrambled eggs finished with generous shavings of black truffle. The dish was cooked in front of me at a wide, polished wood counter.
Around 150 dishes are drawn directly from Le Guide Culinaire, each annotated with its original page number. I was careful to pace myself as I didn't want to miss out on cheese and dessert; luckily, diners are given time to let courses settle. For the lunch service, guests arrive in 15-minute increments from noon and can stay until 16.30. At dinner, doors open at 19:00 and close at midnight.
Beyond the food, Les Grands Buffets also celebrates the arts de la table, or the staging and setting of a meal. Privat has assembled an impressive collection of French culinary heritage, including a silver Christofle duck press from Paris' legendary La Tour d'Argent restaurant, purchased at auction for €40,000 ($46,432) in 2016, and a silver trolley from Nice's Belle Epoque icon, Le Negresco, now used to prepare crêpes Suzettes tableside.
Four dining rooms branch off from the main service area, where tables are set with white tablecloths, polished cutlery and glassware. Each has its own theme; one is named for British sculpture artist Ann Carrington, whose works hang in institutions such as London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Privat purchased one of her bouquets, made out of cutlery, from her stand at Portobello Market a decade ago; it now occupies pride of place in the room.
"He had a good eye as he chose the best piece," said Carrington. "The restaurant is also the perfect location for a sculpture made from cutlery, how fitting!"
But I couldn't leave without asking about wastage. Privat, forever the accountant, he has meticulously tracked exactly how much people eat: for instance, an average of 49g of foie gras per person. Leftovers from the buffet are kept for the team; more than 100 employees receive lunch and dinner every day. And while some waste is inevitable, it remains minimal: "We throw out 10kg a day and serve 1,000 people, so that's 10g per person wastage," Privat said.
by Chrissie McClatchie, BBC | Read more:
Images: Adrien Privat and Chrissie McClatchie
Four dining rooms branch off from the main service area, where tables are set with white tablecloths, polished cutlery and glassware. Each has its own theme; one is named for British sculpture artist Ann Carrington, whose works hang in institutions such as London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Privat purchased one of her bouquets, made out of cutlery, from her stand at Portobello Market a decade ago; it now occupies pride of place in the room.
"He had a good eye as he chose the best piece," said Carrington. "The restaurant is also the perfect location for a sculpture made from cutlery, how fitting!"
But I couldn't leave without asking about wastage. Privat, forever the accountant, he has meticulously tracked exactly how much people eat: for instance, an average of 49g of foie gras per person. Leftovers from the buffet are kept for the team; more than 100 employees receive lunch and dinner every day. And while some waste is inevitable, it remains minimal: "We throw out 10kg a day and serve 1,000 people, so that's 10g per person wastage," Privat said.
by Chrissie McClatchie, BBC | Read more:
Images: Adrien Privat and Chrissie McClatchie
[ed. Oui!]
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Frito Pie
Ingredients
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
1 pound ground beef, preferably 20-percent fat
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 (1-ounce) packet taco seasoning (or 3 tablespoons of a homemade taco seasoning)
2 (15-ounce) cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 (19-ounce) can red enchilada sauce (or 2½ cups of homemade enchilada sauce)
2 (9-ounce) packages or 1 (18-ounce) package Fritos, 1 cup reserved for serving (8 to 10 cups)
8 ounces shredded Cheddar (about 2 cups)
Diced white onion, sliced scallions, pickled jalapeños, sour cream or pico de gallo, or a combination, for serving (optional)
Preparation
1 pound ground beef, preferably 20-percent fat
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 (1-ounce) packet taco seasoning (or 3 tablespoons of a homemade taco seasoning)
2 (15-ounce) cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 (19-ounce) can red enchilada sauce (or 2½ cups of homemade enchilada sauce)
2 (9-ounce) packages or 1 (18-ounce) package Fritos, 1 cup reserved for serving (8 to 10 cups)
8 ounces shredded Cheddar (about 2 cups)
Diced white onion, sliced scallions, pickled jalapeños, sour cream or pico de gallo, or a combination, for serving (optional)
Preparation
Step 1: Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Coat a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with cooking spray.
Step 2: In a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed skillet, heat the oil over medium-high. Add the beef and onion, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat is browned and the onion is translucent, 8 to 10 minutes. Lower the heat if the meat is browning too quickly.
Step 3: Sprinkle the taco seasoning over the meat mixture and pour in ¾ cup of water; mix well. Bring to a simmer and cook until the liquid thickens and coats the pan, scraping up any browned bits, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the beans and enchilada sauce, stirring until combined. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes.
Step 4: Assemble the pie: Sprinkle half of the Fritos in the prepared baking dish, followed by half of the Cheddar. Cover with all of the meat filling. Finally, add the remaining Fritos (minus the reserved cup) and Cheddar.
Step 5: Bake until the cheese is melted and bubbly, 7 to 10 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes, then add the desired toppings to the casserole, or spoon into individual bowls and have eaters top as they please. Add reserved Fritos for more crunch, if desired.
by Kia Damon, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
[ed. Forgot about these. Should be great for Seattle's upcoming Super Bowl win.]
[ed. Forgot about these. Should be great for Seattle's upcoming Super Bowl win.]
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Free Fall: How Sweetgreen Became Millennial Cringe
Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company’s “chief concept officer,” Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to “reevaluating and redefining fast food,” but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also “reevaluating and redefining” how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.
In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.
This is remarkable because, for a golden decade or so, Sweetgreen was the future of lunch. Americans, especially ones who were youngish and worked on computers, were toting green paper bags around coastal cities (and later, smaller towns and non-coastal cities) en masse. Silicon Valley was injecting capital into a restaurant as though it were a software start-up.
Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.
In all this, the chain was achingly of its era, when high functioning in the office (productivity) and on the cellular level (health) became irretrievably intertwined. The widespread adoption of smartphones invented new categories of aspiration, new ways to sell things, new expectations that workers be available and productive, including during lunch hour. The wellness influencer—a figure whose job title did not exist just a few years earlier—suddenly started to seem like one of the more powerful figures in American life. Millennials graduated, grew up, got jobs, and emerged as not just a chronological category but a marketing segment.
Around this time, a number of venture-backed start-ups appeared to sell them new versions of stuff they already used. The stuff was legitimately nicer, but only a little; the real innovation was in how it was sold. Largely, this meant minimalist packaging that was purpose-built to look good on a small screen, and marketing copy that made canny nods to responsibility but also fun, using a corporate voice that sounded like a real person’s, even if that person was sort of embarrassing and obsessed with the grind (“you’re going to guac this week. #monday 👊,” read the caption on an Instagram post from Sweetgreen in 2015). In short order, many Americans swapped out their YMCA stationary-bike classes for SoulCycle; their yellow cabs for rideshares; their generic workout gear for color-blocked, cellphone-pocketed leggings made out of, like, recycled water bottles.
