You Should Read This Memoir About Motherhood and the Restaurant Industry

March 09, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week

This post originally appeared on March 7, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

This week I want to shout out a memoir I breezed through last month called Everything Is Under Control, by Phyllis Grant. So many people send books to my office and I barely look at 95 percent of them, so I’m not sure what convinced me to open this memoir (a genre that I don’t gravitate toward) by someone I’ve never heard of. But I did open it, and the random page I turned to sucked me in: “I know I’m pregnant again when I find myself in the anchovy aisle, tracing my fingers along the tins, my mouth watering, my skin tingling, my body overly alive.”

Another random page: “The industrial kitchen fan pumps a mash-up of lunch fumes out into the alley. I want my hair to smell like chocolate and garlic and fish. I want to lean in and carefully place the roasted beets next to the potato puree. I want a purpose.”

I won’t quote the line that so perfectly evokes the smells of new motherhood, but trust me, it’s inspired.

The book is a series of vignettes, poetic and spare and powerful, that trace this writer’s life as a chef, a baker, a mother, a partner. I have never been a chef, so I found her passages from that period of her life compelling, but I especially appreciate her portrait of motherhood, including postpartum depression, the specific pain of childbirth, and getting an abortion as a mother of two. And yet it’s not a downer at all. Check it out when it’s released next month, and let me know what you think.

On Eater

Alex Staniloff/Eater

• Intel: Jean-Georges Vongerichten said on a panel discussing his recent memoir that he didn’t regret breaking his dishwasher’s nose; the people behind New York’s Chinese Tuxedo will open a pan-Asian restaurant downtown; Vegas’s Raku has a new restaurant in the works; the tornado that ripped through Nashville killed 24 people (including two bartenders) and damaged dozens of restaurants; SF’s Slanted Door opened a Vegas location; Michelin’s new sustainability badges are bullshit; the Miami location of Punch Bowl Social looks like it was designed for and via Instagram; Guy Fieri is doubling down in Boston; a Dallas chef acted like a baby in someone else’s restaurant and then apologized after getting called out on Instagram; Tartine officially came out against its employees’ unionization efforts; 80-year-old legend Art’s Famous Chili Dogs will close; bizarre but beloved New York theme restaurant Ninja closed after 15 years; Eric Adjepong, the D.C.-based winner of Top Chef: Kentucky, will open a fast-casual doubles shop this spring; the people behind Suerte in Austin will open a Mexican seafood spot called Este in Austin; LA is awash in hand-roll restaurants; and the team behind Boston’s Puritan & Co. is opening a trio of new restaurants, including a roof bar.
• On the COVID-19 beat: The cancelation of SXSW is going to screw restaurants and bars; Rancho Gordo bean sales have quadrupled; San Antonio’s Texas Foodways conference and IACP were canceled; here’s Jaya’s call for paid sick leave for delivery workers; Seattle restaurants are struggling to cope in the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak; Tito’s vodka had to tell everyone on social media that they shouldn’t use vodka to make DIY hand sanitizer; and Chinese restaurants in New York are adding more delivery services to mitigate the drop in business.
• Inside the members-only world of online beer trading.
• The critics: Ryan Sutton on Fieldtrip and Teranga, new fast-casual restaurants that “don’t trade creativity for convenience”; and Robert Sietsema investigates two dubious best burger claims in downtown New York.
• Hey, in exchange for all this free content, want to fill out our audience survey?
• An ode to Andy Rooney’s unintentionally hilarious examination of his kitchen utensil collection.
• How Ava Gene’s makes its very beautiful babka waffles.
• Remembering Lespinasse and chef Gray Kunz to commemorate his death.

Dina Avila / EPDX

Off Eater

• I know there is a more depressing thing out there than pre-made collage kits but I can’t think of it right now. Also I have to say, one of the many blessings of reading the paper in print every day is seeing the print versus online headlines. In this case, the print hed was “Where’s My Imagination? Oh, Right, I Bought It.” [NYT]
• How to turn your bedroom into a minimalist cocoon [Curbed]
• Everyone is irrationally panic shopping and it’s at once horrifying and amusing. [TNY]
• Why wine is so hard to understand. [Vox]
• When did pepper mills, a signal of sophistication, became passé? [Taste]