How Chef Wesley Altuna’s Filipino Delivery Restaurant Is Taking Over Toronto 

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

After losing his advertising job due to the pandemic, Altuna started selling classic Filipino dishes over Instagram

After being laid off from his job at an advertising agency, Wesley Altuna started selling Filipino food over Instagram under the name Bawang. The business took off and now he’s hand-delivering over 25 orders a day to the city’s eager residents.

“The things that go into it, the love that goes into it, the flavors that come out of the kitchen that translate into these beautiful dishes is nothing less than spectacular,” says Altuna. He’s talking about the classic Filipino dishes that he makes with his sous chef Paul Cantuba, like saucy beef mechado, sticky sweet chili chicken wings, crispy deep-fried lechon, and pork adobo, simmered in vinegar and soy sauce. “If you’re Filipino you know adobo, it’s in your DNA”

“I did this out of love and passion,” says Altuna, after describing his usual 14 to 16 hour work day. “When I see people actually reach out and grab it and post it and celebrate it...that’s the thing that makes me feel like I’m actually doing something that, one, I love, two, that makes sense, and three, people actually appreciate.”

Celebrate the House Meal, the Go-To Dish for When There’s No One to Satisfy but Yourself

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

 Too simple or too weird to try out on guests, the house meal is the epitome of experimental home cooking

I have a recipe for fried rice that no Asian culture would ever want to lay claim to. It’s a recipe in the loosest sense, made when my partner and I realize we have enough of the ingredients already in the house, but nothing else to make it better or more cohesive. It’s easily added to or subtracted from, usually starting with vegetables we have to use up before next week’s CSA box, which means dicing up everything from onions to romano beans to amaranth leaves. We forget to make rice the day before, so in goes a heaping pile of freshly cooked basmati rice, and maybe an egg, or some frozen shrimp, so that the texture is alternately crispy and goopy. It gets seasoned with mostly soy sauce, but sometimes miso or gochujang whisked in. Out of the wok comes an umami-rich slop, fried rice only in memory. And honestly, who cares? Such is the glory of the house meal.

You, too, probably have a house meal, whether you’ve thought about it or not. It’s a dish that perhaps was once inspired by a recipe, but you’ve made it so many times, and riffed on it so often, that it bears little resemblance to any known dish. It is comfort food at its finest, a thing designed for your specific palate, with absolutely no thought paid to impressing anyone else. And unlike the mainstream understanding of “comfort food,” the house meal is about as experimental and adaptive as you can get.

“I was intending to make something resembling a traditional tortilla soup,” said Whitney Reynolds of Brooklyn, describing the invention of their house meal, “but then dang it if I didn’t buy the wrong kind of tortillas!” Instead of giving up, they sliced their flour tortillas into strips and put them in the soup anyway, turning them into “soft weird sloppy tortilla noodles.” Kristen Carzodo of Albany, California, says she makes what looks like steamed artichokes with aioli, but the sauce is just store-bought mayonnaise and vinaigrette mixed together. And Becca Thimmesch in Washington, D.C., says her “depression chickpeas” grew out of more popular recipes for chickpea curry, but turned into cooking a can of chickpeas with stock and onions, and then topping with yogurt and harissa.

But not every house meal is born out of a recipe gone wrong. Joshua Rivera says his house recipe — a fried egg over rice with a mix of hot sauce and ketchup — was just what his mom made when she was frazzled, money was tight, and she still had four kids to feed. And now, it’s his dish to make “as a solid backup or emergency plan” when there’s nothing else in the house and nobody feels like making much of an effort. Kendra Vaculin, whose house meal is dal mixed with scrambled eggs, said she first made it when trying to “cobble together a dinner from what I had in the fridge,” and found it rang all the bells of other egg and starch dishes, but with a comforting mushy texture. Reynolds also described a dish they made recently as “a real fucked up mess of Goya spanish rice mix, green olives, and ranch dressing all mixed together. Disgusting. Fantastic.”

What ties these house meals together is that mostly these aren’t things you’d serve anyone but yourself. Reynolds has added the tortilla soup recipe to their soup Patreon, and Rivera has made eggs over rice for his partner, but usually the house recipe is so calibrated to your personal comforts that it’d be almost too revealing to make it for anyone else. “It’s a single can of chickpeas for a single serving of dinner,” Thimmesch said of her house meal. Carzodo says she’d serve her artichokes and dipping sauce to the friends in high school, but for an adult dinner party she’d feel the need to make actual aioli.