And these same Americans abandoned the salad bar—for decades, a depressing fixture of the workday lunch—in favor of Sweetgreen. It was a healthy, efficient meal for healthy, efficient people (at least aspirationally), a power lunch for those who didn’t have assistants or expense accounts but who were nonetheless determined to feel in control, possibly formidable. Especially after 2018—when the company began installing shelves in office lobbies and WeWork cafeterias, from which workers could retrieve a preordered salad without leaving the building—it just became a default, a nearly frictionless calorie-delivery vehicle for people whose bosses were definitely paying attention to whether their little Slack bubble was green or not...
In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.
Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.
In all this, the chain was achingly of its era, when high functioning in the office (productivity) and on the cellular level (health) became irretrievably intertwined. The widespread adoption of smartphones invented new categories of aspiration, new ways to sell things, new expectations that workers be available and productive, including during lunch hour. The wellness influencer—a figure whose job title did not exist just a few years earlier—suddenly started to seem like one of the more powerful figures in American life. Millennials graduated, grew up, got jobs, and emerged as not just a chronological category but a marketing segment.
Around this time, a number of venture-backed start-ups appeared to sell them new versions of stuff they already used. The stuff was legitimately nicer, but only a little; the real innovation was in how it was sold. Largely, this meant minimalist packaging that was purpose-built to look good on a small screen, and marketing copy that made canny nods to responsibility but also fun, using a corporate voice that sounded like a real person’s, even if that person was sort of embarrassing and obsessed with the grind (“you’re going to guac this week. #monday 👊,” read the caption on an Instagram post from Sweetgreen in 2015). In short order, many Americans swapped out their YMCA stationary-bike classes for SoulCycle; their yellow cabs for rideshares; their generic workout gear for color-blocked, cellphone-pocketed leggings made out of, like, recycled water bottles.
And these same Americans abandoned the salad bar—for decades, a depressing fixture of the workday lunch—in favor of Sweetgreen. It was a healthy, efficient meal for healthy, efficient people (at least aspirationally), a power lunch for those who didn’t have assistants or expense accounts but who were nonetheless determined to feel in control, possibly formidable. Especially after 2018—when the company began installing shelves in office lobbies and WeWork cafeterias, from which workers could retrieve a preordered salad without leaving the building—it just became a default, a nearly frictionless calorie-delivery vehicle for people whose bosses were definitely paying attention to whether their little Slack bubble was green or not...
Sweetgreen sold salad, which you eat, but it also sold moral superiority, which you build an identity around. (By 2016, BuzzFeed was posting lists about “21 Truths for Everyone Obsessed With Sweetgreen.”) The company capitalized on this to sell not just lunch but a lifestyle brand. It staged an annual music festival; collaborated with cool fashion people on limited-edition housewares and accessories; sold branded Nalgenes and expensive, earth-toned sweatshirts in its capacious webstore; posted its playlists to Spotify. Imagine anyone willingly re-creating the sonic ambience inside their local McDonald’s at home and you will realize how unique Sweetgreen is, or was, among casual-restaurant chains.
Although McDonald’s and its ilk got big by serving as broad an audience as possible, Sweetgreen derived much of its cachet from projecting a level of elitism. This, as it turns out, is not the secret to market dominance. Sweetgreen has always been relatively expensive, and it has gotten more so: In 2014, a kale Caesar with chicken was $8.85; this week, in some locations, it’s more than $14.75, which is almost $2 higher than can be explained by inflation alone. Maybe more important is the impression that it’s expensive. Today’s consumers are highly price-sensitive, Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told me, and “Sweetgreen has had a reputation as an expensive place to eat for what you’re getting.”
There’s also the issue that many Americans don’t like salad quite enough to actually want it regularly. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they ate salad more than once a week, which might seem like a lot until you remember that some of them were surely lying, and you consider how many more people prefer food that isn’t chopped-up raw vegetables: Last year, the nation’s top five quick-service restaurants were, in order, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. “It’s really difficult to convince a large number of people that salad is something they’re going to eat on a frequent enough basis to support a chain like that,” Maze said. Many years ago, he was driving his then-10-year-old son and a friend home from baseball practice, and the friend was excitedly talking about eating Chipotle for dinner. The memory has, clearly, stuck with him: “Can I realistically imagine my son’s 10-year-old friend bragging about going to Sweetgreen?” He cannot. I can’t either.
Although McDonald’s and its ilk got big by serving as broad an audience as possible, Sweetgreen derived much of its cachet from projecting a level of elitism. This, as it turns out, is not the secret to market dominance. Sweetgreen has always been relatively expensive, and it has gotten more so: In 2014, a kale Caesar with chicken was $8.85; this week, in some locations, it’s more than $14.75, which is almost $2 higher than can be explained by inflation alone. Maybe more important is the impression that it’s expensive. Today’s consumers are highly price-sensitive, Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told me, and “Sweetgreen has had a reputation as an expensive place to eat for what you’re getting.”
There’s also the issue that many Americans don’t like salad quite enough to actually want it regularly. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they ate salad more than once a week, which might seem like a lot until you remember that some of them were surely lying, and you consider how many more people prefer food that isn’t chopped-up raw vegetables: Last year, the nation’s top five quick-service restaurants were, in order, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. “It’s really difficult to convince a large number of people that salad is something they’re going to eat on a frequent enough basis to support a chain like that,” Maze said. Many years ago, he was driving his then-10-year-old son and a friend home from baseball practice, and the friend was excitedly talking about eating Chipotle for dinner. The memory has, clearly, stuck with him: “Can I realistically imagine my son’s 10-year-old friend bragging about going to Sweetgreen?” He cannot. I can’t either.
by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Akshita Chandra/The Atlantic. Source: Dixie D. Vereen/The Washington Post/Getty.
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce's Steakhouse
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As celebrity restaurant mascots, athletes offer a tidy sense of vertical integration: Why not supply the very calories they need to expend on the field? I’m surprised there are so few successful models. We have all mostly forgotten (or agreed not to talk about) George Brett’s restaurant in Kansas City, Brett Favre’s Wisconsin steakhouse, or those 31 Papa John’s franchises Peyton Manning coincidentally shed two days before the NFL dropped the pizza chain as a sponsor.
Still, tables have been reliably booked at 1587 Prime—a mashup of Patrick Mahomes’s and Travis Kelce’s jersey numbers, along with a word that vaguely connotes “beef”—since it opened in Kansas City in August. I left an eight-year gig as a KC restaurant critic in 2023, but the mania surrounding the opening was enough to summon me out of retirement. Like a washed-up former detective, I couldn’t resist stumbling half-drunk into my old precinct for one last job.
