It’s Decided: Mediterranean Fast-Casual Restaurant Cava Makes the Best Bowls

January 31, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

It’s the end of the Eater Bowl Bowl (and Panda Express’s surprising, yet delightful winning streak) and we feel fine

It’s the end of the road for the 2020 Eater Bowl Bowl. For some — like Chop’t and Taco Bell — the journey ended far too soon, while others — heavy-hitters like Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Panera — made it almost to the end, only to be surprisingly crushed by dark horses Cava, an appreciated but not widely known Mediterranean-inspired bowl chain, and Panda Express. Let this be a lesson: Never underestimate the power of good orange chicken.

In an ideal world, we would have taken our obnoxious wordplay to its limit, securing NBA player Bol Bol to be our last Bowl Bowl judge. Unfortunately, we were unable to reach his people because — well — we got too busy with other things to try. Besides, Chipotle already beat us to it. And so we did the next best thing, a staff-wide vote to decide which of our finalists would triumph over all of its competitors.

Beating Panda Express with 66.7 percent of the vote, we have our winner Cava, originally ranked a middling 3 out of 8 bowl types in the Healthy-ish division. (Panda Express, perhaps more impressively, was ranked sixth on the Slop side of the bracket. Talk about an upset!)

Asked to comment on their decision, here are some comments from the Eater staff:

“Cava is THAT GIRL. She is healthful. She is doing what the others can’t (serving braised lamb). She is giving 2x portions of toppings like cucumber and tomato and mint IF you want them. It’s not a one and done scoop situation like the fuckery of Dig Inn or Sweetgreen. She gives you tzatziki! She is sloppy but she is kind. She is delicious most of the time. She is all of this mixed up in a beautiful bowl.”

“More good vegetarian and/or healthy options!”

“It’s so goop-y.” (A compliment, apparently!)

“I love falafel and hummus in bowl form.”

“What’s not to love?” (Vague, but that’s fine.)

“Because I am a woman who likes value. You can choose three dips/spreads, all 13 toppings, and six dressings FOR NO EXTRA COST, which sings to my heart.”

“While Panda has successfully pivoted to the bowl, its pleasures came before this circular cultural moment and will last after. Cava is a bowl native, and its many delightful slops really only make sense dumped into a large round container and eaten more or less at random. You may not like it, but this is what peak bowl looks like.”

“I believe a bowl’s greatest purpose is to serve as a satisfying but also somewhat healthy lunch you eat during the workday. No one does this better than Cava. Cava isn’t doing anything remarkably different from other bowl purveyors with an array of vegetables and proteins to mix and match, but unlike so many of those places, Cava’s mix-and-match options actually taste pretty good.”

And because Panda Express put up such a valiant effort, here’s what its fans had to say about it:

“Panda Express can make people happy or make them sad. If Cava elicits any emotion from customers, it’s deep, unsettling ennui. Panda Express can be a place for families to eat together or solo travelers to hunker down for a pitstop, but Cava is only a place to be alone with your choices, namely the weird flavor combo you decided to overload in your bowl. Any PE customer can dig into a bowl and feel they are having a substantial, semi-coherent eating experience, while a meal at Cava is like an allegory about the dangers of too much choice, overabundance, flavor without context or consideration.”

“It’s what I crave vs. what I feel I should eat.”

“[Comment section left blank]”

Congrats to Cava on this meaningless-though-flattering honor.

Here’s a visual reminder of where we began:

Respect that. Bow(l) down, bitches.

Yeah, Smoothie Bowls Are Pretty — Pretty Stupid

January 31, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The cup is a perfectly fine smoothie vessel and whoever thinks otherwise is wrong

This piece is written as part of Eater’s Bowl Bowl series, a celebration of the Super Bowl... and bowls.

Rarely does anything good come from forcing an item with a specifically designed container into another kind of vessel. Yet, for some reason the world now insists that everything must be served in bowls to suit the customizable, fast-casual model.

Enter the smoothie bowl: a food divined from two completely incongruous terms. Smoothies, afterall, belong in cups, ideally with a straw. Few people if any have ever complained about this method of serving smoothies and yet it’s been reimagined by juiceries into a far less convenient (but possibly more Instagrammable) fruit slop tray.

To get to the bottom of the smoothie bowl’s dramatic rise, one only needs to look as far as the smoothie bar trend, largely led in the mid-aughts by Jamba Juice. In the first half of its lifespan, Jamba (as it’s now known) was a colorful, jungle-themed smoothie chain frequented by tweens desiring a very large cup of blended sugar slush in flavors like strawberry-banana. By the late aughts numerous juice bars and smoothie brands fanned out across the U.S., selling an aura of wheat grass-driven wellness to customers. Despite being packed with unhealthy ingredients, many of these shops were conveniently located next to (or maybe even inside) franchise gyms, the better to serve their customers.

Simultaneously, the market for purportedly healthy treats and superfoods has grown into a whole lifestyle industry worth billions of dollars. Among the most ubiquitous of these “superfoods” is acai, an exoticized purple berry harvested from an Amazonian palm plant that marketers widely hailed for its dubious antioxidant properties. While acai has been consumed fresh for centuries by communities in the Amazon, cities in Brazil such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo began to transform the fruits into a frozen dessert in the 1990s. As The New Yorker put it in a 2011 piece:

Because açaí pulp degrades quickly, it had to be frozen before being shipped, so in Rio and São Paulo it is served like ice cream, its almost dirtlike undertaste made attractive to urban palates by the addition of sugar and, often, extract of guarana, an Amazonian fruit that is higher in caffeine than coffee.

