https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/12/23/21024804/cold-winter-recipes-soup-seasonal-food
Kang/Eater
Eating the same breakfast every day while traveling can be a welcome sense of routine
This post originally appeared in the December 31, 2019 edition of The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move. Subscribe now.
Traveling is often delightful and stressful in equal proportions. The promise of seeing, eating, and drinking new things outweighs the bustle of airports (or trains), difficulty of language barriers, and effects of jet lag. Though eating well might be the best reason to travel the world, I’m going to suggest one easy way to feel grounded every morning while you’re abroad: Get the hotel breakfast buffet.
Practically speaking, good hotel breakfast buffets are often reasonably priced, available every day of the week, and offer a multitude of choices. Starting your day with a selection of eggs, fruits, pastries, juices, teas, and coffees in unlimited portions provides the perfect fuel for a long day of sightseeing, and hotel breakfast buffets give you something to look forward to every morning that you wouldn’t usually experience, making you feel like you’re truly on vacation. But perhaps most importantly, the hotel breakfast provides a welcome sense of routine in a place where you’re far from home.
When I was on my honeymoon with my wife, Rochelle, in Phuket, Thailand, I was lucky enough to find a modestly priced resort that included a daily breakfast buffet. On paper, it seemed like a waste of a meal to eat eggs, bacon, fruits, and coffee in Thailand for the full week of our stay. But we loved it: Every morning, there was a selection of paper-thin bacon strips, little grilled sausages, perfectly fried eggs, and made-to-order omelettes. Every morning, the hotel also offered some Thai-style breakfast items, like rice porridge and stir-fried noodles. And every morning — the most hilarious part — featured the exact same soundtrack: the melancholy tunes of Kings of Convenience.
The first morning, I was delighted to hear the Norwegian band’s harmonic lyrics and gentle guitar strumming. The second, I was slightly annoyed to encounter the same music, even asking the staff if they could play something different. They said no. The third and subsequent mornings, my wife and I just laughed at the hilarious soundtrack as we took down plate after plate of the same breakfast as the day before.
Though vacation is supposed to be the opposite of work, traveling — especially through many locations — is often hectic and stressful. Figuring out the day’s activities can mean difficult decisions when there are so many options. But the hotel breakfast buffet is predictable, relaxing, and delightful. Most of the time, my wife and I just smiled at each other in silence, reveling in the quiet routine of the breakfast buffet as a welcome start to each day before we set off on boat trips to lush islands, motorbike drives through thick forest roads, and long afternoons on isolated beaches.
Recently Rochelle and I traveled through Europe, and some of our favorite memories were waking up to get the hotel breakfast buffet. Sure, there were croissants, pintxos, pasteis de nata, and fish and chips throughout our two-week, four-country excursion. But getting up to the comfortable, delicious luxury of a hotel breakfast buffet made the whole thing feel like an actual vacation.
P.S. American airport breakfasts, however, are a completely different story: Here’s how chefs navigate the morning meal when stuck inside a terminal.
There’s more to beer cocktails than shandys and micheladas
There are beer drinkers, and then there are cocktail drinkers. People usually find themselves squarely in one of the two camps and stick to it. It’s why Brock Schulte, bartender director at the swanky Monarch Cocktail Bar and Lounge in Kansas City likes to make beer cocktails. “For us, it’s more like a gateway for people into cocktails,” he says. “It’s melding what they already know with something they don’t.” But even if you’re not a cocktail novice, beer can make your mixed drinks more interesting.
Beer cocktails are actually nothing new. In the 1882 edition of Harry Johnson’s Bartenders’ Manual, the British Shandy Gaff (what we call a Shandy today) was a combination of ale and ginger ale. Another popular beer concoction, the Michelada has Mexican roots and is a tart blend of light Mexican beer, lime juice, hot sauce, and tajin (a chili-lime-salt mixture).
Today, you’ll find bartenders getting even more creative with beer cocktails. Rather than a simple mixture of beer and lemonade, they’re using interesting juices or pairing beers with spirits and other ingredients that allow the beer’s citrusy (or possibly hoppy) notes to shine. For example, stylish gastropub Euclid Hall in Denver has the Troll Toll, a rich blend of mezcal, rye, piloncillo syrup, chocolate bitters, and porter beer. It’s smoky and made velvety rich by the porter and chocolate bitters. In Austin, the Salty Sow serves up the Wallow, a blood orange margarita topped with a lager.