In some respects, a flashy celebrity steakhouse means the same thing everywhere. But it means something else in Kansas City, a cowtown whose economic engine was its stockyards, once the second-largest in the country, and which has struggled for years to cultivate a high-end dining scene. We have some great restaurants, but fundamentally, we’re a city that loathes to dress for dinner. (I felt a swell of civic pride when I learned Travis proposed to Taylor Swift in shorts.) I wondered how Noble 33—the Miami-based fine-dining restaurant group tasked with executing 15 and 87’s vision—would fare here.
In a pure business sense, they seem to be faring just fine. On a recent visit, a server told me that a group of Taylor Swift fans had waited six hours for bar seats, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the singer housing a truffle grilled cheese. Taylor didn’t show. I wish the restaurant had something else to offer them.
If nothing else, 1587 Prime looks nice. The 238-seat, two-story restaurant inside the Loews Kansas City Hotel is riddled with luxury tropes. Everything is bathed in a charmed, golden light. The stairs are marble, the tables are marble, and the servers all wear smart white coats and black ties. The leather-backed menus are enormous—perilous. Manipulating them at a small table covered with expensive glassware made me feel like a horse on roller skates.
Music is ostensibly a theme. Every night, local musicians perform short sets of Motown, jazz, and soul hits, and the performers are universally talented. They’re also chastely miked. The live backing band is never loud enough to compete with diners’ conversation, and while the singers roam around the dining room, they seem trained in the art of extremely brief eye contact that asks nothing of you in return.
The same can’t be said of the patrons. Every time I looked around the room, diners looked back with the defiant stares of people who are used to being watched. The restaurant seems to be drawing in its target clients: people who fly private. On my first visit, our server—a very friendly woman named Debbie—told us she had two tables that had flown in just for dinner.
“There’s this thing I learned about,” she said. “Did you know they have an Uber Jet?”
I did not. I sensed that Debbie and I had both learned this against our will.
To be fair, one of the reasons I kept looking around the room was that everyone’s drinks were on fire. This was, I learned, The Alchemy ($22), a cocktail the restaurant created for Taylor Swift, a woman who has never had to use Uber Jet.
I ordered one, too, and a dedicated server brought out a martini glass with some steel wool tangled around the stem. (Something else to know about 1587 Prime: there are at least two employees whose main job appears to be setting things on fire.)
“How many tables order this every night?” I asked.
“Almost all of them,” she said, with just a hint of resignation.
She lit the drink. The steel wool pulsed with a warm, luxurious shimmer before almost immediately fizzling into a cold pile (yes, this is a metaphor). “The stem might be a little hot,” she warned, pawing the nest away from the glass. The drink tasted like a Cosmo someone had strained through a French Vanilla Yankee Candle.
The Alchemy is in a section of cocktails titled “The Players,” named for the steakhouse’s famous guests. For Mahomes fans, there’s the “Showtime” ($19), a rum and coconut cocktail made with a “Coors Light syrup” that I tragically could not taste. I preferred Kelce’s “Big Yeti” ($24), a nocino-enhanced old fashioned with bitter chocolate notes.
There is a fourth cocktail in the section, named after Brittany Mahomes. I will not be tricked into commenting on it.
The drinks were designed by beverage director Juan Carlos Santana, who’s led menu design at other Noble 33 haunts. This is the only way I can explain why a steakhouse cocktail menu features a “Noble Margarita” ($18), or why the house martini ($23) is laced with fino sherry and fennel-infused Italicus (a sweet, sunny bergamot liqueur). It’s a lovely, nuanced cocktail, and it seems to have been designed in a lab to piss off martini drinkers.
If you’re after a more traditional martini—say, gin and vermouth—you can order the martini “your way” for an extra $10.
“Isn’t this a service most bars offer for free?” my husband asked.
Sure. But most bars don’t come with a “Martini Cart Experience.” The first part of the Experience is using a checklist and a golf pencil to select your ideal spirits, vermouths, and enhancements, whether that’s truffle brine (an additional $5), caviar-stuffed olives (an extra $12) or an accompanying “caviar bump” ($21).
The second part of the Experience is waiting for the cart. The restaurant only has space for one cart per floor, which can create backlogs when multiple tables order martinis. On my first visit, my table waited a modest 12 minutes before the cart became available.
The Experience concluded with a bartender scanning my checklist, building the martini, shaking it (you read that correctly), and straining it into a glass that had been chilled by a light-up contraption resembling a Simon. With the upcharge for the truffle brine, the martini was $38. (...)
Perhaps my mistake was ordering it with a “tableside flambé,” which you can add to any steak here for an extra $27. After conferring with Debbie about whether this was a good idea, she dispatched a second cart with a second fire-oriented employee.
While he worked, I peppered him with questions. Did he man the flambé cart every night? Yes, by choice. “I’ve never worked in a kitchen,” he said. “I just really like fire.” Had he ever singed his shirtsleeves on the cart? “I’m going to tell you guys a little secret,” he replied. He leaned over the table and brushed some hair away from his forehead. Most of his eyebrows were missing.
In some respects, a flashy celebrity steakhouse means the same thing everywhere. But it means something else in Kansas City, a cowtown whose economic engine was its stockyards, once the second-largest in the country, and which has struggled for years to cultivate a high-end dining scene. We have some great restaurants, but fundamentally, we’re a city that loathes to dress for dinner. (I felt a swell of civic pride when I learned Travis proposed to Taylor Swift in shorts.) I wondered how Noble 33—the Miami-based fine-dining restaurant group tasked with executing 15 and 87’s vision—would fare here.
In a pure business sense, they seem to be faring just fine. On a recent visit, a server told me that a group of Taylor Swift fans had waited six hours for bar seats, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the singer housing a truffle grilled cheese. Taylor didn’t show. I wish the restaurant had something else to offer them.
If nothing else, 1587 Prime looks nice. The 238-seat, two-story restaurant inside the Loews Kansas City Hotel is riddled with luxury tropes. Everything is bathed in a charmed, golden light. The stairs are marble, the tables are marble, and the servers all wear smart white coats and black ties. The leather-backed menus are enormous—perilous. Manipulating them at a small table covered with expensive glassware made me feel like a horse on roller skates.
Music is ostensibly a theme. Every night, local musicians perform short sets of Motown, jazz, and soul hits, and the performers are universally talented. They’re also chastely miked. The live backing band is never loud enough to compete with diners’ conversation, and while the singers roam around the dining room, they seem trained in the art of extremely brief eye contact that asks nothing of you in return.
The same can’t be said of the patrons. Every time I looked around the room, diners looked back with the defiant stares of people who are used to being watched. The restaurant seems to be drawing in its target clients: people who fly private. On my first visit, our server—a very friendly woman named Debbie—told us she had two tables that had flown in just for dinner.