By the 2000s, two brothers from Southern California, Ryan and Jeremy Black, began importing acai berries to the U.S. for the first time, kickstarting the frozen acai bowl craze. A decade later, Instagram emerged and began to rapidly grow its users, wildly altering the way people interact with, consume, and market food and other products. Health foods couldn’t just be made from whole ingredients anymore; they needed to be attractive for photos. Acai bowls fit perfectly into this niche. The thick blend of purple berry goo is an eye-catching backdrop for colorful slices of fresh fruits, whole berries, shredded coconut, seeds, and chia. But why stop at just acai, when there are so many other frozen fruits on hand? Soon the smoothie bowl hashtag blossomed on Instagram with millions of vibrant entries by wellness influencers.

Because making acai bowls uses frozen fruit and a blender, it made sense that juice and smoothie bars would pivot and adopt the trendy treat on menus to stay relevant. Look at Jamba’s menu today and customers will find it dominated by “artisan flatbread,” juice “shots,” and, yes, colorful smoothie bowls decorated with rows of sliced banana and peanut butter drizzle. Jamba has evolved into a fast-casual, health food franchise and, not coincidentally, dropped the “Juice” from its name in the process.

Still, the question remains: What exactly makes a smoothie bowl meaningfully different from a normal smoothie? The answer is, unsurprisingly, not that much.

On a recent 30-degree day in Detroit, I went out in search of a smoothie bowl — ideal conditions for what I only assumed was a large serving of chilled fruit soup. The proprietor of my local smoothie bowl shop gleefully explained the essence of a smoothie bowl: It’s far thicker than the average smoothie, making it suitable bowl and spoon food. She convinced me to try the spicy mango smoothie bowl — basically the blended version of a mangonada. And it did indeed come out thick, as if someone had forgotten to add liquid to the blender and then threw granola and honey on top. It was, admittedly refreshing and pleasant for about four bites (maybe five if I lived somewhere warmer).

Proponents of the smoothie bowl will tell you that it is a healthy option suitable for breakfast because it’s full of fruit. But they’re not fooling anyone. It’s proximity to fitness and purportedly healthy ingredients may it feel more virtuous than eating dessert — but ultimately what people are essentially consuming is a pint of sorbet with a bunch of honey and cereal dumped on top. And while sorbet can be enjoyable as a palate cleanser in small portions, the smoothie bowl by nature is huge, dense, and sweet, making it a chore to eat.

Smoothie bowls are, in essence, a marketing lie that’s heaved on the masses to prolong the life of the smoothie and juice bar genre. But here’s the thing: People genuinely like smoothies and don’t exactly need it to be reimagined. It’s time to stop this snack trend in its tracks and put smoothies back in their rightful place, a cup.

Pinning Coronavirus on How Chinese People Eat Plays Into Racist Assumptions

January 31, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The outbreak has had a decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric “others”

While panic and fear abound in response to the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak that has killed at least 213 people in China and infected more than 9,700 worldwide, there has also been a conspicuous — if not entirely surprising — lack of empathy for those who are suffering most from the virus: the Chinese people who face lockdowns, supply shortages, and a higher chance of contracting the illness.

The outbreak has had a decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric “others” who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases and an appetite for dogs, cats, and other animals outside the norms of Occidental diets. These ideas, perennially the subtext behind how Chinese people are viewed by the Western gaze, have been given oxygen anew after preliminary reports linked the coronavirus outbreak to a Wuhan wet market where produce and meat are sold alongside livestock and more exotic wildlife like snakes, civet cats, and bamboo rats; and to bats, which are frequent carriers of viruses that cause human disease.

Tabloids like the Daily Mail quickly resurfaced old videos of Chinese people eating bat and mice that had nothing to do with the current outbreak (the bat video, as Foreign Policy’s James Palmer points out, didn’t even take place in China, but the Pacific archipelago of Palau; meanwhile, the “delicacy” shown in the mice video has been debunked; it is not popular or mainstream by any means). People commented “This is not human behaviour” on the articles; on Twitter, searching for anything related to keywords like “China,” “eat,” “virus,” and “food” is enough to bring up an endless scroll of statements that suggest that Chinese people “deserve” the karmic retribution in the form of the deaths and illnesses that the virus has wrought, at least in part because of what they eat.

There are a few threads to untangle in this recent wave of Sinophobia. First, as Palmer writes for Foreign Policy, the supposition that Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market is the source of the outbreak has not yet been confirmed. According to a study in the Lancet by Chinese researchers and doctors, more than a third of the earliest known cases of this virus — including the outbreak’s first known case — had no connection to the market. Without more research and evidence, it’s premature to assert definitively that the virus jumped from bat to humans through meat consumption at the market. As Charlie Campbell writes for Time, the “Child Zero” victim of Ebola in West Africa was likely infected via contact with bat droppings, and “MERS was also primarily spread from live camels to humans through association, rather than the eating of camel meat.”

Second, the hypocritical idea that some animals are socially permissible to eat, while others are not, is a belief in one’s own cultural hegemony. American meat companies produced 26.3 billion pounds of beef in 2017; in India, the slaughter or sale of cows is prohibited in multiple states, and has been weaponized by Hindu nationalists against the Muslim minority. Eating horse meat has historic precedence in Europe (including France) and Asia; the appearance of horse tartare on an episode of Top Chef Canada in 2011 was enough to trigger a boycott and mass outrage. Wild game — including deer, squirrel, and feral hogs — are still hunted and eaten in the U.S., a tradition that would surely make residents of some other nations turn up their nose. And that’s not to mention the mass-produced and overly processed junk that has overtaken Americans’ plates, leaving people “simultaneously overfed and undernourished.”