“Beer’s changed a whole lot in the last couple of years. You have things like raspberry sours from Saint Arnold’s. You can do a couple of different nice, pretty juices with it to elevate that kind of sour beer,” says Linda Salinas, a Houston-based beverage consultant for brands and restaurants like Liquid Alchemy and Ninfa’s on Navigation. “You can also use an IPA in a beer cocktail and elevate the citrus components of citra hops or any other really pretty floral, white flower hops.”
To find out how to make a well-balanced beer cocktail at home, we spoke with Salinas and Brock Schulte, bartender director of the swanky Monarch Cocktail Bar and Lounge in Kansas City.
When it comes to beer in cocktails, Schulte prefers to use a small amount of it to add flavor to a cocktail. “I have more fun personally using beer as a modifier. Otherwise, I’m just going to drink the beer,” he laughs. One way he does this is with the French 75. Instead of topping off the gin, lemon juice, and sugar mixture with Champagne, he uses Lindemans Framboise, a lambic fruit beer. The beer has a raspberry aroma and gives the drink a fruity bite. On the Monarch menu is a Planter’s Punch with three rums, banana, and tepache (a fermented pineapple rind beverage), topped with gose which gives the drink some tartness.
Another way Schulte likes to have fun with beer in cocktails is by making a chocolate stout reduction. To do this, the Monarch team carefully cooks down the beer over low heat (if you let it boil the beer can get too bitter). He uses the reduction in a cocktail called Valhalla’s Blessing, a combination of scotch, chai-infused cognac, amaro, and bitters. He says, “The reduction affects the mouthfeel in a way much like if you make a syrup and add gum, like arabic gum. So it gives you a richer, fuller mouthfeel and almost like a velvety texture.”
Salinas prefers to keep things simple when getting crafty with beer by not overloading it with spirits. She says, “I think, we’re getting to a point now where you’re not trying to get everyone completely bombed all the time, and enjoy good ingredients without trashing everyone’s palette, you know?” A fan of the Beer-mosa (a play on Mimosa that swaps out champagne for beer, Salinas suggests mixing chocolate stout and orange juice. Although the combination sounds strange, it works. “A classic pairing is orange and chocolate, right? Like a Valencia Orange. So, when you think about those flavors and the texture, I think that those work really well,” she explains.
If you do want to make a beer cocktail that’s slightly boozier, Salinas suggests shaking a shot of tequila with tamarind syrup and lime juice and topping it off with Indio, a Mexican lager that adds a hint of caramel.
The thought of drinking warm beer may make you cringe, but Salinas’s take on a hot toddy-meets-Vietnamese iced coffee with beer is perfect for the cooler months. It’s a blend of rum, angostura, and condensed milk topped off with a Vietnamese porter by 8th Wonder. The beer is a creamy infusion of cold brew and milk sugar. “We had planned to serve this cocktail at Girl Gang in San Antonio [an all female bartender competition] as snow cones, but it was 45 degrees by the time we started the event,” Salinas says. As a quick fix, they served it warm. Doing so kills the beer’s carbonation, but adds a roastiness that complements the coffee notes and rum nicely.
Schulte also can get behind warm beer cocktails, “There are a lot of ciders out this time of year that are actually great with whiskey. Or whatever main spirit you choose [like rum] as long as it goes well with apples.” He’s also a fan of what he calls the Hat Trick: a shot of espresso and Jameson whiskey topped with Guinness. Schulte explains, “Stouts and porters are inherently sweet but have bitter characteristics that are malty, and roasted; malty flavors always go well with aged whiskies.”
Pivot to musicals in 2020, please!
Yelp can either be an incredibly useful website if you’re looking for somewhere to eat, or a hellhole of petty grievances. There is no in between. You get open hours and whether or not a spot is BYOB, or you get some dude scream-typing about how he watched Hell’s Kitchen once and this risotto was not exactly the consistency he saw on TV and HE WOULD GIVE ZERO STARS IF HE COULD. So singer and comedian Grace Hayes decided to immortalize outlandish Yelp reviews... in song.
