It's eight in the morning and you can barely keep your eyes open, much less engage in the activities that constitute productive participation in the glorious neoliberal machinery of our economy.
What really makes whiskey taste like whiskey? If flavor truly just came down to a simple formula of distilling ratios of grains plus time spent in a barrel, then there wouldn’t be an infinite range of tastes, profiles and qualities.
There were only about three or four ramen shops on Oahu when Hidehito Uki founded Sun Noodle in 1981. Ramen in America was pretty much just a cup of noodles you cooked in the microwave.
Taco Bell is the best Mexican food I ever ate. I will say this to your face over a plate of enchiladas suiza. You will shake your head at such transparent provocation. What a shocking thing to say at a restaurant that has the best tacos in New York City! I won't even correct that assertion.
Our family immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s. We left behind our friends, our family, our language, our customs and everything we knew.
In the fall of 1889, when he was 41 years old, the painter Paul Gauguin was brutally, furiously alone. Famous now for his saturated, almost hallucinatory paintings of life in Tahiti, at the time he was living in Brittany, still two years away from his first visit to French Polynesia.
Mark Gardiner was a former VP of marketing and an advertising consultant before taking a job as a crew member at a Trader Joe’s store in Kansas City six years ago.
For a long time, Ina Garten was a Hamptons shopkeeper who waited upon the wealthy. She has been, for a shorter time, a celebrity chef of some wealth. "Am I a billionaire? Of course not!" she told me recently over tea on the Upper East Side, and then she laughed.
My bodega is only a little bigger than my studio apartment, and sells no fewer than 10 kinds of Muscle Milk.
This story was originally published on Civil Eats. By now, the images of shelves full of perfect greens in hulking warehouses, stacked floor to ceiling in sterile environs and illuminated by high-powered LED lights, have become familiar.
Friend, have you heard the good news? Bread is back. After a 20-year period of privileged carb-fearing in America, our hunger for hearty artisan bread has returned in a way that we haven’t experienced since the ’90s.
This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark.
At lunchtime on a Saturday in early June, in the south Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, the temperature tipped up over the 90-degree mark. Locol, a fast food restaurant at the corner of 103rd and Anzac Avenue, was full of customers.
Last summer, I was at the beach when I saw a plane towing a banner for Vintage seltzer, the stalwart bodega brand. Not long before that, I was accosted by photographs of Topo Chico bottles sweating so lasciviously that the pages of the magazine almost stuck together.
Anthony Bourdain had just returned home for the holidays, stepping off a plane that had delivered him from the balmy heat of Muscat and walking directly into one of those wintry New York snaps where the frigid wind fires through Manhattan’s crosstown canyons like rubber bullets.
The official version of chili con carne can only be made by people from Texas.
This story was originally published on Civil Eats. Joe Schroeder works as a farm advocate for Farm Aid, where he answers calls to the group’s farmer hotline.
Last fall, the chef Sean Brock and brewmaster Ryan Coker of Revelry Brewing unveiled a collaboration called Amber Waves, a malt liquor made with locally sourced ingredients and grains reflective “of the 19th-century South.
Are humans more alike or more different? I try my best never to think about it, partly because the implications are far too terrifying, and partly because the evidence is too abstract and boring.
In May of 1995, Ruth Patras realized that something was wrong with her 5-week-old daughter, Ciara. Initially happy and healthy, about a month after Ciara was born, the whites of her eyes started to turn yellow. Over the next few days, the color deepened, and her appetite diminished.
Plenty of smart, useful articles appear each year directing people to the nation’s buzziest restaurants, highlighting emerging trends and up-and-coming chefs.
In The Waste Makers, his 1960 history of American consumerism for consumerism’s sake, author Vance Packard describes a satirical city of the future.
People love Chick-fil-A, the poultry-centric fast-food chain whose corporate purpose is to “glorify God,” and whose strict Sunday closure means that every employee gets at least one day of rest.
The walls of the bar are covered in old art, photographs of Ireland, and yellowing posters in frames. A pair of hurleys, the flat ash stick of the Gaelic game, are tacked above the door frame.
One week to the day after he won the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump slipped away from his handlers — as well as the journalists assigned to cover him — for an off-the-books dinner at 21 Club in New York, where he ordered a steak, cooked well-done.
Tsukiji is the most exalted fish market on earth, the sort of humbling place that causes the likes of globally worshipped god-chef René Redzepi to deem it one of the “seven culinary wonders of the world.
That's it. And that's strange, really, considering the pitch of the media coverage surrounding those revelations.
It should be common knowledge that when dining out in America, you tip your server. Sure, tipping is inherently exploitative, but as long as tipped minimum wages exist, you don’t get to opt out.
Empellon chef Alex Stupak owns four New York City restaurants devoted to tacos. He’s the author of a taco cookbook. But growing up in Leominster, Massachusetts, there was no Mexican food in Stupak’s life ("Old El Paso taco night" aside).