Vice’s Bettina Makalintal puts it perfectly:

In the United States, where we’re used to a limited protein range and a shopping model that puts plastic-wrapped, disembodied animal parts in cold cases at grocery stores, there’s an undercurrent that what people in Asia eat is inherently “weird” and unsettling. When those eating practices are linked, however inconclusively, to health scares—as they are currently—those beliefs become loud rationalizations for dehumanizing Chinese people and treating their lives as less worthy.

Some of the complaints about China’s eating habits are concerned more with the cruelty of select slaughter methods, like the treatment of dogs at the annual Lychee and Dog Meat Festival in Yulin. If the aim is, rightly, ethical and humane treatment of animals, then of course those practices should be eliminated (there are plenty of Chinese people who advocate for better animal welfare), but so too should the relentless U.S. model of intensive farming.

There are legitimate objections to the lack of hygiene and regulations in China’s wet markets and food system that allows for the spread of dangerous pathogens. “The country’s food-safety standards are notoriously bad, despite numerous government-led initiatives to improve them,” Palmer writes for Foreign Policy. “Food scandals are common, and diarrhea and food poisoning are a distressingly regular experience. Markets, like Huanan, that aren’t licensed for live species nevertheless sell them. Workers are undertrained in basic hygiene techniques like glove-wearing and hand-washing. Dangerous additives are commonly used to increase production.”

But, as Palmer points out, these conditions aren’t unique: “It looks, in fact, a lot like the United States did in the past, before muckraking exposés led to the creation of modern regulation systems.” Even today, the U.S. is far from a paragon of food-safety regulations gone right. The routine use of antibiotics in factory farming has helped create drug-resistant bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses. Food recalls have become more common — with E. coli found in lettuce practically every other week — at least in part because “regulations and enforcement mechanisms are not keeping pace with changes in food production,” per Time. Under the Trump administration, regulations have gotten even more lax — a new rule last fall eliminated slaughter-line speed limits and reduced the number of Department of Agriculture inspectors in pork plants.

Chinese people are calling for improved standards and practices. Per Palmer: “Seventy-seven percent of the public ranks food safety as their single biggest concern.” In response to the current outbreak, there’s been an “unusual outpouring of public sentiment against the trade of live animals,” the New York Times reports. “A campaign on Weibo, the social media platform, drew 45 million views with the hashtag #rejectgamemeat.” The government has once again issued a ban on wildlife trade, and leading scientists and many Chinese people are calling for that ban to be made permanent.

A viral outbreak like this undoubtedly requires action, both immediate and in the long term. But fear mongering and callously using rhetoric that suggests that Chinese people — who, it should be made clear, are not one and the same as the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party — deserve this outbreak as some kind of payback for “barbarian” customs is, at its core, blatant prejudice. Racist memes and unsympathetic language are not just pixels on a screen: the anti-Chinese sentiment is having a very real effect. Businesses have posted signs barring Chinese customers from entry; families overseas are being targeted and asked to quarantine themselves. “The subreddit r/CoronavirusMemes casually jokes about nuking the entire city of Wuhan,” Makalintal reports for Vice.

The coronavirus outbreak, which the World Health Organization just declared a global health emergency, is alarming. A degree of apprehension and caution is perfectly warranted. But it’s telling that sympathy — or any regard, for that matter — for the outbreak’s vast majority of victims in China seems to be in short supply. As if devaluing other humans’ lives will protect your own.

• Don’t Blame Bat Soup for the Wuhan Virus [Foreign Policy]
• Coronavirus Fears Are Reviving Racist Ideas About Chinese Food [Vice]
• The West Blames the Wuhan Coronavirus on China’s Love of Eating Wild Animals. The Truth Is More Complex [Time]

Low-Calorie IPAs Are a Thing. But Should You Actually Drink Them?

January 31, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Got Lacteal Secretions? Virginia Tries to Limit the Legal Definition of Milk

January 31, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Plus, the Super Bowl adds up to a lot of food waste, and more news to start your day

The milk lobby is working to make milk sound even grosser

As plant-based milks continue to dominate the market and the diary industry faces bankruptcies, dairy producers are fighting back any weird ol’ way that they can. Taking a page from the beef industry, which recently lobbied for a law that would ban meatless products from using phrases like “meat” and “burger” in product descriptions, Big Dairy is using similar tactics. In Virginia, according to The Guardian, it is now “unlawful” to describe plant-based milks as “milk.” The legal definition of milk is now “the lacteal secretion of a healthy, hooved mammal.”

“Our dairy farmers have been going out to the tune of one dairy farm every other week,” said republican delegate Barry Knight, adding that he hoped the legislation will help Virginia’s dairy farmers. But what this and similar legislation seem to willfully misunderstand is that no one is buying oat milk because they think they are buying milk. The fact that it’s not a lacteal secretion is precisely the point. Recently, the Ninth Circuit court ruled in favor of plant-milk producers in Painter v. Blue Diamond Growers, saying in the opinion, “Painter’s complaint does not plausibly allege that a reasonable consumer would be deceived into believing that Blue Diamond’s almond milk products are nutritionally equivalent to dairy milk based on their package labels and advertising.”

In case you were wondering, there is an exception in the Virginia law about human breast milk, so no one has to go around calling it “human breast secretions.”

And in other news...

