I’ve been anticipating doing another food-specific edition for quite some time.
As I’ve been, er, auditing my life and personal time, I’ve been making an effort to make more food with my own hands that I’m excited about, instead of primarily being excited about eating food at restaurants.
Which is still a big excitement to me.
Lately, that’s being filled by sandwiches from the Mad Grocer in Crosstown Concourse, which uses inventive and creative ingredient pairiings. And I have amassed a long list of places I’d like to try, both locally and nationally. (International list, to come.)
But I’m also getting into recipes. One of my Instagram friends, Allie, regularly posts food she tries, with the link, which has been a big source of inspiration.
Here are my favorite food reads, as of late:
A fun Atlanta magazine profile: “Meet James “Mr. V” Virgil, the disco legend who sells kitchen gear to chefs and designers.”
Before moving to Atlanta, the Mississippi native ran a club in Chicago. But fame truly came knocking when he opened Mr. V’s Figure 8 on Campbellton Road in Atlanta, during the heyday of TBS. Ted Turner’s station broadcast his commercials (and his face) all over the world. For almost 10 years, the likes of Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, and Eddie Murphy hung out in a joint billed as classy and with a stringent dress code, as pictures and videos from the ’70s and ’80s attest. Limos fetched celebrities at the airport, and parties went on through the night.
An Atlanta guide to coffee cocktails.
A Bay Area story fusing music and food. (Bonus: illustrations!):
It’s no surprise, then, that in the history of local rap, food has always been a strong reference point — a metaphorical kitchen for creative exchange. An endless platter of well-seasoned slang. For decades, our rappers have delivered punchlines involving sauce, lasagna and lumpia; dropped verses that generously reference desserts and bakeries; and supplied entire songs about stacking bread, cheese and lettuce as lucrative sandwiches.
Food-loving Bay Area rappers have always been bold when it comes to transmorphing culinary items and kitchen utensils into slang that others then appropriate and even misuse (see: “food doesn’t slap”). Shock G once talked about getting busy in a Burger King bathroom and declared, “I like my oatmeal lumpy.” On “Dreganomics,” Mac Dre himself asked, “What’s spaghetti without the sauce?” We’ve got Suga T (sweet) and Spice 1 (hot). Berner founded Cookies. And just a few weeks ago, Stunnaman02 dropped a whole series of viral videos centered on his latest single. His focus? Eating a salad.
In other Bay Area food news, Bon Appétit previews new San Francisco food hall, Saluhall, which includes a Nordic bakery, café, and cooking school; a plant-based burger bar; a soft-serve bar; several cocktail bars and five local vendors.
“The whole city has been through a tough time since COVID,” says Stéphane Keulian, food and beverage director at Ingka Centres. “But we are very confident.” The team envisions creating a gleaming new destination in the city center, with the Saluhall food hall, Ikea store, and Hej! Workshop coworking space all sitting side by side on Market Street. I recently ventured downtown and peered inside the not-yet-open Saluhall, where diners will soon ride the escalators to multiple levels featuring clean and cheerful Scandinavian design.
In Los Angeles, “The restaurant Chain taps into a feverish nostalgia for burgers and pizza from the 20th century.”
The chef Tim Hollingsworth made it for what he called “Pizza Haute,” one of the meticulous themed dinners he cooks at Chain in Los Angeles, a regular pop-up that considers American fast food with an almost scholarly attention, exalting the genre with rigorous cooking and presentation.
…
Chain’s menus change, sometimes mashing together brands into a super-lineup. This particular set meal was $75 a person, which got you cocktails in red Solo cups, plenty and possibly even unlimited wine, a relic of a salad bar and an ice cream station stocked with actual blocks of Hunka Chunka PB Fudge and Butter Crunch from Friendly’s, flown in from the East Coast.
Here’s a guide to the best Korean fried chicken spots in L.A.’s Koreatown.