So much of the impetus behind the house meal is an easy vehicle for soothing flavors, for times when you’re overwhelmed, busy, exhausted, or just don’t have the mental fortitude to make a bigger grocery list or cook something more elaborate. For Reynolds, “sloppy shortcuts” like the tortilla soup, or another dish they make with herbed goat cheese mixed in overcooked rice, have become even more important as they recover from contracting COVID-19 in March. “Six months on I’m still suffering from a lot of fatigue and I can get exhausted easily. I’ve particularly become unable to tolerate heat, which can make cooking pretty difficult. So the more things I have that I can just throw together without a lot of standing in a hot kitchen, the better. Slop SUSTAINS.”

However, it doesn’t mean the house meal is just about shoveling calories into your body. Thimmesch says her chickpeas are “for those nights where you just feel horrible and you want to make something for yourself that’s easy and fast and uncomplicated, but warm and brothy and wakes up your tastebuds a bit.” It’s not flavorless gruel meant only to provide you with filler, but your favorite flavors and textures at their most concentrated. Hot sauce and egg, chickpea and harissa — the elements of more complicated dishes reduced to their most obvious components.

I’ve always prickled at phrases like “comfort food.” The way it’s utilized in America tends to enforce a white, middle-class, and frankly bland palate. Comfort food is tater tots and mac and cheese, and the epitome of a home cooked meal is a “simple” (three spices maximum) roast chicken. Not that those things aren’t delicious, but this language sets up a stark divide: Outside the home is for the weird, the avant-garde, and the new. Home, where comfort lies, is for the simple and the unadventurous, with the assumption that “adventurous” is any cooking laying outside of a northwestern European tradition.

But as these house recipes show, “comfort food” is in the eye of the beholder, and can be an area of great fusion and experimentation. “I’ve been using tomatoes all summer to great effect, but greens work really well, or peppers (kind of menemen-y in vibe plus the dal), eggplant, caramelized onions, or leftover roasted squash,” says Vaculin of her egg-and-lentil mash. “I usually put whatever herbs I have on top, and/or a drizzle of olive oil or ghee or hot sauce or tadka.” My goopy fried rice is usually flavored with miso or gochujang, but sometimes I’ve added leftover tomato sauce and oregano, or takeout birria broth. The point is not adhering to any one flavor profile, but making something entirely suited to your tastes, whatever those are.

The house meal, then, is the epitome of comfort food —not in the broad sense, but when and how it actually matters. It is easy, it is replicable, and it doesn’t need to satisfy anyone but those in your household. And sure, you can gussy it up for company or just for yourself, but... why? I’d only ever add something I could just throw on top,” says Rivera, who once attempted anchovies with his eggs. “Any more work undermines the point.”

At Least 19 Wineries, Restaurants, and Resorts Have Been Destroyed or Damaged by the Glass Incident Fire

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The False Hope of Reopening Is Killing Small Businesses

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The Stages of Gentrification, as Told by Restaurant Openings

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Inocencio Carbajal opened his acclaimed taqueria, Carnitas Uruapan, on West 18th Street in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood in 1975. He picked the location for a simple reason: At the time, it was near one of the city’s only Mexican grocery stores. There was another, more complex reason Carbajal and the grocery store were in the neighborhood, though. The construction of the University of Illinois campus in the neighboring Near West Side community between 1960 and 1965 pushed longtime Mexican residents into Pilsen, transforming the largely Czech and Eastern European immigrant neighborhood into a predominantly Mexican community by 1970. Within less than a decade, Pilsen had become one of Chicago’s most prominent Latinx neighborhoods.

More than 40 years later, the original Carnitas Uruapan is still there. But the Pilsen around it is changing again. City officials began planning new development for the area during the early 1970s, shortly after it emerged as a majority-Latinx community. The 1973 “Chicago 21 Plan,” designed to stem white flight by revitalizing areas surrounding the city’s commercial district, the Loop, targeted nearby communities like Pilsen. Private developers then tried slowly expanding into those areas. Community activists were able to resist these efforts through the early 1990s, but by the 2000s, political leaders, including the community’s alderman, invited pricey new development into the neighborhood, paving the way for rapid change.

Over the next decade, new cafes, restaurants, and housing developments owned by outsiders replaced many resident-owned properties and abandoned lots. Between 2000 and 2010, the Latinx population declined 26 percent. Today, Pilsen is one of the hippest areas in Chicago, with a thriving arts scene, fine dining options, and quaint cafes that continue to entice wealthier transplants to the area as working-class Mexicans who have lived there for years are displaced.