• Over 2,000 pounds of ground beef is being recalled for plastic contamination. [Forbes]
• People are paying their respects to Kobe Bryant at his favorite Mexican restaurant, El Camino Real. [Vice]
• KFC will begin testing its Beyond Fried Chicken in Charlotte next week. [WSOCTV]
• Jack in the Box is planning another social media stunt for the Super Bowl instead of paying for a TV ad. [QSR]
• After extensive flooding, the Friar’s Club will be closed until the end of the summer. [Page Six]
• You think you’re too good to put Velveeta and Rotel in your queso dip? [Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog]
• Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes really are simple. Really. No, trust us. [The New Yorker]
• Over 40,000 pounds of food may be wasted at the Super Bowl, specifically from the game’s VIP attenders. [The Counter]
• Curséd crudité:

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Planters Killed Mr. Peanut, Brought Him Back, and Killed Him Again — All for the Super Bowl

January 31, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The Super Bowl has always been the epicenter for dumb stunt advertising, and the internet only makes it worse

On January 22, 2020, the cane-swinging, top hat-wearing, possibly gay capitalist known as Mr. Peanut was pronounced dead by Planters on Twitter. “We’re devastated to confirm that Mr. Peanut is gone,” wrote the nut brand, which has been synonymous with the iconic legume since 1916. “He died doing what he did best – having people’s backs when they needed him most.”

How exactly did the monocled figurehead die? In a 30-second Super Bowl pregame ad, Mr. Peanut is shown cruising down a mountain road in his Nutmobile with Wesley Snipes and Veep’s Matt Walsh. To avoid hitting an armadillo, the vehicle swerves and nosedives off a cliff, leaving all three passengers holding onto a branch for dear life. The branch threatens to snap under their weight, until Mr. Peanut sacrifices himself and lets go, falling into the canyon and presumably to his death. His funeral, according to a press release that also encourages fans to eulogize the legume on social media using the hashtag #RIPeanut, was originally set to be broadcast in a Super Bowl spot this Sunday, before the brand paused the plan — and then recommitted to it — in the wake of the deaths of Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and several others in a helicopter crash over the weekend.

The calculated demise of Mr. Peanut felt like a wild, but not totally unforeseen, ending for a 104-year-old mascot who spent much of last year tweeting things like “Silent nut. Holy nut.” and whatever this is. Users reacted with dank glee and horniness; countless jokes and memes propelled it into a trending topic; and, of course, seemingly every other corporate account in existence responded to the news in character, unleashing an orgy of human-aping Brand Twitter of a magnitude that has rarely been seen before.

It’s fitting that Planters’ marketing coup was tied to Super Bowl, arguably the ground zero of over-the-top brand stunts. Long before brands started getting attention for appropriating millennial depression and peeing in jars, they competed to make the most memorable Super Bowl commercials, striving for just the right alchemical mixture of humor, celebrity, self-awareness, feel-good messaging, and more to become the ad with the biggest watercooler buzz the next day. At its peak, the Super Bowl reached a viewership of 114.4 million in 2015. Although ratings have fallen since then, it still remains one of the most-watched television events of the year.

But in today’s fragmented media environment, with so many other screens demanding consumers’ attention, it’s become critical to rethink the traditional TV spot so that it has legs on social media, especially if advertisers hope to get a good return on the behemoth cost of airing an ad during the Super Bowl (in 2020, that price tag is $5.5 million for 30 seconds).

“It used to be, ‘We need a Super Bowl spot.’ Then, it was, ‘We need a Super Bowl spot and program,’” advertising executive Mark DiMassimo told Billboard in 2017. “Now, it’s, ‘We need a Super Bowl stunt or event.’ It needs to be newsworthy, social and surprising — and it needs to be much bigger than 30 seconds.”

Enter: the pre-pre-pregame ad, released days before Super Bowl Sunday. Before Volkswagen’s “The Force” ad — which Time called “the ad that changed Super Bowl commercials forever” — in 2011, it was conventional wisdom to keep commercials under wraps until the game. Now, it’s common for brands to tease or outright unveil their ads early in hopes of going viral and commanding attention well before kickoff.

The Super Bowl’s convergence with social media — and Twitter, in particular, as the platform most suited for millions of users to experience the same event simultaneously — hit another milestone in 2013, when Oreo capitalized on an unexpected blackout with a viral tweet so appropriately opportunistic, it has its own oral history. “By now the cringey meme-seeking of Big Brand Twitter is so familiar that we’d probably just scroll by, but at the time, this was a headline-worthy move — one taken as an early sign that the sun might be setting on the supremacy of that primest of prime-time TV spots,” Emma Grey Ellis wrote for Wired.

From there, the meme-minded ads and stunts just kept coming, especially from food and drink brands, which “have a little more leeway to be entertainment-driven,” as ad executive Dan Granger told Vox in 2019. Much of the escalation seems to have crystallized in 2017, the same year that brands as personas became “an internet-wide meme,” according to Steak-umm social media manager Nate Auerbach wrote for Vulture last year. Super Bowl LI had Wendy’s debut Super Bowl spot, which translated the fast-food chain’s shittalking Twitter persona to the big screen with a dig at frozen beef; the first-ever live commercial, featuring Adam Driver and Snickers; and, although not a food brand, an encapsulation of Brand Twitter’s hallmark trait of horniness in the form of a sexy Mr. Clean ad. That year also saw a stunt tailor-made for headlines: Kraft Heinz gave its office workers the day off after the Super Bowl, and launched an online petition to make that Monday a national holiday (tragically, the petition only procured 70,000 signatures out of the goal of 100,000).