“There’s this thing I learned about,” she said. “Did you know they have an Uber Jet?”
I did not. I sensed that Debbie and I had both learned this against our will.
To be fair, one of the reasons I kept looking around the room was that everyone’s drinks were on fire. This was, I learned, The Alchemy ($22), a cocktail the restaurant created for Taylor Swift, a woman who has never had to use Uber Jet.
I ordered one, too, and a dedicated server brought out a martini glass with some steel wool tangled around the stem. (Something else to know about 1587 Prime: there are at least two employees whose main job appears to be setting things on fire.)
“How many tables order this every night?” I asked.
“Almost all of them,” she said, with just a hint of resignation.
The Alchemy is in a section of cocktails titled “The Players,” named for the steakhouse’s famous guests. For Mahomes fans, there’s the “Showtime” ($19), a rum and coconut cocktail made with a “Coors Light syrup” that I tragically could not taste. I preferred Kelce’s “Big Yeti” ($24), a nocino-enhanced old fashioned with bitter chocolate notes.
There is a fourth cocktail in the section, named after Brittany Mahomes. I will not be tricked into commenting on it.
The drinks were designed by beverage director Juan Carlos Santana, who’s led menu design at other Noble 33 haunts. This is the only way I can explain why a steakhouse cocktail menu features a “Noble Margarita” ($18), or why the house martini ($23) is laced with fino sherry and fennel-infused Italicus (a sweet, sunny bergamot liqueur). It’s a lovely, nuanced cocktail, and it seems to have been designed in a lab to piss off martini drinkers.
If you’re after a more traditional martini—say, gin and vermouth—you can order the martini “your way” for an extra $10.
“Isn’t this a service most bars offer for free?” my husband asked.
Sure. But most bars don’t come with a “Martini Cart Experience.” The first part of the Experience is using a checklist and a golf pencil to select your ideal spirits, vermouths, and enhancements, whether that’s truffle brine (an additional $5), caviar-stuffed olives (an extra $12) or an accompanying “caviar bump” ($21).
The second part of the Experience is waiting for the cart. The restaurant only has space for one cart per floor, which can create backlogs when multiple tables order martinis. On my first visit, my table waited a modest 12 minutes before the cart became available.
The Experience concluded with a bartender scanning my checklist, building the martini, shaking it (you read that correctly), and straining it into a glass that had been chilled by a light-up contraption resembling a Simon. With the upcharge for the truffle brine, the martini was $38. (...)
Perhaps my mistake was ordering it with a “tableside flambé,” which you can add to any steak here for an extra $27. After conferring with Debbie about whether this was a good idea, she dispatched a second cart with a second fire-oriented employee.
While he worked, I peppered him with questions. Did he man the flambé cart every night? Yes, by choice. “I’ve never worked in a kitchen,” he said. “I just really like fire.” Had he ever singed his shirtsleeves on the cart? “I’m going to tell you guys a little secret,” he replied. He leaned over the table and brushed some hair away from his forehead. Most of his eyebrows were missing.
by Liz Cook, Defector | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Monday, December 22, 2025
Wednesday, December 17, 2025
Feast Your Eyes on Japan’s Fake Food
Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue. The phrase applies all the more when the dish in question isn’t meant to be eaten at all. Last year, I was one of two hundred thousand people to visit “Looks Delicious!,” an exhibition organized by the cultural center Japan House London showcasing dozens upon dozens of shokuhin sampuru—mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas that appear in the windows and display cases of restaurants, kiosks, and bars across Japan. Shokuhin sampuru are a roughly ninety-million-dollar industry, and a beloved part of Japanese pop culture. A few decades ago, there was a show on Japanese television in which shokuhin sampuru artisans competed to make the most convincing replicas of dishes, a sort of inverse of “Is It Cake?”
But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.
Early shokuhin sampuru were relatively rough replicas molded out of wax; some pioneering artisans were more accustomed to, say, sculpting ear canals for otologists and solar systems for science classes. Even in rudimentary form, they freed customers from having to badger employees with questions or take their chances ordering a bowl of ramen, not knowing whether it would come with two slices of pork or three. Food replicas eased embarrassment, prevented disappointment, and encouraged experimentation, just as they do today. “The Japanese customer loves to know what they’re getting,” the food writer Yukari Sakamoto told me. “When I’m meeting up with my family in Tokyo, we talk and talk and look at the plastic food displays until something jumps out at us.”
The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan...
“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.
Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima. (...)
However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.
[ed. For many more examples, see also: Photos show hyper-realistic plastic food that is a $90 million industry in Japan (MYSA).]
But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.
Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.” (...)
According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.
According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.
The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan...
“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.
Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima. (...)
However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Images: via; and Masuda Yoshirо̄/Courtesy Japan House
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Damage Control
$12 billion bailout for farmers.
On President Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” in April, when he announced the tariffs that have upended global trade, he vowed that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” The imposition of taxes on imports, the president promised, “will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” leading to lower prices for Americans.
So far it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.
At the White House on Monday, the president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers who have been battered in large part by his trade policies.
Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.
China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technological competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.
And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.
Mr. Trump insists that his signature decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 is working, or will soon. He continues to blame his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for every economic woe, though the argument is getting thinner and thinner as he approaches, in just six weeks, his first anniversary in office.
He finds himself in roughly the place Mr. Biden did in early 2024: Telling the American people that they are doing great, when many don’t feel that way. He has dismissed talk of high prices at grocery stores, insisting they are coming down. But inflation edged upward in September, to about a 3 percent annual increase, almost exactly where it was when his predecessor left office.
Manufacturing jobs have continued to decline gradually this year, with losses of roughly 50,000 since January. (Such numbers contributed to the dismissal in July of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Mr. Trump announced that downward revisions to the official jobs reports were “rigged.”)
Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump tried on Monday to portray the $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers as a victory, another piece of evidence — at least to him — that his decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 are working, or will soon. (...)
The numbers don’t quite add up: The U.S. has collected about $250 billion in tariff revenue this year — a bit shy of the $2.66 trillion in federal individual income taxes in the 2025 fiscal year.
The president has promised that tariff revenue will pay down the national debt, now at $38.45 trillion. Over the summer, he told lawmakers that other deals he is striking — some in return for lowering tariffs — would reduce some drug prices by 1,500 percent, a piece of mathematical gymnastics that left some in his audience mystified.
The numeric magic continued on Monday, when Mr. Trump said he was using some of those tariff revenues as a “bridge payment,” to tide American farmers over Chinese until purchases resume, a commitment Mr. Trump says he extracted from President Xi Jinping when they met in late October.
The repeated use of the word “bridge” by the president and his top economic aides seemed intended to signal to Americans that they just needed to hold on, and the promised benefits from tariff plan would pay off.