Eater interviewed “Simpsons” writer Cesar Mazariegos for “In New ‘Simpsons’ Episode, Marge Becomes the Face of a Ghost Kitchen Union:”
You also have a scene in the episode that’s clearly an homage to the really stressful takeout scene from The Bear. That scene has one of my favorite gags: Marge carrying a tub of mayonnaise branded “Mayo Edebiri.” What made you want to bring in The Bear and riff on that?
The Bear was just in the zeitgeist. It’s this incredible show, and that scene, I didn’t even notice it was a one-shot thing until after the fact. Usually, when you see a one-shot scene in a live action show, it’s with an action scene. But to do it with this stressful work, I think so many people can relate to that.ing that annoys you, or a thing you love?” And we try to find an episode in that.
Semi-related:
“Ghost Kitchens Are Disappearing, Squeezed by Demand and Complaints.”
“Half a million California workers will get $20 minimum wage, starting today”
The New York Times names its “25 Best Restaurants in Chicago Right Now.”
Similarly, “25 of Our Readers’ Favorite New York City Restaurants.”
A few environment-food stories you should read:
From Civil Eats: “How Tennessee Officials Lost Out on Millions in Funding for Farmers and Food Banks”
From Civil Eats: “Cooking Kudzu: The Invasive Species Is on the Menu in the South”
From NPR: “Cocoa prices have hit all-time highs. Chocolate producers make changes”
Because I like to look in people’s fridges (because they might know about something I am missing out on): “What a 33-Year-Old OB/GYN Making $290K in Los Angeles Eats.”
Probably my most favorite food (and regional food) story this week: “Heinz Is Putting Up Ketchup Dispensers To Tempt Chicagoans With Forbidden Condiment.”
Another regional favorite is about chew bread.
Chew bread is a treat similar to a dense blondie that can be found in Black Southern households and at church functions. Though its roots are murky, chew bread may have stemmed from sharecroppers, like Lucinda Moore, who learned to make a dessert with the leftover ingredients the landowners gave her to cook for her seven siblings. Many people added pecans that fell from nearby trees.
The dessert goes by other names, too, like cornbread cake, or chewies in South Carolina. (The treat has no relation to the candy Charleston Chew.) Chewies were made frequently by the Gullah Geechee people for birthday parties, Christmas and other celebrations, said Kardea Brown, the host of “Delicious Miss Brown” on the Food Network and the author of the cookbook “The Way Home: A Celebration of Sea Islands Food and Family With Over 100 Recipes.”
She said the Gullah Geechee, descendants of West Africans in America’s southeastern coast, created the dessert with bare-bones pantry staples because their isolation made it challenging to access some ingredients.
Songs I Listened to This Week
Podcasts I Listened to This Week
The Gen X Soda That Was Just “OK” | Decoder Ring
Thirty years ago, a new kind of soda arrived in select stores. Instead of crowing about how spectacular it was, it offered up a liquid shrug, a fizzy irony. OK Soda was an inside joke for people who knew soda wasn’t cool. But what exactly was the punchline? In today’s episode, we’re going to ask how Coca-Cola, a company predicated on the idea that soda is more than “OK,” ever bankrolled such a project. It was either a corporate attempt to market authenticity or a bold send-up of consumer capitalism; a project that either utterly, predictably failed or, perhaps more surprisingly, almost succeeded.
Inside the Test Kitchen: Lemon Bars | Dinner SOS (Bon Appétit)
Most weeks on the show, we help out home cooks who have had a kitchen fail. This week, the "fail" is coming from inside the test kitchen. Test Kitchen Editor Kendra Vaculin joins Chris to chat about the fraught recipe development process of Kendra's Foolproof Lemon Bars — which was caught on camera as part of our "How I Developed" video series. Chris and Kendra also share how the team works together in the Bon Appetit test kitchen to bring you recipes you'll be excited to cook at home.
Semi-related, from The New York Times: “Life Gave a Pastry Chef Lemons. She Made Lemon Bars.”