In 2018, the ethos of public beefing continued with brand feuds — Wendy’s vs. McDonald’s, Martha Stewart vs. Jack in the Box — that drew inspiration from or spilled over onto social media. In 2019, brand shenanigans got even wilder, with a far-ranging buffet of antics that included an iconically cringeworthy Kraft Heinz/Devour Foods ad about “frozen food porn”:

Skittles’ Broadway musical, directed and scored by actual professionals, and performed by Dexter’s Michael C. Hall for a real audience, in lieu of a paid Super Bowl spot:

And the World Record Egg, which partnered with Hulu to hatch an unnervingly (performatively?) earnest post-Super Bowl ad about … mental health?

This year’s lineup of Super Bowl ads features plenty of familiar names: Cheetos and MC Hammer; Pop-Tarts and Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness; Doritos and Sam Elliott, Billy Ray Cyrus, and meme lord Lil Nas X himself. But so far, it’s Planters’ offing of Mr. Peanut that best embodies where brand marketing and social media intersect today: weird, disingenuously humanized, just this side of depraved.

Even more zeitgeisty is that the internet’s quasi-lust-murder fascination with Mr. Peanut — the basis of the collective schadenfreude that has garnered Planters millions of impressions and press from every publication under the sun — was originally most vocally articulated by a comedian, Luke Taylor, who was banned from Twitter for threatening to kill the anthropomorphized legume. How very 2020 that a massive food conglomerate stood to benefit from a joke that was apparently seen as so untoward when directed at a corporate brand, it was forcibly excised from the company’s mentions.

Building a multimillion-dollar ad campaign off of death was always a risky endeavor — one that threatened to fall apart in the face of real tragedy. That’s the thing about these brand stunts that leaves such a bad taste in the mouth: the novelty is in watching these inanimate, two-dimensional brands open their mouths and convince us to see the humanity in them, humor and ennui and all. But to be truly human is to be confronted with the knowledge of your own mortality; to live is to eventually die. When the world collectively loses a real person — especially one whose life and legacy are being mourned and grappled with by millions — that’s when we’re reminded of what it really means to be human.

The Diner That Every Future President Must Visit

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

New Hampshire’s Red Arrow Diner is the one thing all sides — whether Democrat, Republican, or independent — can agree on

Over the course of a two-year presidential campaign, a candidate will visit hundreds of restaurants as they try to convincingly demonstrate that they’re just like the rest of us — and that they deserve our vote. Most restaurants are lucky to see a single presidential hopeful even once, a fly-by-night celebrity doling out an even more fleeting brush with fame. Some, however, become fixtures of the trail: In Iowa, the Western-themed Pizza Ranch, a regional pizza chain that says its goal is to “to glorify God by positively impacting the world we live in,” is a Republican favorite, while it’s difficult to find a Democrat who would turn down a visit to Iowa City’s Hamburg Inn No. 2 for one of its pie shakes.

The ne plus ultra of campaign trail restaurants, visited without fail election cycle after election cycle by Democrat, Republican, and third-party candidates alike, is the Red Arrow Diner, a century-old, 24-hour diner in Manchester, New Hampshire. A political consultant could not imagine a better stage for the practice of person-to-person politicking: The Red Arrow boasts a diverse cast of regulars; its walls are lined with decades’ worth of newspaper clippings and photographs of famous customers, including hometown hero Adam Sandler; and its menu is uncut Americana, with dozens of items, from diner classics like hot turkey sandwiches or steak and eggs to more outré fare, like a mug filled with 20 strips of bacon.

New Hampshire’s primary is the first in the nation, just days after the Iowa caucuses, and its voters place a premium on “retail politics” — the standard baby-kissing, glad-handing, flesh-pressing, and earnest head-nodding that are the foundation of a politician’s rapport with voters. As the premiere venue for crowd-working in New Hampshire’s most populous city, the Red Arrow occupies an outsized place in Granite State electoral politics — it has been a Jeopardy! clue — and it plays its part eagerly. “Would you like to schedule a political visit?” the top of its website beckons, while dozens of presidential hopefuls gaze down on patrons from the walls. Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Ben Carson, Barack Obama, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, John Edwards, and Donald Trump can be seen in a single glance.

Even Trump, whose 2016 campaign was marked by its near-total rejection of traditional retail politics in favor of mass rallies, could not avoid a visit to the Red Arrow — which has since rebranded its most gluttonous creation, the Newton Burger, which consists of a half-pound of ground beef, a deep-fried ball of mac and cheese, and two slices of melted American cheese, all wedged between two whole grilled cheese sandwiches that serve as the bun, as the Trump Tower Burger. As the Associated Press once put it, “It may not be spelled out in the Constitution, but the simple fact of the matter is, you really can’t run for president without grabbing some grub at the Red Arrow Diner.”

The origins of a surprising number of modern-day campaign conventions can be found in the 1992 Clinton campaign. While many paths to the White House begin in Iowa, the New Hampshire primary proved just as pivotal. Clinton’s strategy of getting personal with voters at diners across the state, including the Red Arrow, is credited for his subsequent second-place finish in the state primary — branding him as the “Comeback Kid” and propelling him to the nomination, then, ultimately, the presidency. Gore campaign operatives continued the tradition in 2000, officially making the Red Arrow an institution, and by the 2008 election cycle, it had become a must-stop for both Democrats and Republicans.

On a recent Sunday morning, a photo of Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was pinned up on a bulletin board in the basement; an employee had vandalized it with a scribbled-on tail. The increasingly embattled presidential candidate was criss-crossing New Hampshire on a four-day tour, his 15th visit to the state. He was scheduled to drop by the Red Arrow shortly before noon — during the peak brunch rush — for an off-the-record visit, or an OTR. The appearance, like most OTRs, was not on the official event schedule that was released to the public or the press, but the staff was abuzz with news of the visit.