“This money would not be possible without tariffs,” he told a small group of farmers and rice refiners who were brought into the White House for the event. “The tariffs are taking in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’re giving some up to the farmers because they were mistreated by other countries, for maybe the right reasons, maybe wrong reasons.”
He was skipping by the fact that the imposition of the tariffs, primarily on China, led to a Chinese boycott of American farm goods. And now, to stem the bleeding for a core constituency, he was boasting that he was using tariffs receipts to compensate them. (Most of the payments will come through the Agriculture Department’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program, and are not directly funded by tariff income.) (...)
“The farmers problem is not entirely government-grown, but there is a big trade policy aspect to it,’’ said Scott Lincicome, director of general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank that has objected to Mr. Trump’s moves toward state-directed capitalism.
“Prices are depressed because the Chinese boycotted our farm goods much of the year,” he noted. “But fertilizer, machinery, those costs have remained elevated, and subject to tariffs. You’ve heard Caterpillar and John Deere complain,” he said, referring to two of the biggest manufacturers of farm equipment, which Mr. Trump said on Monday he would also help by paying them tariff revenues. (...)
Mr. Lincicome said that the tariffs have also introduced a new level of “unprecedented, crippling and truly insane complexity” to operating businesses. It has only gotten more confusing as Mr. Trump has slashed some tariffs — on imported beef, for example — to mitigate supermarket prices.
So far it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.
Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.
China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technological competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.
And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.
Mr. Trump insists that his signature decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 is working, or will soon. He continues to blame his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for every economic woe, though the argument is getting thinner and thinner as he approaches, in just six weeks, his first anniversary in office.
He finds himself in roughly the place Mr. Biden did in early 2024: Telling the American people that they are doing great, when many don’t feel that way. He has dismissed talk of high prices at grocery stores, insisting they are coming down. But inflation edged upward in September, to about a 3 percent annual increase, almost exactly where it was when his predecessor left office.
Manufacturing jobs have continued to decline gradually this year, with losses of roughly 50,000 since January. (Such numbers contributed to the dismissal in July of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Mr. Trump announced that downward revisions to the official jobs reports were “rigged.”)
Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump tried on Monday to portray the $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers as a victory, another piece of evidence — at least to him — that his decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 are working, or will soon. (...)
The numbers don’t quite add up: The U.S. has collected about $250 billion in tariff revenue this year — a bit shy of the $2.66 trillion in federal individual income taxes in the 2025 fiscal year.
The president has promised that tariff revenue will pay down the national debt, now at $38.45 trillion. Over the summer, he told lawmakers that other deals he is striking — some in return for lowering tariffs — would reduce some drug prices by 1,500 percent, a piece of mathematical gymnastics that left some in his audience mystified.
The numeric magic continued on Monday, when Mr. Trump said he was using some of those tariff revenues as a “bridge payment,” to tide American farmers over Chinese until purchases resume, a commitment Mr. Trump says he extracted from President Xi Jinping when they met in late October.
The repeated use of the word “bridge” by the president and his top economic aides seemed intended to signal to Americans that they just needed to hold on, and the promised benefits from tariff plan would pay off.
“This money would not be possible without tariffs,” he told a small group of farmers and rice refiners who were brought into the White House for the event. “The tariffs are taking in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’re giving some up to the farmers because they were mistreated by other countries, for maybe the right reasons, maybe wrong reasons.”
He was skipping by the fact that the imposition of the tariffs, primarily on China, led to a Chinese boycott of American farm goods. And now, to stem the bleeding for a core constituency, he was boasting that he was using tariffs receipts to compensate them. (Most of the payments will come through the Agriculture Department’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program, and are not directly funded by tariff income.) (...)
“The farmers problem is not entirely government-grown, but there is a big trade policy aspect to it,’’ said Scott Lincicome, director of general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank that has objected to Mr. Trump’s moves toward state-directed capitalism.
“Prices are depressed because the Chinese boycotted our farm goods much of the year,” he noted. “But fertilizer, machinery, those costs have remained elevated, and subject to tariffs. You’ve heard Caterpillar and John Deere complain,” he said, referring to two of the biggest manufacturers of farm equipment, which Mr. Trump said on Monday he would also help by paying them tariff revenues. (...)
Mr. Lincicome said that the tariffs have also introduced a new level of “unprecedented, crippling and truly insane complexity” to operating businesses. It has only gotten more confusing as Mr. Trump has slashed some tariffs — on imported beef, for example — to mitigate supermarket prices.
by David Sanger, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bob Brawdy/Tri-City Herald
[ed. Just making shit up as they go along, Band-Aids for self-inflicted foot wounds. These bridge subsidies are apparently in addition to what farmers receive annually through the Farm Bill (roughly 13.5 percent of net farm income) and, since January 2025, another $30 billion in "Ad Hoc" assistance (because something, something... Biden's fault). See also: Federal farm subsidies: What the data says (USA Facts).]
Saturday, December 6, 2025
‘The English Person With a Chinese Stomach’: How Fuchsia Dunlop Became a Sichuan Food Hero
Every autumn in the mid-00s, when I lived in China, my friend Scarlett Li would invite me to Shanghai to eat hairy crab. Named for the spiky fur on their legs and claws, the crabs are said to have the best flavour during the ninth month of the lunar calendar. They’re steamed and served whole, with a dip of rice vinegar spiked with ginger. The most prized specimens come from Yangcheng Lake near Suzhou, which is not far from Scarlett’s home town of Wuxi. She had moved to Hong Kong as a child, attended high school and college in Australia, and returned to China to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. Despite her years abroad, she remained Chinese through and through – and eating hairy crab with her, I became Chinese, too.
Beginning in the Tang dynasty in the seventh century, crabs were harvested from the lakes and estuaries of the Yangtze delta and sent as tribute to the imperial court. Twelfth-century Hangzhou had specialised crab markets and dedicated crab restaurants. “I have lusted after crabs all my life,” wrote the 17th-century playwright Li Yu. “From the first day of the crab season until the last day they are sold, I … do not let a single evening pass without eating them …. Dear crab, dear crab, you and I, are we to be lifelong companions?”
In Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Fuchsia Dunlop traces the history of this remarkable cuisine through 30 dishes, from slow-braised pork belly to steamed rice. (There are 10 mentions of hairy crab – not to be confused with crab that’s roasted, baked, shredded, stuffed into soup dumplings or steamed buns, or marinated in liquor and served raw in a dish called drunken crab, which gets its own chapter.) Dunlop, who is British, explores the staggering ingenuity and range of a cuisine that she feels has not won the respect it deserves in the world of fine dining: “Only the Chinese have placed [cooking] at the very core of their identity. For the ancient Chinese, the transformation of raw ingredients through cooking marked the boundary not only between humans and their savage ancestors, but between the people of the civilised world (that is, China and its antecedent states) and the barbarians who lived around its edges.”