Gentrification is a process, one that today generally begins with investors seeking out affordable communities in order to transform them for profit. A key component of gentrification, which distinguishes it from revitalization, is the demographic shift that happens when newer, more expensive development attracts wealthier newcomers, often young professionals, who then price out the community’s original residents. The displaced people are usually members of marginalized minority groups who have been historically confined to divested inner-city districts by racist housing practices, segregation, and midcentury white flight.

Marcos Carbajal, Inocencio’s son, and now a co-owner of Carnitas Uruapan, is torn over the gentrification of Pilsen. On one hand, he misses the neighborhood he grew up in. But its growing popularity with middle-class outsiders has been good for business: His family purchased the building decades ago, so the area’s rising rents haven’t affected the shop, and new residents are flocking to the taqueria for the unique Uruapan-style carnitas his dad learned to make as a child. “To me it’s a giant gray area and it’s really hard to judge it one way or the other,” Carbajal says. “If you’ve been in that neighborhood long enough, you can’t deny that it’s much safer and much more eclectic than it once was.”

Conflicting views on gentrification’s impact have led to public showdowns over new developments and businesses in countless communities, many involving restaurants. In 2017, just as chef Stephen Gillanders was set to open the upscale contemporary-American restaurant S.K.Y. about a half-mile from Carnitas Uruapan, members of anti-gentrification groups ChiResist and Defend Boyle Heights marched up to the building and began livestreaming themselves condemning the business. In the video, S.K.Y.’s general manager confronted the group and asked, “Is there anything we can do to help?” to which several of the activists responded, “Get the fuck out!” The manager listed the ways the restaurant gives back to community programs, but the activists in the video dismissed them. A week later, graffiti appeared on S.K.Y.’s building and Dusek’s Board and Beer, the Michelin-starred fine dining spot across the street: “Get out,” “Gentrifiers,” and “YT People Outta Pilsen.”

Grassroots organizations of anti-gentrification activists have emerged across the country in response to the tidal wave of gentrification that has swept through America’s largest cities over the past two decades. There is the Brooklyn Anti-gentrification Network (BANgentrification) in New York City, Defend Our Hoodz in Austin, and Defend Boyle Heights in Los Angeles (which recently joined a national housing inequality organization called the United Neighborhood Defense Movement), to name a few.

Like ChiResist, many of these organizations zero in on food businesses and confront restaurant owners, and that’s no coincidence — when it comes to gentrification, new food spaces are often the canary in the coal mine, according to Joshua Sbicca, a sociology professor at Colorado State University, whose research has shown that restaurants often act as proxies for gentrification. As American neighborhoods evolve, the changes appear in their foodscapes: There is a stark contrast between a 40-year-old Pilsen restaurant like Carnitas Urapan and the new, upscale S.K.Y. or Thalia Hall down the street.

Sbicca says that there are generally two ways to look at gentrification: from an economic standpoint, as something that happens when businesses seek investment opportunities in underprivileged communities, and from a cultural standpoint, as something that happens when an underserved community’s vibrant culture attracts wealthier outsiders. Restaurants fall at the intersection of these frames, making them ideal indicators for the state of gentrification in a given area. “It’s different than many other kinds of businesses or processes of gentrification that take place,” Sbicca says. “I can’t think of a better way to have a look at the aspects of gentrification.”

These changes aren’t just happening in Chicago. As white-collar jobs and tech businesses attract more young American professionals to cities, these gentrification trends show up in data from around the country. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example, banquet halls that have existed in the community for decades are competing with new Michelin-starred halls. In the Bushwick area of New York City, the four or so dive bars that existed in the once predominantly working-class Latinx neighborhood a decade ago now sit alongside dozens of swanky new watering holes catering to the influx of young urban professionals. Portland’s Black population is being pushed to the city’s outskirts, farther and farther away from the city’s buzziest new restaurants.

To make matters worse, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many small businesses to close for good. Reports show that 60 percent of restaurants that have closed since the onset of the pandemic have shuttered permanently. There is consequently a growing fear that large chains and bigger businesses will capitalize on failing small businesses and buy up empty spaces in working-class neighborhoods if stakeholders don’t act soon. This could only speed up the changes happening across American cities.

In order to explore the relationship between restaurants and gentrification, Eater requested restaurant health inspection data from several U.S. cities, using the data to estimate how many restaurants are in each city and where they’re located.. Neighborhoods with anecdotal evidence of recent gentrification were pinpointed — Pilsen in Chicago; Crown Heights, Bushwick, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City; and Chinatown in San Francisco, for instance — and the information was analyzed against census data on the areas’ income and racial makeup and Zillow data on home and rental prices.