“I’m excited to meet Pete!” said server Ashley Chapdelaine, who recently turned 19 and will be voting in a presidential election for the first time this year.

“Is there a plan?” asked Emilia Morrissette, another server, as she looked at her boss nervously.

“Same as always,” said general manager Jamie Lemay, who has been working at the Red Arrow for eight years, through multiple election cycles. “There is no plan.”

By mid-morning, the restaurant was humming along: completely packed, with servers rotating families in and out of the five booths at the front of the restaurant, seating everyone else at the 15-seat counter. In the kitchen, “Hungry Eyes” blasted over the stereo system as three line cooks prepared blueberry pancakes and omelets for the Sunday-morning crowd. Lemay checked her watch as she stood near the kitchen doorway. It was after 11, and there was still no contact from the campaign.

At 11:07, the Buttigieg advance team walked through the door: Eugene Chow, the deputy communications director for New Hampshire, and Dan Zotos, the campaign’s New Hampshire political director. The two briefed Lemay on how everything would go down: handshakes, lunch, photographs, in that order.

Servers who had been smoothly serving customers just minutes before stiffened up as the dance of turning tables now needed to accommodate Buttigieg, while the kitchen found itself in the weeds with 12 takeout orders for the campaign staff. As three sets of cameras and additional campaign staff materialized, guests realized that something was afoot. Conversation faded to a murmur and every pair of eyes in the room fixed itself on the doorway.

Minutes later, Buttigieg burst through the door and hugged the two local activists he was there to dine with. The silence broke and normal conversation resumed; the anticipation, it seems, was more exciting than the actual presence of a presidential candidate. Even as Buttigieg worked his way down the counter to shake hands, diners’ attention never quite returned, save for Donna Shindelman. The health care worker and lifelong Democrat from Reading, Massachusetts, asked for a photo, proudly stating that she’d be voting for Buttigieg in the Massachusetts primary on Super Tuesday.

Buttigieg sat down with a mug of black coffee and ordered a chicken-fried steak Benedict, slathering it with Sriracha after his first bite; he leaned heavily into the plate to protect his trademark ensemble of a white dress shirt with blue tie. Halfway through the meal, a server rang a bell to announce that everyone was in the presence of a Red Arrow virgin, the traditional welcome for first-timers to the restaurant (Hillary Clinton excepted). Presented with stickers that declared “I’ve Been De-virginized at the Red Arrow Diner,” Buttigieg gamely slapped one onto his chest.

After signing some mugs and taking a few more photos, about 40 minutes after he arrived, Buttigieg was gone. Lemay, the general manager, breathed a sigh of relief. “That was a long time,” she said. According to her, most visits last around 10 minutes and are purely for the upfront photo op. Few candidates stay long enough to squeeze past the counter for facetime with the kitchen staff, and Buttigieg had made the rare move of concluding his visit by taking photos with the back of house.

“Knowing that someone like that was in the restaurant is pretty cool,” said Conor Trumble, who has been a cook at the Red Arrow for 10 years and was thrilled to meet the candidate. “I’m voting for Buttigieg,” said Trumble. “And my girlfriend is as well.”

John Heward, another cook, who has been working at the Red Arrow on and off for 20 years, had a different point of view. “I’d rather be cooking for Trump!”

Gary He is a photojournalist based in New York City.

The Best Spicy Condiment at Trader Joe’s Is the Habanero Hot Sauce

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Eater Young Gun Max Boonthanakit (‘19) likes to smuggle Trader Joe’s hot sauce into his favorite spring roll restaurant in LA for some extra heat

Welcome to the Best Thing at Trader Joe’s, a series in which chefs and restaurant industry insiders share which TJ’s product is the GOAT (no #sponcon necessary). Today’s installment: Pastry chef and Eater Young Gun Max Boonthanakit (‘19) on Habanero Hot Sauce.

This hot sauce is my favorite because it’s just super pure — it tastes like 100 percent habanero. When I go to Trader Joe’s, I always get the plantain chips and this hot sauce, and I’ll just dip the chips right into it.

At this point it might be the only hot sauce in my kitchen, aside from the one I make myself. I like that it’s super hot, and at the same time it has a fresh, fruity note to it. And they don’t make it too vinegary. A lot of sauces are too vinegar-based. But I’m obsessed with the flavor of this one. I’ll even eat it on Pringles — just straight up, original Pringles with habanero sauce — or on pizza.

I go to this place called Summer Rolls in LA, that serves Vietnamese spring rolls with crispy egg rolls inside. They have like a sweet, thickened rice dipping sauce that they serve with it, but I’ll make my fiancé smuggle a bottle of hot sauce in with us, and dip the pork spring rolls directly into it.

Is There a World Where Panda Express Beats Chipotle in the First-Ever Eater Bowl Bowl?

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

With Sweetgreen officially out of the running, bibimbap, Cava, Chipotle, and Panda Express are dishing out pain for gain in the semifinals

Folks, I’m shocked. I’m stunned. Heavyweight Sweetgreen lost in the Elite 8 to bibimbap, a dish adored by all but without an official fast-casual home. Meanwhile, Cava, a fast-casual bowl restaurant that uses the fallen Sweetgreen model for ordering and eating, HAS persevered into the semi-finals, beating out poke bowl chain Pokéworks. Is this what the Creed movies, spin-offs of the Rocky series, are about? No, not really! But let’s take a moment to think about Michael B. Jordan anyway, because after this, it’s gonna get ugly.