Henry Denard, the hero of Anthony Bourdain's second novel, Gone Bamboo, is a hit man with a heart of maybe 14-karat gold. He’s halfway botched a contract killing, and now must pay the price.
My second job ever was as a food demonstrator at Williams-Sonoma, the California-based cookware store founded in the 1950s.
California is now the most influential force in American dining. That’s right, it isn’t New York. Not any longer. Sure, the great city will always produce blockbusters and occasional, wonderful novelties; Queens is an undervalued wonderland of cuisines.
Stop me when this sounds scary familiar: A historic boomtown becomes ground zero for a feverish technological revolution that promises to transform life as we know it. Shaggy-haired software developers suit up in blazers and T-shirts to preach the gospel of e-commerce.
On August 3, 2005, at 9:57 a.m., with the summer sun high in the sky, I walked through the front door of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris’s 7th arrondissement, my knife kit slung over my right shoulder.
Talk to a fisherman anywhere in the world and it won’t be long before you’ll hear the tales: the first catch, the one that got away, the really big one. On Tonle Sap Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Southeast Asia, the fish stories are divided into then and now.
The fantasy of the domestic goddess is as old as cave paintings, but its contemporary manifestations are located in the cookbook aisle.
A few months ago, Christina Tosi met a cookie she expected to be meh. “It was called salted caramel crunch, and I thought it was going to be a total snoozefest,” she said. After all, these days a cookie carpet-bombed with salt is old hat.
When I think of Pizza Hut, I think of my grandmother. She’s 90. She lives in Beijing.
The year 2018 gave us all plenty to complain about, and it was no different for restaurant criticism.
“I was thinking of giving this place five stars, but I’m kind of teetering on five stars or one star,” says South Park’s Eric Cartman, surrounded by half-eaten plates of food in a 2015 episode. Visibly concerned about an impending online review, a manager asks what he can do to help.
The first time I went to Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, I was 12 years old, and I didn’t even eat the chicken. My dad, though, ordered his “hot” — one of six heat levels spicy enough to force beads of sweat from one’s brow onto the table, one soft drop at a time.
Women in bars don't always have the best experiences. Yes, we have fun and drink and dance on tables, or sit down and have good times with friends, or play skee-ball or win quiz games or hook up or have interesting conversations, or do any of the things that humans do in bars.
Late on a Friday morning this summer, I sat down at a wobbly two-person table outside Sqirl, a tiny counter-service restaurant on the edges of Silver Lake, one of Los Angeles’s hipper neighborhoods.
F. Nephi Grigg had an unbeatable scheme. Nephi and his brother Golden had travelled 2,883 miles from the tiny Oregon border town where they ran their frozen potato company to the white sparkling sands of Miami Beach. This was 1954.
The kitchen of the future is here, and it’s one that no one asked for.
Julia Turshen has long been a sought-after cookbook writer, collaborating with big names like Gwyneth Paltrow and Dana Cowin and famously turning in book drafts an entire year before their due date (unheard of in the cookbook world).
Tsubasa Tamaki was concerned with the state of the pizza in his new oven. Wearing his uniform of white t-shirt, faded blue jeans, and white Converse sneakers, he had stopped talking and began to watch the dough, eyeing the fire; a second too long and the pizza would be ruined.
Nearly every story about the Four Seasons is told the same way, even if some tellings are better than others.
It is my brother's and my shared belief that a single fast food meal eaten on or about June 6, 1982, ruined the relationship between us in a way that we still don't understand, and from which we have yet to recover.
NYC restaurateur, Shake Shack founder, and millionaire Danny Meyer is having a good week.
The story of H-E-B seems unoriginal, as far as cult grocers go: A family launches a store in a small town a long time ago (in this case, the Butt family, in Kerrville, Texas, in 1905). That store earns a loyal following and expands throughout the region (Texas).
When I ask a diplomat friend — a crisis-management guy who spent a few years representing U.S. interests in Bogotá — where I should dine in Colombia, his first response is Andrés Carne de Res, a restaurant as famous for its stellar empanadas as its all-night, alcohol-fueled benders.
At Manresa, in Los Gatos, California, a perfectly poached halibut arrives topped with an auburn, whisper-thin crisp of eggplant.
I didn’t know what to expect as I merged from Interstate 5 onto Highway 99, the 425-mile road that serves as the scruffy spine of California’s Central Valley.
“You know what this place needs,” I said to myself this morning, as I went into the little store around the corner where I buy my daily coffee, my breakfast sandwiches, my late-night potato chips, and my emergency tampons.
Afriend of mine, I'll call her Elena, worked for many years for one of New York's top restaurants, rising over time to the position of maitre d' — a very huge deal (monumentally huge, actually) for a woman in the hospitality industry.
Millennials are murderers! Or so you’d think, if you believe the headlines. Which I do, for the most part — though in the case of Young People Today, most of the things that are dying seem to have been destined for the grave in the first place (paper napkins? ugh).
Tokyo is the food paradise that every city hopes to become: where Jiro dreams of sushi, where ramen demands noisy slurping, where cocktails taste best 40 floors above the ground.