The result is a gastronomy that is unparalleled for its diversity, sophistication, subtlety and “sheer deliciousness”. Many supposedly modern ideas about eating, Dunlop points out, have been accepted in China for centuries. Consuming the freshest meat, fish and produce, local and in season, has been important since the earliest dynasties. “Certainly to have a fresh fish and to cause it to become unfresh is a terrible act,” wrote Yuan Mei, an 18th-century gourmet and poet. Educated gentlemen through the ages have searched obsessively for the freshest bamboo shoots, the finest vinegar, or the perfect bowl of congee. (It tastes best, according to one connoisseur, when made with rainwater in early spring.) Ingredients should be cooked in small quantities using refined methods that reveal their benwei, or “root flavours”.
The passage of seasons was marked by the fruits and vegetables available in the markets, starting with apricots and cherries in early summer, followed by peaches and melons, then chestnuts, grapes and oranges at the mid-autumn festival and goose pears and quinces at the onset of winter. Everyone knew that the best handmade tofu came from Xiba in Sichuan, just as Nanjing was the place for salted duck, Pixian for chilli bean paste, and the hills around Hangzhou for the most delicate leaves of dragon well green tea. “Concern for the provenance and terroir of ingredients, so important to modern western gourmets, was not the invention of the French or Californians, but has been a preoccupation in China for more than 2,000 years,” Dunlop writes. The Chinese also pioneered imitation meat, free-range chickens, molecular gastronomy, sushi, tofu, soy sauce, ramen and restaurants, which were fashionable gathering places in 12th-century Kaifeng, six centuries before they first appeared in Paris.
Pleasure in eating has always been paired with the need for restraint, and classical texts warned against overindulgence. “Even if there is plenty of meat, [a gentleman] should not eat more meat than rice,” counselled Confucius in the Analects. The ideal has always been to achieve moderation and balance – yin and yang, heating and cooling ingredients, main dishes and rice – in order to nourish the body while living in harmony with nature. (...)
More surprisingly, Dunlop has gained a large following by explaining Chinese food to the Chinese. Her memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper sold about 200,000 copies when it came out in China in 2018. Invitation to a Banquet has sold 50,000 copies since its publication there last year, and two of her cookbooks have also done well. Among Chinese food lovers and chefs, Dunlop is praised for her deep understanding of the country’s culinary history. She’s known, like a celebrity, by her first name: “Fu Xia” in Chinese.
How exactly did a waiguoren – a Cambridge-educated white woman who grew up 5,000 miles away – become accepted as an authority on matters so important to the Chinese? Amid China’s rapid transition to a modern industrialised nation, traditional ways of eating and living are disappearing. It has fallen to Dunlop, an outsider, to study the history, to sift through the tradition, and to taste the dishes as if for the first time. Along the way, she has become the voice of a more authentic past. “It kind of shames us, because it’s our own culture,” He Yujia, her Chinese translator, told me. “She helps us rediscover what we’ve neglected for too long.” (...)
Of course, Dunlop’s foreignness also sets her apart. In the extensive coverage of her work and life in the Chinese media, she is “the Cambridge graduate who came to China to cook”, “the English person with a Chinese stomach”, “the foreigner who understands Chinese food best”. “She lends legitimacy to Chinese culture and Chinese cooking at a time when Chinese people really need that affirmation,” Tzui Chuang, a Taiwanese-American food writer, told me.
One of Dunlop’s goals is to rescue Chinese food from its reputation in the west as “popular, but … cheap, low-status and junky”. As she explains in Invitation to a Banquet, the earliest Chinese restaurateurs abroad – beginning with those who went to California during the Gold Rush in the 1840s – were uneducated labourers with no culinary training. The dishes that they made, like deep-fried wontons and sweet-and-sour everything, were nothing like the sophisticated cuisine back home. (...)
In the three decades since Dunlop first went to China, the country’s food system has also been transformed. Western fast food restaurants arrived, followed by supermarket chains and megamarkets such as Carrefour and Walmart, all of which led to increased consumption of western-style processed and packaged foods, saturated fats and sugary beverages. “Just like much of the US, it was becoming easier for Chinese urban consumers to buy out-of-season fruit from thousands of miles away than it was to get fresh produce from the farm just outside town,” writes Thomas David DuBois in China in Seven Banquets, a history of Chinese food that gives a good picture of contemporary developments.
A generation ago most Chinese people knew how to cook; in some parts of the country, including Sichuan, it was common for men to be the primary cooks in the family. But rising living standards and a hyper-competitive work culture have changed that. Many Chinese in their 20s and 30s don’t know how to cook or are too busy to do so. According to recent surveys, more than half the population now eats most of its meals outside the home or relies on food delivery services, which have become ubiquitous over the past decade.
Many Chinese are losing touch with the tradition of healthy eating that Dunlop so earnestly celebrates. Consumption of whole grains, legumes and vegetables is in steep decline. According to a 2021 article in the journal Public Health Nutrition, the Chinese now get 30% of their calories from animal products and 29% from industrially processed foods. In 1990, the figures were 9.5% and 1.5%, respectively. Obesity has increased fivefold; the Chinese suffer increasingly from the chronic ailments, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that afflict so many millions in the developed world.
Beginning in the Tang dynasty in the seventh century, crabs were harvested from the lakes and estuaries of the Yangtze delta and sent as tribute to the imperial court. Twelfth-century Hangzhou had specialised crab markets and dedicated crab restaurants. “I have lusted after crabs all my life,” wrote the 17th-century playwright Li Yu. “From the first day of the crab season until the last day they are sold, I … do not let a single evening pass without eating them …. Dear crab, dear crab, you and I, are we to be lifelong companions?”
A hairy crab festival in Huai’an, Jiangsu province, in October. Photograph: VCG/Getty
The result is a gastronomy that is unparalleled for its diversity, sophistication, subtlety and “sheer deliciousness”. Many supposedly modern ideas about eating, Dunlop points out, have been accepted in China for centuries. Consuming the freshest meat, fish and produce, local and in season, has been important since the earliest dynasties. “Certainly to have a fresh fish and to cause it to become unfresh is a terrible act,” wrote Yuan Mei, an 18th-century gourmet and poet. Educated gentlemen through the ages have searched obsessively for the freshest bamboo shoots, the finest vinegar, or the perfect bowl of congee. (It tastes best, according to one connoisseur, when made with rainwater in early spring.) Ingredients should be cooked in small quantities using refined methods that reveal their benwei, or “root flavours”.