Facing off in the Final 4, we have bibimbap going toe-to-toe with Cava and fast-casual titan Chipotle facing off with Panda Express, a Chinese-American fast-food staple. Do NOT reach over the sneeze guard, please. It’s unsanitary and you might lose a hand. Judging today’s matches is one of our most intimidatingly discerning judges, Eater restaurant editor Hillary Dixler Canavan.

Healthy-ish

Bibimbap (2) vs Cava (3)

There’s no doubt bibimbap is a culinary treasure and represents the best of what bowl eating can be. There’s a symphony of texture: crispy rice on the bottom, soft rice up top; crunchy pickled veg; chewy meat; oozing egg yolk. And it’s flavor-packed, a jumble of savory heat and bright acidity that mingles as you mix it together. Just thinking about it has made me hungry, even though I just ate a slice of pizza reheated the good way (in a pan with tin foil on top).

Meanwhile Cava is standard fast-casual fare, a DIY salad situation that leans heavily on spreads like hummus, harissa, and tzatziki for flavor-building. Its vaguely Middle Eastern, vaguely Mediterranean, and vaguely boring. One colleague described it to me as extremely goop-y, and not in the Gwyneth sense.

But comparing a dish to a specific brand isn’t really fair. Us judges are free to imagine bibimbap the way we like it to be, but it’s as-yet unproved whether a fast-casual or fast-food chain can figure out bibimbap at scale. Will the rice be crispy? What will they do about the runny egg yolks? WILL THERE BE ACTUALLY SPICY KIMCHI AVAILABLE?

A Cava bowl is what it is. It’s real. And real things are both good and bad, unlike whatever idealized version of bibimbap each judge is assuming to be in competition here. Sorry to rain on the parade, friends, but I’m picking Cava because at least we know the specifics. Winner: Cava —HDC

Slop

Chipotle (1) vs. Panda Express (6)

There’s a lot more than meets the eye at Panda Express. Even with huge lines I’ve never seen the staff be anything less than chipper, eager to offer a sample of anything you’d like to try. The chain is uniquely expert at frying, which means that, especially during high traffic times, it’s easy to find a pleasing crunch from a hot batch of its famous orange chicken or, my personal favorite, sweet fire chicken (ever-so-slightly spicy, highly citrus-y fried chicken chunks). The options for customization are particularly compelling, especially if you go the route of halving rice with the steamed super greens mix of broccoli, kale, and cabbage. For New Years Eve 2019, I paired Panda Express with Champagne and honestly it was perfect. I should do that again without the holiday excuse.

But here’s the thing: I live in Los Angeles and Panda Express here is a completely different experience than the Panda Express mall-court experiences I had growing up in New Jersey. The East Coast mall-court Pandas are pretty grim. The food sits, it’s too sweet, and even the astoundingly cheap price doesn’t make up for how bad it is. Chipotle is far more consistent nationwide.

Chipotle has always been an easy option because it’s so customizable — even before it released specific bowls designed to be Keto or Whole30, plenty of us had figured out how to make the Chipotle bowl tick whatever restrictive boxes we needed it to. My go-to order has been either salad greens or brown rice with a half-portion of black beans, plus steak, double serving of grilled veggies, fresh tomato salsa, tomato-tomatillo salsa, and guac. Feeling particularly festive? Add an order of chips, throw some on top of the bowl and use the rest to scoop out the contents.

And yet. I didn’t recently wake up to news that Panda Express was massively fined for violating child labor laws. I’ve never had to write blog posts about how Panda Express greenwashed their business model. I don’t have to do nearly as much soul-searching about questions of appropriation at Panda; its founders are not white men who hugely profited off another group’s food culture. And most importantly, I’ve never had to go LITERAL YEARS avoiding Panda Express because of frankly legitimate concerns over foodborne illness.

Plus, have I mentioned how good the sweet fire chicken is? Winner: Panda Express —HDC

Here, going into the finals, is the bracket as it stands:

Come back Friday to find out what bowl restaurant — Cava or Panda Express — is crowned the winner of the Eater Bowl Bowl.

Photo credits: Chicken grain bowl: Lauri Patterson/Getty; granola smoothie Bowl: zeljkosantrac/Getty; veggie bowl: vaaseenaa/Getty; salad: Westend61/Getty; bowl icon: Crystal Gorden/the Noun Project

The SCOTUS Cafeteria Is Now Serving Terrible Pizza, Thanks to Brett Kavanaugh

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Trader Joe’s Now Offers ‘Protein Patties,’ Its Own Version of Meatless Meat

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Plus, Joe Biden supporters are less likely to enjoy Indian food, and more news to start your day

The meatless trickle-down is here

While Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are the big names in the plant-based meat industry, basically every grocery store has been trying to market its own version. Costco, H-E-B, and Kroger’s have all brought in plant-based brands unique to their stores, and now Trader Joe’s is throwing its hibiscus-print hat in the ring. The store’s new “Protein Patties” are made with pea protein, sunflower oil, and beets, resulting in what’s supposed to be a “meaty texture.” “Folks are increasingly going for meatless burgers for all kinds of reasons, but we like to think that one reason in particular is primarily responsible: plant-based burgers have gotten really, really good recently,” the brand told Food & Wine.

Experts told Grocery Dive that demand for plant-based meat shows no signs of slowing down, even as beef lobbyists are fighting against the industry. According to a reviewer at Popsugar, TJ’s burgers are less textured and “meaty” than Beyond Meat, which might actually be a boon for vegetarians and vegans who don’t eat meat because of the texture. At this point, it’s clear that meatless meat is taking over for the veggie burgers of the world. I still love you, Boca Burger!

And in other news...