Certain patterns emerged that highlight the interdependent relationship between restaurants and the numerous phases of urban gentrification. A new high-rise or upscale restaurant opening in a neighborhood might appear to be the first major sign of gentrification, but by then, the process is often already wrapping up — it’s the cafe, the bar, and the initial boom in table-service dining venues that are the real beacons of change. “A focus on food shows how patchwork neighborhood change often results from these small and piecemeal entrepreneurship efforts, and that the creep of gentrification and displacement often moves through foodspaces,” Sbicca says.

Stage One One: Third Places

Gentrification happens in phases, according to Sbicca. It’s a long-held belief that the first wave is driven by artists and young creative professionals, who are drawn to communities with lower rents. So, naturally, places like coffee shops and bars, which frequently act as third places for these groups of people, are often the initial signs that wealthier outsiders have their eyes set on an affordable neighborhood. “There’s a reason why those are anchor food institutions as opposed to, say, your upscale omakase-style Japanese restaurant where someone is paying 100 bucks to have an omakase tasting,” Sbicca says. “That’s a later wave, where those kinds of restaurants are catering to wealthier professionals who have disposable income to actually afford to eat those kinds of cuisines.”

Third places like cafes are ideal for young creatives looking for affordable businesses they can patronize while also being able to practice their craft, Sbicca says. This is in line with results of a Harvard research study that found a strong correlation between the presence of cafes and an increase in college-educated residents; as neighborhoods become whiter and wealthier, the number of cafes tends to increase.

Take New York City’s Crown Heights, a historically Black and Caribbean community in Brooklyn. As the Michael Bloomberg mayorship (2002 to 2013) stoked massive residential development projects to accommodate the city’s growing population, more white-collar professionals found themselves in Brooklyn. Data for the years 2012 and 2013, Bloomberg’s last year in office, show clear signs that the area was deep in the process of gentrification: The average cost of a one-bedroom home increased 13 percent. Black residents, who made up 78 percent of the Crown Heights population in 2000, only accounted for 57 percent by 2013.

[1-CHART COMPARING COFFEE SHOPS TO GROWTH IN GENTRIFICATION/DEMOGRAPHICS]

Eater’s analysis shows a strong correlation between the number of cafes in Crown Heights and rising housing, rent, and income levels. Five cafes opened in Crown Heights in 2013, nearly doubling the number of cafes in the neighborhood. By 2014, a Starbucks arrived. Eater used correlation coefficients to measure how strongly housing prices and certain types of restaurants are related; a value between 0.50 and 1 is indicative of a strong correlation. Housing data from Zillow and restaurant data from city health inspections showed that in Crown Heights, the number of cafes and median housing prices have a correlation coefficient of 0.8. Similarly, the correlation coefficient for total number of cafes and average income for Crown Heights was 0.83.

The same is true for other neighborhoods in American cities that people anecdotally suspect are gentrifying. In Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, for instance, where a historically working-class Latinx community started becoming more and more affluent and white in the 2010s, the relationship between cafes and housing prices showed a correlation coefficient of 0.87.

New bars have a similar relationship with higher cost of living. There were only six bar venues in Bushwick in 2007, when the cost of a single-family home was $495,000; a decade later, there were 40 bars in the neighborhood, while home prices have risen to $850,000. Bushwick bars and housing costs have a coefficient of 0.69. Similarly, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area, there were eight bars in 2010. By 2013, there were 13. The correlation between bars and home prices in the neighborhood has a coefficient of 0.60.

Stage Two: Bigger and Better

As the gentrification process continues, the scope and scale of restaurants in the neighborhood begin to change. Restaurants appear to get larger and more expensive as the next wave of young professionals and small-business entrepreneurs move in, driven by new opportunities to meet the demands of residents with higher incomes and more expensive taste. Wait-service and large-capacity restaurants, for instance, grow during this phase. Typically, restaurants served by waitstaff are larger and more upscale, with higher price points.

This growth in more massive, more expensive food spaces worries residents in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Malcolm Yeung, the executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco, says Chinatown is one of the few communities in the city that hasn’t fully gentrified, because, unlike many Chinatowns around the country, it is still predominantly working class and Chinese. But as the rent rises and businesses shutter, he and other advocates are trying to prevent gentrification from swallowing it up too. “Our concern is that when you start to see a trend of restaurants that move away from accessibility to the community,” Yeung says. “it starts to give you the wrong signal about where Chinatown is heading and perhaps begins to attract restaurants, owners, and operators into Chinatown that don’t necessarily have that community spirit in mind.”