Pleasure in eating has always been paired with the need for restraint, and classical texts warned against overindulgence. “Even if there is plenty of meat, [a gentleman] should not eat more meat than rice,” counselled Confucius in the Analects. The ideal has always been to achieve moderation and balance – yin and yang, heating and cooling ingredients, main dishes and rice – in order to nourish the body while living in harmony with nature. (...)
The seductive flavours of China’s local specialities have defined Dunlop’s career. Educated at the University of Cambridge, she first went to live in China in 1994, on a one-year scholarship at Sichuan University in Chengdu to study the government’s policy toward ethnic minorities. She was fortunate to have been sent to a place with one of China’s most distinctive cuisines and found herself taking notes on the food. She quit her studies and enrolled at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine as one of its first foreign students. Over the past three decades she has built a career explaining Chinese cooking to western readers, initially focusing on Sichuan and then expanding to other regions.
More surprisingly, Dunlop has gained a large following by explaining Chinese food to the Chinese. Her memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper sold about 200,000 copies when it came out in China in 2018. Invitation to a Banquet has sold 50,000 copies since its publication there last year, and two of her cookbooks have also done well. Among Chinese food lovers and chefs, Dunlop is praised for her deep understanding of the country’s culinary history. She’s known, like a celebrity, by her first name: “Fu Xia” in Chinese.
How exactly did a waiguoren – a Cambridge-educated white woman who grew up 5,000 miles away – become accepted as an authority on matters so important to the Chinese? Amid China’s rapid transition to a modern industrialised nation, traditional ways of eating and living are disappearing. It has fallen to Dunlop, an outsider, to study the history, to sift through the tradition, and to taste the dishes as if for the first time. Along the way, she has become the voice of a more authentic past. “It kind of shames us, because it’s our own culture,” He Yujia, her Chinese translator, told me. “She helps us rediscover what we’ve neglected for too long.” (...)
One of Dunlop’s goals is to rescue Chinese food from its reputation in the west as “popular, but … cheap, low-status and junky”. As she explains in Invitation to a Banquet, the earliest Chinese restaurateurs abroad – beginning with those who went to California during the Gold Rush in the 1840s – were uneducated labourers with no culinary training. The dishes that they made, like deep-fried wontons and sweet-and-sour everything, were nothing like the sophisticated cuisine back home. (...)
In the three decades since Dunlop first went to China, the country’s food system has also been transformed. Western fast food restaurants arrived, followed by supermarket chains and megamarkets such as Carrefour and Walmart, all of which led to increased consumption of western-style processed and packaged foods, saturated fats and sugary beverages. “Just like much of the US, it was becoming easier for Chinese urban consumers to buy out-of-season fruit from thousands of miles away than it was to get fresh produce from the farm just outside town,” writes Thomas David DuBois in China in Seven Banquets, a history of Chinese food that gives a good picture of contemporary developments.
A generation ago most Chinese people knew how to cook; in some parts of the country, including Sichuan, it was common for men to be the primary cooks in the family. But rising living standards and a hyper-competitive work culture have changed that. Many Chinese in their 20s and 30s don’t know how to cook or are too busy to do so. According to recent surveys, more than half the population now eats most of its meals outside the home or relies on food delivery services, which have become ubiquitous over the past decade.
Many Chinese are losing touch with the tradition of healthy eating that Dunlop so earnestly celebrates. Consumption of whole grains, legumes and vegetables is in steep decline. According to a 2021 article in the journal Public Health Nutrition, the Chinese now get 30% of their calories from animal products and 29% from industrially processed foods. In 1990, the figures were 9.5% and 1.5%, respectively. Obesity has increased fivefold; the Chinese suffer increasingly from the chronic ailments, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that afflict so many millions in the developed world.
by Leslie T. Chang, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: VGC/Getty Images/Lai Wu
[ed. An expert's expert. If you don't have any of her cookbooks you really should find a few (they'd make great Christmas gifts).]
Monday, December 1, 2025
Here Come China's Food and Drink Chains
Chinese tea shops in New York and Los Angeles are offering consumers drinks topped with a milk or cheese foam. Fried chicken sandwich joints are trying to lure diners in California with affordable fast food. Restaurant and drink brands, some with thousands of stores in China, are taking root in American cities to escape punishing competition at home.
Heytea, a tea chain originating in Jiangmen, a city in southern China, has opened three dozen stores nationwide since 2023, including a flagship operation in Times Square in New York. Two other rival tea brands, Chagee and Naisnow, opened their first U.S. stores this year. Luckin Coffee, a chain with three outlets for every one Starbucks in China, opened several spots across Manhattan.
Wallace, one of China’s largest fast-food chains with more than 20,000 stores selling fried chicken and hamburgers, landed in Walnut, California, for its first shop. Haidilao, China’s largest hot-pot chain, is redoubling its efforts in the United States after entering the market more than a decade ago.
The American expansion comes at a challenging moment for China’s food and beverage industry. The Chinese economy is no longer growing at a breakneck pace, hampered by a long-running real estate crisis and sluggish consumer spending. To survive, restaurant chains are undercutting one another on prices, inciting an unsustainable, profit-killing race to the bottom.
by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Joy Dong, NYT/ST | Read more:
Image: Ava Pellor/The New York Times
[ed. Not to mention Japan's plans to give 7-11's a complete workover.]
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Loco Moco
This classic Hawaiian dish is similar to Japanese hambagu, a ground beef patty topped with a ketchup-based sauce, but loco moco is heartier, served atop a pile of white rice, smothered with caramelized onion gravy and topped with a fried egg. People in Hawaii enjoy it for breakfast, lunch, dinner or any time in between. This version is adapted from “Aloha Kitchen: Recipes From Hawai‘i,” by Alana Kysar, a cookbook of Hawaiian classics. - recipe:
[ed. Never thought I'd see Loco Moco in the NY Times food section. What next? Spam musubi?]
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Tequila Wars: 100 Percent Should Mean 100 Percent
[ed. Costco, Kendall Jenner, Diego Corp (Don Julio, Casamigos, etc.) others accused of selling adulterated tequila.]
If you’ve been following this unfolding drama, you may remember that Galván is a spokesperson for agave farmers (currently Agaveros de la Agroindustria del Tequila) who have been protesting industry corruption and unfair practices for over a year.
“The CRT certifies a product as 100% agave when it isn’t,” Galván stated, “With these tests, we prove it. The organization acts as a monopoly that favors industrialists, marginalizes small producers, and puts public health at risk.”
The CRT is a nonprofit “interprofessional organization” that supposedly represents all players in the tequila industry–including agave farmers. In October of 2024, a coalition of agaveros challenged this claim. The price of agave had dropped from 32 pesos a kilo (in 2018) to just one peso a kilo, and the farmers had a litany of complaints. They alleged that the drop in prices wasn’t just the same old boom and bust cycle that had plagued agave farmers for years. At a protest outside of CRT headquarters in Zapopan, Jalisco, agaveros sounded the alarm, alleging that the CRT was colluding with major tequila companies to drive down agave prices and squeeze out small farmers.