• Iowa Democratic caucus-goers who ate at an Indian restaurant in the past 10 years were more likely to support Sanders or Warren for president, and least likely to support Biden. [NY Times]
• Applebee’s is trying to get into the Bowl Bowl with their new Irresist-A-Bowls. Sorry guys, next year!! [Brand Eating]
• Beyond Meat is likely going to be liable for over $628k over unpaid invoices for breaching an agreement with its former co-packer. [Food Dive]
• Starbucks is introducing a plant-based breakfast sandwich. [NRN]
• France is banning “mass shredding of live chicks,” a thing you may not have realized is part of poultry and egg production. [CNN]
• Mike Bloomberg’s pandering plug of Big Gay Ice Cream makes it somehow feel like he has neither eaten ice cream before, nor met a gay person. [Twitter]
• Antitrust officials are investigating a merger between Dean Foods, which filed for bankruptcy in November, and Dairy Farmers of America. [NY Times]
• Scabby the rat has come for Salt Bae, as the chef faces a host of labor issues.

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Milk Bar’s New Flagship Is All Sugar, No Soul

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Christina Tosi’s once-groundbreaking Momofuku offshoot feels fully corporate in its new Nomad digs

The SCOTUS Cafeteria Is Now Serving Terrible Pizza, Thanks to Brett Kavanaugh

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The junior justice sits on the Supreme Court’s cafeteria committee

A Light-Up Croissant, Chinatown Merch, and More Things to Buy This Week

January 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Your weekly dispatch from the ‘Add to Cart’ newsletter

This post originally appeared on January 28, 2020, in Add to Cart — the weekly newsletter for people who love shopping (almost) as much as they love eating. Subscribe now.

Very good food take of the week: When traveling, always hit the grocery store.

As my Eater colleague Brenna Houck wrote this week in The Move, another Eater newsletter (it is great, sign up here), trawling supermarket aisles while in a foreign country — or even just Texas — is the best way to get to know a place: the distinctive flavors, the ubiquitous snacks, the homegrown brands.

It’s something that was second nature for me growing up, when every family vacation included a Friday-afternoon supermarket run, where we bought food — ingredients to prepare a meal if our lodging had a kitchen, or just yogurt and readymade items to stash in the minibar fridge — to hold us from sundown on Friday through sundown on Saturday night. Not being able to shop, dine out, or cook on the Sabbath meant we needed to be ready, which also meant we got a thorough tour of the local grocery store’s aisles.

I tend to travel without my family now, but on vacations, I still spend Friday afternoons — and other days of the week, too, for souvenir-shopping purposes — at the supermarket.

Things to buy

• I wasn’t sure I’d like using these small glass tumblers by Hawkins New York, which stand at a mere 2.5 inches high. But they look cute (especially in the chic “smoke” shade) and work well for beverages you plan to sip rather than gulp, like wine.
• Spotted in designer Ellen Van Dusen’s home: the croissant lamp (made from an actual once-edible pastry) coveted by many Eater staffers.
• Since receiving samples from cookware startup Equal Parts a few months ago, I’ve come to love the wooden cutting board, which is super solid but not so bulky I can’t hoist it in and out of my crammed cabinets. The wood surface is smooth to the touch, too.
• New Year’s Eve may be weeks behind us, but I’m a firm believer that drinking bubbles can happen at any time of year (and on random weeknights). This Gruet Sauvage sparkling chardonnay was a hit at last week’s Eater Wine Club. (Check out our next one if you live in NYC — email your name to events@eater.com to get added to the list.)

Things to know

• Ryan Sutton’s Eater NY review of Lekka, Amanda Cohen’s new veggie burger spot in NYC, serves as a reminder that colorfully rimmed enamel dishes are still very much a thing.
• Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur of the now-deceased Of a Kind are back in the newsletter game. A Thing or Two is a near-replica of Of a Kind’s original “10 Things” newsletter — in a very good way — with a neat list of 10 recommendations of products, brands, recipes, podcasts, or trends that are bound to delight. Sign up here.
• Care of Chan, an agency that reps food clients, has launched a fun limited-run online shop, called the Chinatown Collection. Timed in honor of Lunar New Year, the shop (which is also popping up IRL on 5 Rivington Street in NYC) includes a long-sleeve Mission Chinese Food tee designed by Danny Bowien, a Jing Fong T-shirt, gold-plated dumplings from ceramicist Stephanie Shih, and curated collection of Chinese-American cookbooks.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.

London Superstar Chef Clare Smyth Will Open Sydney Restaurant in 2021

January 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The only British female chef to preside over a three-Michelin-starred restaurant will be a headliner at The Crown mega complex

Forget Your Fiddle-Leaf Figs: 2020 Restaurant Decor Is All About the Booth Tree

January 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Part Rainforest Cafe, part Gilded Age greenhouse, trees growing out of the backs of booths are among the lushest restaurant design trends

In 2020, having lots of plants in your restaurant simply isn’t enough. To take things to the next level, restaurant designers are embracing what I’ve called the “edgy jungle” look by transforming booths into full-on planters, a fitting home for trees to sprout behind unassuming diners. These are booth trees, and they are here to bring back the ’80s mall plant pit with a luxe twist. Rainforest Cafe, but make it capital-F Fa-shun.

Oh, and restaurants: Please do your best to keep these trees alive. Dead plants are so 2018.

Quality Bistro, NYC

Alex Staniloff

Nari, San Francisco

Patricia Chang

Rochambeau, Boston

Seen any others? Let me know (hillary@eater.com) or tag me in the Instagram comments, @hillarydixlercanavan.