Inside 5 restaurants with no kitchen and a Biscuits and Banjos photo essay
Things I Saw This Week — Friday, May 2
Art
A new International Center of Photography Museum exhibition chronicles the history of labor in the U.S.
Cities
In Philly, a new tool helps protect the city’s 4,000+ murals from demolition or development.
Designed by West Philly developer Ryan Spak, Mural Arts’ new voluntary preservation easement obligates a building owner and successive owners to preserve a mural on the property or to provide for its replacement if the building must be demolished.
The previous method of preserving murals ”doesn’t have any real teeth,” Spak said. “But the preservation easement we’ve developed is a template to encourage building owners and developers to do the right thing.”
Eater visits a tasting menu restaurant inside a Houston home.
In the end, we got a big reveal: This house was Avilés’s actual home. The chef by night and graphic by day, lives there with his wife, Jessica Wall — a copywriter and Ensemble’s general manager and director of operations, who was in the kitchen quietly washing dishes and resetting plates — and his son. The couple has run a tasting menu restaurant in their home for the past four years. There, of course, was a licensing process — Avilés, Westry, and staff are all licensed for food handling, and the kitchen is also certified. Technically, because Ensemble’s Chef House is organized more as a social club than an everyday restaurant, Avilés says the requirements have been less stringent than those of a restaurant.
Food
Here’s how five restaurants operate without having little to no kitchen space.
What happens when a restaurant has no refrigerator? No gas? Almost no kitchen space? In some cases, brilliance.
As rents and other expenses rise, many restaurants across the country are saving on space and operating without a full-service kitchen. Their chefs are grilling on panini presses, smoking eggplant with no smoker, crisping chicken wings with no fryer. They are constantly forced to focus and adapt — and their menus are all the more exciting for it.
On so-called “disco fries.”
The Tick Tock diner in Clifton, New Jersey, takes credit for inventing disco fries, though given their similarity to poutine, it’s likely they weren’t the only diner to think of topping fries with cheese and gravy. They got their name, supposedly, in the ’70s, when hungry people coming back from the disco would stop into 24/7 diners for a snack.
But now, disco fries are available at all times of day, and in endless variations. Perhaps it began with Thai Diner, whose Thai disco fries slathered in massaman curry and peanuts are a perennial menu hit. Golden HOF in New York serves jjajang disco fries with black bean and pork gravy, and Chica & the Don have “Latin” disco fries with chorizo and salsa. But it’s not just in the northeast that disco fries have been showing up. Samosa Shop in Denver serves its masala fries “disco style,” doused with cheese, tikka masala sauce, and chutney. Little Rituals in Phoenix has disco fries topped with brisket, pho gravy, and sambal aioli. King BBQ in Charleston makes them with five spice and chicken gravy, while elsewhere in the city, Da Toscano Fugazzi does an Italian riff with garlic fries, vodka sauce, and mozzarella cheese.
From Bon Appetit: What to eat in Marfa, Texas.
As a longtime Marfa resident, I’ve heard plenty of theories about why our high desert town is so beloved. Some people think it’s the quality of light; or the expansive Trans-Pecos sky; or the particular collection of creative humans who have ended up in a place with a population the size of a suburban high school. Whatever your preferred explanation, by now you’ve almost certainly heard about Marfa, a perennial road trip destination for everyone, from your favorite yoga teacher to Beyoncé.
In Nashville, a couple’s coffee shop (called Now and Then) has omakase and wine bar influences.
The menu is stacked with a rotating selection of about 10 rare, hard-to-source coffee beans processed in labs and roasteries globally, each of which can be served as a filter shot, pour-over, or emulsifying filtered coffee in a shaker with ice until it’s frothy, served in a coupe. Now and Then only seats 10, offers no takeout, and no cold brew. There’s one latte and one $10 mocha made with single-origin chocolate—though Chacon will insist patrons save these indulgences for last since milk will coat their palate and change how they might experience other drinks.
Like the sommeliers they draw inspiration from, Chacon and Ball will ask customers what they like about coffee and what they dislike. There’s no expertise necessary, nor pretentiousness.
Popular Science explores what food was like before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration existed.
Music
NPR has a photo gallery of Rhiannon Giddens’ first Biscuits and Banjos festival in Durham, North Carolina *and* a Q-and-A with the photojournalist.
Also in Houston, DJ Paul Phuong Dang is combining his training as a mental health therapist with DJing.
"Music is therapy, and it can be therapy for a lot of people," Klein said. "It evokes emotions, it evokes feelings, it evokes thought, it evokes connection. And so, whether it's an instrument or turntables, being able to have something kind of artistic really does help kind of with trauma, and it does help with PTSD and anxiety and depression."
TV/Film
Jazz musician Kamasi Washington provides a soundtrack for Shinichirō Watanabe’s new anime series, “Lazarus.” (Watanabe is known for “Cowboy Bebop” and “Samurai Champloo.”)
The Verge talked to Kamasi Washington about the endeavor.
Watanabe gave me a series of situations, like “there’s a guy breaking out of a prison,” or he’d say things like “the song should sound like a flashback of someone finding and going through a bunch of evidence.” But he wanted me to build the entire soundtrack with a focus on evoking feelings as opposed to writing songs meant to match or fit into a specifically planned-out scene. That’s how I write music instinctively, and Watanabe was really emphatic about wanting this to just sound like an album as opposed to music written for a film or show.
London’s Design Museum will display the archives of filmmaker Wes Anderson, beginning in November.
Among the some-600 objects on show will be the huge model of the Grand Budapest Hotel, which spans three metres in width and was used to film the building’s facade for the 2014 film.
Other highlights will include vending machines from Asteroid City (2023), stop motion puppets from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and Gwenyth Paltrow’s Fendi coat from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
Personal notebooks belonging to Anderson will also be on show, featuring sketches and notes that take visitors behind the scenes of his creative process.“Every single object in a Wes Anderson film is very personal to him — they are not simply props, they are fully formed pieces of art and design that make his inventive worlds come to life,” says Lucia Savi, Head of Curatorial and Interpretation at the Design Museum and co-curator of Wes Anderson: The Archives alongside Johanna Agerman Ross.