Yeung welcomes new businesses but says they should be businesses that the community can access. Affordable banquet halls have historically been an important cornerstone for the Chinese community in San Francisco, hosting large family gatherings, celebrations, and political events. There were once five such banquet halls in Chinatown. Of the three that have recently closed, two have been turned into Michelin-starred fine dining spaces (Mister Jiu’s and Eight Tables at China Live). Chef Ho Chee Boon, the former executive chef for the Hakkasan restaurant chain, is set to open another upscale spot in the third space.

“Those two restaurants are good and well. We’re glad they’re in the neighborhood, but we’re raising questions,” Yeung says of Mister Jiu’s and Eight Tables. “When you only have five large spaces to begin with, is it really the right thing for the community for the third one to also convert to a one-Michelin-star restaurant?”

The data suggest there might be reason for concern. More luxe restaurants in other cities show a strong correlation with demographic changes. In New York City, for example, there is a strong correlation between the number of restaurants offering wait service (as opposed to fast food or takeout) and rising housing prices, income, and rent in gentrifying neighborhoods. New York City inspection data document the type of restaurant inspected, including whether the restaurant offers wait service. In 2013, there were 34 Harlem restaurants with wait service; by 2015, that number grew by more than 20 percent as housing prices soared from $588,000 to $777,000 and median income grew 23 percent. The correlation coefficient between home prices and waitstaff restaurants in Harlem is 0.77. Correlation data shows a 0.90 coefficient for waitstaff restaurants and housing prices in Crown Heights. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, the value is 0.85.

Yeung says that is how gentrification seems to work: Investors and developers of higher status move in, build pricier businesses, and inevitably push the original community out since the existing residents have fewer resources to compete. He fears San Francisco’s Chinatown could end up like other Chinatowns around the country — according to the 2010 U.S. census, there are only 300 Chinese residents left in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown.

The growth in high-end dining options that cater more to outsiders than local residents isolates the existing community and propels gentrification, Yeung says. “From what we’ve seen, the people that patronize those high-end Chinese restaurants, it’s almost literally they Uber in or Lyft in, they have a cocktail or eat dinner or lunch, and then they just leave,” he says. “They don’t stay around to visit their family association building, or buy groceries, or to buy takeout, or dim sum, or to get a haircut or get hair and nails done, or to buy dry goods, or any one of the myriad collateral benefits that restaurants who draw community stakeholders would have on the rest of the community.”

Race and ethnicity are major de facto components of gentrification, as the communities that tend to get displaced are disproportionately communities of color, but the issue can extend beyond racial inequality. New restaurant owners entering gentrifying areas are sometimes people of color themselves, but this doesn’t mean that they can’t be gentrifiers, Sbicca says. The owners of San Francisco’s new Chinatown banquet halls are Asian entrepreneurs, for instance, but still draw business primarily from non-residents.

Stephen Gillanders, the chef-owner of S.K.Y. in Chicago, where protesters confronted management, told Eater in 2018 that he’d assumed his Filipino heritage would resonate with the people of Pilsen and made a point of mentioning that S.K.Y. hires diverse talent. Yet when Gillander’s general manager shared those points with the ChiResist protesters during their encounter, the activists scoffed. Likewise, when celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, of Ethiopian and Swedish descent, opened soul food restaurant Red Rooster in Harlem, New York, in 2010, some criticized it for contributing to gentrification by catering to outsiders. Samuelsson is set to open a second Red Rooster in Miami’s Overtown community; it has received similar backlash from residents.

Entrepreneurs of color moving into areas that are gentrifying still face criticism because gentrification is also an issue of class, Sbicca says. “It might not be a racial shift, per se, but say there’s a wealthier African-American community that’s able to stay in that neighborhood,” he says. “Is there this economic shift that’s pricing people out?”

The crux of gentrification, in other words, is any demographic shift caused by wealthier newcomers. This shift doesn’t have to be cultural. Sometimes new residents and investors embrace the local culture, art, music, and cuisine. This means that despite the displacement of working-class communities in a gentrifying area, the original cuisine can remain. In fact, in some cases, the dominant cultural cuisine of an area has thrived during times of gentrification.

[5-CHART—SHOWING INCREASES IN WAIT STAFF]

The Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights has been predominantly Caribbean and African American since the 1970s, and Caribbean cuisine has dominated its foodscape for decades. Even though gentrification started changing the income levels and racial demographics of the neighborhood more than a decade ago, Caribbean cuisine remains one of the most common cuisines in the area as recently as 2017, with at least 20 percent of all restaurants in the area serving Caribbean food, according to New York inspection data.