Hayes has a series of videos, each dedicated to reviews of different fast food chains. In one, a Taco Bell customer’s quesadilla was “severely lacking in sour cream,” or as another put it, “quesadilla blasphemy.” In her video about McDonald’s, she soothingly croons about Sprite that tastes like gas. And apparently someone described Arby’s as a “mess of meats and curdled cheese.” Hayes string these complaints together into beautiful piano pieces. Sara Bareilles could never!
This is an extremely pleasant way to absorb the reality that somebody had a fried fly in their fries, and that another person thought their Arby’s meat looked green. Let’s all pivot to more sung reviews in 2020. I want to hear an opera about Hudson Yards.
Chenjack/Flickr
Writers, consider these potential headlines yours for the taking
The takes flowed in 2019, keeping the internet afloat on a sea of confirmation bias, rage, and clicks — and that’s just with opinions about food. 2020 promises to deliver more of the same, so writers, if you find yourself falling behind on your traffic goals or simply bored of being liked by your own Twitter followers, consider these headlines yours for the taking:
• My Daughter’s Private Preschool Banned Her Daily Omakase Lunch Menu Because Another Student Has a Deadly Fish Allergy: Here’s Why That’s a Problem
• When You Think About It, Hot Dogs Are Technically Quesadillas
• Actually, The ONLY Good Thing at In-N-Out Is the Fries
• All Barbecue Is the Same
• Always Eat Your Hamburger With a Knife and Fork
• Sorry to This Pan: Cast Iron Is Overrated
• The Best Nugget Sauce Is Ketchup
• Starbucks Cups Should Celebrate Christmas All Year
• Only Assholes Drink Sours
• It’s Okay to Add People to Your Party Without Changing the Reservation
• Your Waitress Loves It When You Call Her ‘Hon’
• Bring Back the Amtrak Dining Car Smell
• Restaurants Could Be Louder
• All White Wine Is Better Over Ice
• Put Raisins in Literally Everything, You’ll Thank Me
• The Finest Bagels Are in Indianapolis
• Why the Middle of a Coffee Shop Is the Best Place to Take a Phone Call
• Let Your Children Run Wild in Crowded Restaurants
• It’s Not Brave to Eat Alone So Stop Congratulating Yourself for It
• Just Because You Got Your Dad to Buy Us Frappuccinos Doesn’t Mean You’re Popular, Kayleigh: an Op-ed by an Eighth Grader
Shutterstock/Bashutskyy
Get ready to eat way more of it in 2020
The sleeper hit at the dinner party was the cabbage gratin. It’s not that the dish was that much better than the spiced carrots over labneh or the herby pasta our host had also made, it was that it was cabbage. You know, like from cole slaw. But here, in a Bon Appetit recipe with too much cheese and cream and shallots, the leafy green was transformed into a meaty, satisfying dish that we were all sort of shocked we liked so much.
Then again, we could all point to a different cabbage dish we’d recently enjoyed. One person brought up a salad at Mission Chinese of shredded red cabbage drenched in tahini and miso. Another the cabbage with anchovy butter at natural wine bar LaLou. Someone mentioned reading about a White Rabbit pop-up in LA, where the exclusive Russian restaurant served baked cabbage topped with caviar. At a recent dinner at the buzzy new kaiseki restaurant Llama San in New York, I enjoyed a dish of cabbage with miso and nori, and found the restaurant also serves the cabbage-forward okonomiyaki for brunch. And oh my God, have you seen this cabbage lamp?
In America, the most immediate associations with cabbage are either in cole slaw, sauerkraut, boiled alongside corned beef, or the rough purple things you eat around in bagged salad; it also, of course, plays a starring role in Korean kimchi. But more people do appear to be approaching cabbage beyond the side dish, following a familiar path for the dominance of certain vegetables. New American menus from the past decade have seen the “discovery” that diners will actually order brassicas if you top them with enough bacon or cheese or crisp. Kale was celebrated as a “new” fad, though it’s been a soul food staple for generations. Brussels sprouts were rescued from their role as a hated relic of childhood; suddenly, an order of crispy sprouts for the table had everyone in agreement. In some ways, cabbage is just the next in line to the throne, featuring the same tough and toothsome greenery that can be doused in cheese and fat, and without sounding as overplayed as “kale chips with parmesan.”