“I don’t tip because society says I have to,” says Mr. Pink, the crook played by Steve Buscemi in the 1992 Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs. “Alright, I mean I’ll tip if somebody really deserves a tip. If they put forth the effort, I’ll give them something extra.
As a proud New Yorker, I was not supposed to like Pizza Hut's pizza, reconstructed from a third-hand dream about Little Italy. It was pizza distilled and distorted for white middle states, with doughy crusts and sweet sauce and something that just felt off. Liking Pizza Hut was just not what we did.
Tendrils of pasta, slick with butter and meaty ragù, tumble onto a plate in slow motion amid rising steam. A shower of grated Parmesan dusts the dish. Samin Nosrat twirls a forkful of pasta from the edge of the mound, and lifts it to her mouth. Her eyes widen. The music crests.
No one would have described Mizu Sushi Lounge in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico as nondescript. It wasn’t a traditional Mexican restaurant by any means. Patrons dined on deep-fried sushi rolls, and washed the quasi-fusion food down with icy glasses of sangria.
The Cheesecake Factory, in all of its gold-hued, dark-wood opulence; romance novel-length menu; and ancient-Egypt-meets-Vegas-Strip vibe, might not be the American dream, but certainly an American dream. It’s America’s No.
In most movies or TV episodes, characters are bound to eat, at least once.
The first steamed crab I pluck from the pile feels heavy in my hand, and I'm already content. The act of grabbing the shell smears my fingers with clumps of spices and coarse salt, but I don't mind. As a native Marylander, everything about being here at L.P.
Agentle breeze slid in the doorway of Rosa Abdu’s restaurant and escaped through the spaces in the walls.
The dinner was a Japanese-inspired six-course meal made by a chef in Brooklyn. The sample menu included dishes like "steamed silken tofu with edamame sauce" and "stuffed potato ball in Dashi soup" and a roasted green tea crème brûlée for dessert.
Today, Eater's Future Week turns to bleaker visions of the years and decades ahead. Read on for an exclusive (and fictional) interview with dystopian New York's hottest chef. Nova’s new project is both of a piece and pointedly different from his first megahit restaurant.
It's Delivery Week here at Eater, five glorious days celebrating staying put and having your food brought right to your door. Except for today, because maybe you shouldn't get delivery. My aversion to food delivery started, like all good pathologies, in childhood.
On a cold, rainy afternoon last fall, Brandon Chonko showed me how to herd a gaggle of geese. The lesson came at the end of a long day spent building a new fence on the western side of his thirty-acre enterprise, Grassroots Farms, two hundred miles southeast of Atlanta.
The east coast of South Florida feels like purgatory.
Kitchen tech is getting more gonzo. Earlier this year, Museum of Food and Drink founder Dave Arnold unleashed the Searzall, a hand-held broiler meant for up-close meat searing.
When a night at a restaurant or bar finally comes to a close, most Americans engage in an instinctive ritual. They dig into their wallets, fiddle with their smartphone calculators, and then decide how much money to give their server or bartender for a job well done.
That Thursday kicked off the 263 on-the-clock meals I consumed in 29 cities during seven months of travel (or, more precisely, 147 days in the field) in 2014.
With seasonal produce, impossibly clear hand-chipped ice, and precise yet fluid movements, bartenders in Japan elevate the act of building a cocktail into an art form, sometimes asking as much as the cost of a wagyu dinner in return.
“There are kind of two types of cookbooks out there,” chef Jet Tila, frequent Food Network contestant, host, and judge says. “There is the ‘Yo, slap a bunch of this on this, pow, bang, zoom,’” the succession of onomatopoeias suggesting a set of haphazard, 15-minute recipes.
Introducing the burger lover's ultimate bucket list, from classic iterations to the best bistro burgers.
On March 26, 2013, Veniamin Balika pulled his 18-wheeler over at the New Jersey Turnpike's Vince Lombardi rest area. The reprieve didn’t last long, as Balika soon found himself handcuffed and arrested by state policemen.
Imagine the home of the future. It probably has a lot of glass. Maybe a robot butler or two.
The Loaded Potato Skins come eight to an order, crispy at the edges, oozing with cheddar, and studded with glistening little nubs of bacon.
It's Delivery Week here at Eater, five glorious days celebrating staying put and having your food (and in the case of this story, perhaps a little bit more) brought right to your door. A note: Many of the links in this story are not safe for work.
After being laid up in bed for weeks, recovering from an illness she caught in the hospital, my mom said the unthinkable: "Who wants to go to Outback tonight?" I was in the fourth grade, and I wanted nothing more. I looked at my dad. He raised his eyebrows, then winked at me. This was for real.
1 In September 2015, I travelled to a remote forest in Japan's Nara Prefecture, where I hoped to find one of the world's rarest mushrooms.
In the new Netflix show Salt Fat Acid Heat — based off the bestselling book by, and starring, chef Samin Nosrat — all the food production is extremely inefficient.