Similarly, Latinx cuisine remained prevalent in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, and the number of Latinx restaurants ultimately increased, despite skyrocketing housing prices and gentrification. In Chicago’s Pilsen, the number of Mexican and Latinx restaurants also appears to increase during its gentrification periods. These places are part of the draw for gentrifiers, Sbicca says. Many middle-class or affluent people moving into urban spaces are often seeking “authentic experiences” that are different than the “pasty white suburbs” they may have grown up in, so the first waves of gentrifiers may cherish the diversity, multi-ethnic cuisine, and “authentic urban experiences” their neighborhoods have to offer.

These newcomers often pick and choose which parts of the neighborhood’s culture they want to keep around while neglecting to support others, however. “‘I want my authentic experience and I want to get my kombucha,’” Sbicca says, describing their mindset. They might dine out at local Mexican restaurants, but avoid grocery shopping at the longstanding Mexican grocer, choosing more upscale stores instead.

A cuisine’s preservation is also frequently the result of community members’ efforts. Some neighborhood activists form agreements with new businesses in an effort to protect the area’s traditional culture. In San Francisco, residents in the Mission District, a predominantly Latinx hub, fought to designate the neighborhood’s 24th Street corridor a Latino Cultural District. Now certain restaurants must meet with community members to ensure their businesses reflect the vibrant Latinx culture the designation is supposed to preserve, which includes limiting the size of new buildings, adjusting the style of storefronts, and ensuring affordable price points. Despite a citywide decline in restaurants, data show the number of Latinx restaurants in the area did not change much in the last five years.

Preventing gentrification from erasing the culture and people that have historically called an area home too often falls to the community members themselves, and data can be a useful tool in their struggle.

[Map SHOWING PORTLAND BLACK POPULATION DISPERSING]

Nick Kobel and Tony Lamb are analysts with the Portland Department of Planning and Sustainability in Oregon. Part of their job is to monitor neighborhoods in the city and gather insight that might prevent displacement, then make those results available to the public. Their latest research shows that residents of color are being pushed farther and farther from Portland’s city core. Areas like Woodlawn and Alberta, which once had large Black populations, have significantly fewer Black residents now than they did in 2010; those residents are settling in neighborhoods more removed from the city center, where the new restaurants and businesses are.

With their research, Kobel and Lamb were able to publish a gentrification topology outlining all the areas in Portland that are vulnerable to gentrification and displacement. The challenge from there is figuring out what stakeholders can do with that information. “Sure, maybe other bureaus don’t have to look at our numbers, but they’re accountable to the community,” Kobel says. “And if the community is asking us, the community is also asking other bureaus to do a better job at planning without displacement.”

The city’s Bureau of Transportation used the data to see if its streetcar expansion efforts would intersect with gentrifying neighborhoods and possibly increasing gentrification. The Housing Bureau used it to compare public housing development efforts. Yet minority communities in Portland, one of the whitest cities in America, are still being pushed out.

As cities vie for wealthy residents — who city officials hope will invest their capital locally — there are usually economic incentives for working with developers to revitalize communities, according to Sbicca. “There is this economic competition for people that are going to bring in tax revenue, spend dollars, etc.,” Sbicca says. “So if a city is able to find a place in their city that has ‘potential,’ there’s an economic incentive, in some respect, for developers, mayors, city council people, etc., to try to revitalize that place.”

On paper, revitalization can sound promising. But the line between revitalization and gentrification is sometimes blurred, and cities trying to “revitalize” deteriorating areas sometimes make matters worse for current residents, who find themselves having to beg city officials not to displace them.

Stage Three: It’s Too Late

The third phase of the gentrification process is perhaps the most noticeable, but by then, intervention is difficult. After creatives have moved in and attracted bigger, more expensive development to the area, the neighborhood catches the eyes of even bigger developers — the ones behind chains and big-box stores. At this point, community efforts to save the neighborhood from gentrification is very difficult. Lamb points out that during this phase, small restaurants, including the ones that displaced the pre-gentrification restaurants, begin to shutter. “Now, new development is occurring and the costs to operate a business in new developments increasingly gets to be unattainable for a new small business,” Lamb says. “So you have to find much better-capitalized businesses that can do that.”