Cabbage has also been bolstered by the popularity of kimchi, which itself has come from the slow mainstreaming in the U.S. of Korean cuisine and culture through the likes of David Chang, Roy Choi, and honestly BTS. Korean-American restaurants have dotted national Best Of lists in the past few years, all featuring cabbage more prominently than your typical handmade pasta restaurant, and kimchi is an increasingly accessible condiment for non-Koreans. Bon Appetit personality Brad Leone’s video about making it has over three million views, and Alison Roman has a recipe for a kimchi and cheddar omelette. There’s a wellness factor in there, too, as any white person who first ate kimchi two weeks ago seems willing to tell you about its probiotic properties and how good it is for your gut flora. In fact, Korean-American food writer Noah Cho bemoaned the rise of “hipster kimchi” in an essay in Catapult, writing that it’s a food borne of women’s labor, community, and scarcity, a “narrative that gets lost when people are simply subscribing to the latest food trend.”
However cringey, that health halo has added variety to cabbage’s resume. Cabbage rolls and stir-frys are lauded as part of the faddish Keto diet, and searches for “cabbage steaks” have increased since 2013, possibly due to an increased curiosity in vegetarian cooking that mimics meat at least a little bit. Liking leafy greens has become a way to signal health and maturity (or a CSA membership). Some people have gone too far, like the “cabbage juice cult” run by Jillian Epperly, who claims that her cabbage recipe can cure cancer. But overall cabbage slides right into the other thing kale or chard has provided for the past few years, cheese or not — a sheen of wellness with lots of fiber and vitamins, a bite hearty enough to fill you, and cheap enough to put in everything.
But that idea of something delicious coming out of common ingredients is ultimately why cabbage might be showing up on more menus. There are rumblings of another recession on the way, but even if it’s not a full-blown financial crisis, wages are stagnant and Americans increasingly don’t have cash to spare. The last time this happened, food trends turned cozy, from the aforementioned crispy brussels sprouts to braised short ribs to the omnipresent humble luxury of truffle fries.
A decade after the last recession, wellness and Korean cuisine have influenced just how “comfort food” is defined. For every Popeyes chicken sandwich there’s a pot of sustainably sourced heirloom beans, for every lasagna there’s a winter squash Sweetgreen bowl. But the goal is still something delicious and hearty on the (relatively) cheap. Cabbage stands exactly at that intersection — familiar but providing opportunities to “discover” new preparations, filling and nutritious, and available literally everywhere and to everyone. Get ready to be sick of it by 2021.
From “less focus on the center of the plate more on the outskirts” to lab-grown meat, here’s what the trend-casters predict we’ll be eating next year
Start blending your beef burgers with mushrooms and clear your throat for some voice-command ordering, because 2020 is almost here. As is tradition, it’s time to consult the all-knowing restaurant trend oracle (aka my inbox) and see what the future holds for dining, drinking, and snacking in the coming year.
The seers of the industry — data mining consulting firms, PR reps, chefs with PR reps, and major brands — each have taken turns divining what’s in and what’s out in food. The prognosticators craft predictions based on trends in the past year, personal preferences, speculation, copying, and, yes, a little bit of witchcraft, too. It’s also the most likely time of year to encounter the term “ethnic” in a press release.
Along with explosively popular trends like plant-based protein burgers and chicken sandwiches, the hive mind seems to universally agree that zero-proof drinking will continue into the new year. Likewise, health halo beverages like boozy kombucha and alcoholic still water are expected to gain even more ground among consumers in the spirit of 2019’s alcoholic seltzers. On the opposite end, some companies such as Uber Eats are predicting the decline of acai, charcoal, seitan, and hummus. Odd, considering many others predicted a rise in Middle Eastern cuisine.
Are these trends the real deal or simply a way for marketers to infiltrate the end of year news cycle and will their future products into popularity? Regardless, Eater has sifted through the many, many lists copying other lists to create a megalist of what will be hot and what will be, well, not in the coming year. Are the predictions conflicting? Yes. Are the words nonsensical? Yes. What is gastrophysics? Don’t ask. See you in hell.
• All Year in Eater Coverage [E]
• All Trends Coverage [E]
• All Restaurant Coverage [E]
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