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.