[CHART SHOWING DECLINE IN SF RESTAURANTS]

San Francisco saw mass demographic changes and skyrocketing costs of living starting in the late 1990s as the city transformed into a hub for tech companies. The median price of a home in San Francisco is $1.3 million today, compared to $650,000 in 2000, according to Zillow data. Apartments there are also charging some of the highest rent and housing prices on earth. As a result, the employees who staff businesses can’t afford to live in the city, while smaller enterprises have closed because they couldn’t make the rent. This is especially true for restaurants: Based on health inspection data, restaurants in the city have decreased by 44 percent in the last five years.

In New York City, the number of restaurants in the city is also declining in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where gentrification began earlier than neighborhoods deeper into Brooklyn and farther away from Manhattan, like Crown Heights and Bushwick.

With more than half of restaurants that closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic closing for good, many fear that large businesses will swoop into vulnerable neighborhoods to buy up vacant properties at discounted prices. Minority businesses were hit especially hard during the pandemic, and the communities they serve may be especially vulnerable to new development and thus displacement. Whereas cafes, bars, and waitstaff restaurants were early indicators of gentrification that gave community members a chance to fight displacement and preserve their community culture, indicators of post-pandemic gentrification may be the appearance of big-box stores and chains. But by then, it could be too late.

Vince Dixon is the data visualization reporter at Eater.

Methodology: Eater obtained and analyzed restaurant inspection data from the health departments of Chicago, New York City and San Francisco to estimate the total number of restaurants in each city from 2010 to 2019. The restaurants were compared to median housing prices and rent data compiled by Zillow, and median income data courtesy of the U.S. Census.

Data Sources:
Chicago Department of Public Health
New York Department of Mental Health and Hygiene
San Francisco Department of Public Health
Multnomah County Environmental Health
United States Census
Zillow Home Value Index
Zillow Observed Rent Index

TUNE IN NOW: How a Restaurant’s Location Can Decide Its Fate

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Eater editors discuss the power of place

Disney Is Laying Off 28,000 Domestic Theme Park Employees

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Plus, Yuengling is selling a Hershey’s beer, and more news to start your day

Disney lays off 28,000 workers from domestic theme parks due to pandemic

Disney is laying off 28,000 workers from its parks, experiences, and consumer products division, the company announced yesterday. Among the laid-off workers, many of whom have been on furlough since spring, about two-thirds are part-time employees, the Wall Street Journal reports.

While Disney has been able to reopen Disney World in Orlando under restrictions — including requiring face masks unless eating or drinking — plans to reopen Disneyland and California Adventure in Anaheim have been delayed and scrapped amid concerns about rising coronavirus cases. In announcing the layoffs, Disney appeared to partially cast blame on the California state government, saying that the cuts were “exacerbated in California by the State’s unwillingness to lift restrictions that would allow Disneyland to reopen.”

Theme parks represent more than a third of Disney’s revenue, CNBC reports. Per the outlet:

Disney has been hemorrhaging money since the outbreak began. In the second quarter, the company reported a loss of $1 billion in operating income due to the closures of its parks, hotels and cruise lines. In the third quarter, the company reported a steeper loss of $3.5 billion.

The 28,000 workers laid off by Disney will join the tally of 22 million jobs lost in March and April due to the pandemic, with only 9 million regained as of August. More than 205,000 people have died in the U.S. due to COVID-19.

And in other news…

• A lawsuit accuses DoorDash of steering away business from non-partner restaurants by listing them as closed or too far away for delivery. The delivery app refutes the claim, saying that the issue stems from difficulty in tracking restaurant closures during the pandemic. [Restaurant Business]
• Yuengling’s Hershey’s chocolate beer is now available across 22 states. [F&W]
• Relearning how to cook as a chef whose senses of taste and smell were affected by COVID-19. [WaPo]
• Religious groups distributing USDA food boxes may be crossing the line between church and state by asking recipients to pray with them or donate to the church. [The Counter]
• Seagram’s liquor heiress Clare Bronfman will be sentenced for her role in the Nxivm cult case. [NY Post]
• An imminent iOS emoji update includes bubble tea and tamales, among other food items. [Emojipedia]
• Joe Biden’s version of “performance enhancers” is Jeni’s ice cream. Not a big surprise for true politics x ice cream heads, who already know that Biden’s campaign spent more than $10,000 on Jeni’s for donor gifts. [@JoeBiden/Twitter]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

All the Eater Shows You Love, in All the Places You Love to Watch Them

September 30, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Stream five years of Eater shows on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Roku, and YouTube

Reached the end of your Netflix queue? You can watch over 60 hours of Eater programming featuring all the food shows you love, playing in all the places you want to watch them: Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Roku, and YouTube.