Curious to know more about the source of this unrest, I sought out Remberto Galván Cabrera. He was loquacious, passionate, and hellbent to expose the alleged corruption. Much of what he said seemed plausible. The idea of corporations colluding to screw over farmers? Sure. The agaveros’ accusation that a regulatory body (the CRT) was corrupt? Certainly possible. His allegation that giant corporations were breaking international laws to adulterate their supposedly premium tequilas? That was harder to swallow. I couldn’t understand why they would take such a giant risk when it would be relatively easy to prove that a tequila was corrupted. Galván assured me there was evidence, but he wasn’t ready to release it. Fast forward about a year…
Since we first broke the story of the allegations in January of 2025, the drama has escalated. Galván was kidnapped and beaten. His phone and paperwork were stolen. Two leaders in the movement, Julián Rodríguez Parra and Salvador Ibarra Landeros, were arrested and jailed. I received veiled threats. The agaveros continued to stage protests.
Casamigos, Don Julio, Cincoro, and 818 accused of selling fake tequila
Although the protesting agaveros were making a lot of noise, the story wasn’t picked up by major news sources until May 5, 2025, when we reported that a class action lawsuit had been filed in New York against liquor giant Diageo. The lawsuit alleges that two Diageo tequilas, Casamigos and Don Julio, were adulterated with industrial alcohol. Diageo refuted the allegations stating, “All Casamigos and Don Julio tequilas labelled as ‘100% agave’ are made from 100% blue weber agave. We will vigorously defend the quality and integrity of our tequilas in court, and against anyone who is spreading misinformation and lies about our products.”
On July 4, another class action lawsuit was filed in California, opening the field of plaintiffs to anyone in the US who had bought Don Julio or Casamigos products. Since then, additional tequila brands have been slapped with lawsuits, including Kendall Jenner’s 818 tequila. In a case filed in Florida, the plaintiffs accuse 818 of knowingly selling adulterated tequila.
According to the September 23 filing, “Defendants actively concealed and misrepresented the true nature of how their Products were manufactured and composition of their Products. Indeed, Defendants concealed and misrepresented that they had in fact utilized sugars other than those obtained from the tequilana weber blue variety of agave to enhance their tequila, despite the Products being labeled as 100% agave azul.” (...)
So how bad is the adulterated “tequila”?
“The four samples we analyzed were adulterated with cheap cane alcohol,” Galván says. “Two samples weren’t even recognized as mixto tequila, meaning they have 33% agave sugars or less. The other two barely reached 51% agave.” He notes that one sample also had unsafe levels of methanol–a factor the CRT supposedly monitors.
We contacted the CRT for comment but have not yet received a reply. They have declined our previous request.
The numbers Galván lists are consistent with the test results cited in the California class action lawsuit, which was filed on July 4 by Baron & Budd in conjunction with Hagens Berman, who were responsible for the first class action lawsuit in New York.
According to the legal team, tests revealed that Casamigos Blanco contains approximately 33% agave-derived alcohol. Supposedly, Don Julio Blanco is 42% agave, while their pricey 1942 Añejo contains just 33% agave. As the complaint summarizes, “These findings directly contradict the prominent ‘100% Agave’ labels on Diageo Premium tequila products and confirm that Diageo’s representations are materially false and misleading.”
“The four samples we analyzed were adulterated with cheap cane alcohol,” Galván says. “Two samples weren’t even recognized as mixto tequila, meaning they have 33% agave sugars or less. The other two barely reached 51% agave.” He notes that one sample also had unsafe levels of methanol–a factor the CRT supposedly monitors.
We contacted the CRT for comment but have not yet received a reply. They have declined our previous request.
The numbers Galván lists are consistent with the test results cited in the California class action lawsuit, which was filed on July 4 by Baron & Budd in conjunction with Hagens Berman, who were responsible for the first class action lawsuit in New York.
According to the legal team, tests revealed that Casamigos Blanco contains approximately 33% agave-derived alcohol. Supposedly, Don Julio Blanco is 42% agave, while their pricey 1942 Añejo contains just 33% agave. As the complaint summarizes, “These findings directly contradict the prominent ‘100% Agave’ labels on Diageo Premium tequila products and confirm that Diageo’s representations are materially false and misleading.”
by Felisa Rogers, Mezcalitas | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Costco implicated in adulterated tequila scandal; and, Tequila test results revealed, death threats, and other breaking news (Mezcalitas):]***
Since we last reported on the tequila adulteration scandal, A LOT has happened. To make sense of it, I’ve created a timeline of recent revelations, followed by my takeaways and a chilling message from the man who has risked everything to bring this story to light. (...)My takeaways…
At this point, it’s challenging to track all these law suits, law firms, and formal complaints. Meanwhile, we wonder why this story isn’t receiving more attention in the mainstream press. (...)
We continued to cover the protests and negotiations, but the allegations of adulterated tequila didn’t gain traction until May, when we reported that a major law firm was bringing a class action lawsuit against Diageo, the parent company of Casamigos and Don Julio, for allegedly selling adulterated tequila masquerading as a 100% agave premium product. Our story was picked up by Reuters, trade publications, and other outlets. The scandal has since snowballed into more lawsuits, outraged declarations of innocence, and a whole lot of speculation.
But to me, the agaveros are still at the heart of this drama. In a nutshell: this is a story about giant corporations allegedly colluding with a regulatory agency to improve their profit margins. By allegedly adulterating tequila with industrial alcohol, these players are devaluing the price of agave. This is unfair to both the agaveros and the legitimate distillers who are still making real tequila with care and at much greater cost.
It’s also a tale of courage in the face of enormous danger. Since beginning this crusade, Remberto Galván has been abducted and beaten. Two other agavero leaders, Julián Rodríguez and Salvador Ibarra, were arrested for protesting outside of the Sauza distillery and held in jail for 72 days. We are seriously concerned for the safety of everyone who continues to speak out on this issue.
Galván says that he and his associates have received threatening anonymous phone calls. According to Galván, he was told that if doesn’t back down, his body parts will be strewn around his home.
But the alleged intimidation goes beyond death threats. According to Galván, his own distillery, La Alborada, was targeted. He says a friend and colleague was pressured to plant adulterated tequila on the premises.
This appears to be a theme. Galván, a crusader against adulterated tequila, may be charged with adulterating tequila. Julián Rodríguez, an advocate for the rights of farmers, was charged with extortion and intimidation of Sauza for engaging in a peaceful protest outside the entrance of their distillery.
Galván fears for his life. He asked us to put this in the public record.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)