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.
The story of the rise, and rise, and rise of America's queen of cookbooks.
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.
The most important fast food restaurant in America is a radical burger joint in Watts.
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.
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 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.
Once the niche elixir of powerlifting bros, gulping down a Muscle Milk or three is now part of a “healthy, active lifestyle” — whatever that means.
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.
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.
“If one were offered dinner for two at any price, to be eaten in any restaurant anywhere in the world, what would the choice be? And in these days of ever‐higher prices, what would the cost be?” the critic Craig Claiborne once asked in a restaurant review for the New York Times.
How the lightly carbonated refreshment of LaCroix and Polar became building blocks of online identity.
How influencers transformed eating from an activity into an aesthetic.
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.
Overshadowed by barbecue in its home state, Tex-Mex is the most important, least understood regional cuisine in America.
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.
Plenty of smart, useful articles appear each year directing people to the nation’s buzziest restaurants, highlighting emerging trends and up-and-coming chefs.
Consider the chipotle. It’s an icon of Mexican food, renowned for its chameleonic charms. Its dexterity in the kitchen outshines that of its pepper peers, and inspires cooks to create salsas, soups, rubs, and desserts.
There are many local legends about how saffron came to Kashmir. One goes back to the 12th century, and says that Sufi saints Khawaja Masood Wali and Sheikh Sharif-u-din Wali presented a local chieftain with a saffron bulb after he cured them of an illness while they were traveling.
Kombucha’s unlikely rise from Soviet elixir to modern-day miracle drink.
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.
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.
In the course of the last few weeks' gleeful public excoriation of Brooklyn chocolate company Mast Brothers, there have been many things said, many things accused, many things denied. Among it all, there are a few things of which we can be sure.
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.
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).
“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.
White truffles (also known as Piedmont or Alba truffles) are one of the world’s most prized culinary delicacies: When shaved atop a dish, they add a pleasantly earthy layer along with their unexpectedly fresh texture.
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.
This post originally appeared in an edition of What’s the Difference?, a weekly newsletter for the curious and confused by New York City writer Brette Warshaw.
In 1878, a group of jailed Russian dissidents decided to stop eating. They had recently been tried for treason and were being held indefinitely in an island prison. With no certain end to their confinement, they made a gamble: Starving to death couldn’t be worse than how they were living.
At first glance, Ned Ludd, a restaurant open since 2008 in Portland, Oregon, seems like a museum of farm-to-table cliches. Antique shelves display old-timey jugs and glassware above panels of raw wood.
The year 2018 gave us all plenty to complain about, and it was no different for restaurant criticism.
Nearly every story about the Four Seasons is told the same way, even if some tellings are better than others.
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.
Let me tell you about a place where the coconut water never runs dry, there is a gluten-free version of everything, even gluten, the cookies are filled with vegetables, and everything is free.
My second job ever was as a food demonstrator at Williams-Sonoma, the California-based cookware store founded in the 1950s.
The first place we were allowed to go to alone was the McDonald’s around the corner. Our family went so often that my parents eventually allowed us to walk there and back by ourselves.
The fantasy of the domestic goddess is as old as cave paintings, but its contemporary manifestations are located in the cookbook aisle.
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.
Shortly before noon on December 1, an ominous wail pierced the air throughout the Hawaiian Islands. The state’s emergency management agency had flipped the switch on its “Attack Warning Tone,” a foreboding siren that heralds an imminent nuclear attack.
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.
The kitchen of the future is here, and it’s one that no one asked for.
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.
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.
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.
It’s Friday night. You walk into one of the city’s hottest restaurants and, like a wave, it hits you: There’s a 45-minute wait for a table, a mob at the bar, servers zigzagging across the dining room, and plates rolling out of the open kitchen.
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.
When MJ Sanders was a student at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, she looked forward to the “Cuisines of America” class. This was 2009, and the class focused on regional cooking in North and South America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
NYC restaurateur, Shake Shack founder, and millionaire Danny Meyer is having a good week.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
TRY OUR ROTI QUESADILLA, the advertisement beckons. In all caps, it promotes the two cuisines the restaurant serves:
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).
The story usually starts like this: A brilliant chef is poised on the edge of a new opening, a new risk, a new shot at success.
More people than ever are chasing a dream of running a kitchen or flipping an omelette on television. Culinary school enrollment has swelled in recent years, while tuition rates — and student loan debt — rise alongside it.
At Manresa, in Los Gatos, California, a perfectly poached halibut arrives topped with an auburn, whisper-thin crisp of eggplant.
Eater sent Top Chef recapper and comedian Max Silvestri to Top Chef: The Cruise. He made it back in one piece to file this report: Over four days at sea, I see no one happier than Hubert Keller.
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.
When I was maybe 8 or 9, my dad ordered mussels at a restaurant. This was his first time ordering any sort of bivalve, and when the creatures arrived, glistening in their alabaster shells, he grimaced. My family’s relationship to meat has always been complicated.
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.
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.
In The Waste Makers, his 1960 history of American consumerism for consumerism’s sake, author Vance Packard describes a satirical city of the future.
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.
“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.
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.
Imagine the home of the future. It probably has a lot of glass. Maybe a robot butler or two.
Introducing the burger lover's ultimate bucket list, from classic iterations to the best bistro burgers.
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.
The east coast of South Florida feels like purgatory.
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.
For infamously time-pressed millennials, mail-order meal kits initially seemed like a dream come true.
In most movies or TV episodes, characters are bound to eat, at least once.
A gentle breeze slid in the doorway of Rosa Abdu’s restaurant and escaped through the spaces in the walls.
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 Saturday morning and a crowd of 30 people has already clogged the narrow central aisle of Mexico City’s Mercado de San Juan, the gourmet food market in the historic center.
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.
On a spring evening in 1989, one of those sunny and windy days when I decided to stay home from school for the millionth time, I had just settled in for the night with a big, sodium-rich bowl of instant ramen and an episode of Three’s Company when I heard a knock at the door.
On the top floor of @home cafe in Tokyo’s geek-friendly Akihabara district, in a low-ceilinged, brightly lit room that smelled of a poorly ventilated deep fryer, a coterie of frilly aproned maids were delivering wobbly, abstractly decadent Jell-O towers to their eager guests.