With hundreds of episodes and new series offering exclusive access to kitchens around the world, rich cultures, immersive experiences, and authoritative experts, Eater’s got you covered.

Here’s how to watch on your TV now:

1. Visit your preferred streaming device’s app store
2. Type “Eater” in the search bar
3. Click install to download on your TV for free

Where to watch Eater

Chef Behind Parisian New-Wave Hit Dersou Dies

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Taku Sekine struggled with depression following the emergence of #MeToo allegations last month, according to a public statement made by his partner

Parisian chef Taku Sekine — best known for the Japanese-inflected neo-bistro Dersou and the minimalist, Chinese-French restaurant Cheval d’Or — has ended his life, according to a public statement released September 29 by his partner, Sarah Berger, on Instagram stories. Sekine’s death comes shortly after accusations of sexual assault surfaced on social media. He was 39.

Berger posted the following to Instagram stories following his death:

The conditions of Taku SEKINE’s death are neither ordinary nor accidental. Taku SEKINE ended his life, swept away by a serious depression following his public questioning - on social networks and on a specialized site - with a recurrence akin to real relentlessness.

Certain actors, in particular of the press, knowingly, in a few weeks and in the total absence of complaints, ruined the reputation of Taku SEKINE. These malicious people, flouting any ethics and any rule of respect for the presumption of innocence, spread false gossip on social networks and organized a brutal campaign to destroy Taku SEKINE’s network, calling on every actor in the field of gastronomy to spread slander and warning them to work with him. Of course, they never dared to contact him directly.

Deprived of his right to exercise his talent, Taku SEKINE, who lived for the kitchen, within two months locked himself in a violent spiral of depression.

A favorite of Le Fooding and Omnivore Food Festival, Sekine was embraced by many in the Parisian food world and considered a rising young star; earlier this year, Eater described him as a “power player” who was among the young chefs remaking the city’s Asian food scene. Trained in Japan, he worked under some of France’s biggest culinary talents, including Alain Ducasse and Hélène Darroze, as well as at the instantly iconic modern French restaurant Clown Bar. In 2014 he opened his first restaurant, Dersou; it was followed in 2019 by Cheval d’Or. Dersou, a “restobar,” is considered the first restaurant in Paris to offer a menu with a cocktail pairing, and won Le Fooding’s Best Restaurant of 2016, a coveted award in the capital. In November 2019, Sekine was awarded Le Fooding’s Fooding d’honneur Guide 2020, an honorary award, with his new business partner.

During the summer, there were whispers among Parisian food circles and on social media of assault allegations involving Sekine. On August 6, an alleged female victim shared a public Instagram post with details of an assault by an unnamed chef. On August 12, the editor-in-chief of Fou de Cuisine, a popular print magazine and platform, did not name the chef explicitly, but announced she would never again mention them by name in Fou de Cuisine’s publications, partake in events where the chef was involved, or eat at his restaurants. Following this announcement, influential women in the food industry and Instagram accounts dedicated to championing women in food issued statements of support for the alleged victim(s). On August 16, Atabula, a French website dedicated to food news, published the data and analysis of their survey on sexual harassment and sexism in the kitchen.

Three weeks later, on September 6, Atabula+, a subscription-only arm of Atabula, published a roundup of food news that named Sekine as the chef “at the heart” of the assault allegations:

Everyone has been beating around the bush for weeks, even months, there are those who do not want to say anything so as not to upset the work of justice or the journalistic investigations in progress; there is also the fear of defamation… So, the man at the heart of the scandal is certainly not the only one accused of sexual assault, but it now seems appropriate to say his name aloud: Taku Sekine. Knowing for several weeks of the ongoing and upcoming complaints, the head of Dersou and Cheval d’Or (Paris), according to corroborating information, organized his departure and left France for Japan. He is reportedly accused by several women of sexual assault and rape.

On September 9, three days after the Atabula accusations were published, Sekine told Vanity Fair France that he planned to refute the allegations. Florent Ciccoli, the co-owner of Cheval d’Or, among numerous other Paris restaurants, has yet to comment publicly.

If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. For international resources, here is a good place to begin.

Eileen W. Cho is a Korean American journalist and photographer based in Paris, France.

A Last Supper at Mission Chinese in Manhattan

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Senior critic Robert Sietsema traces the New York history of the opulent and humor-inflected restaurant, which ramped up public expectations for dining

What the New Iteration of the HEROES Act Would Mean for Restaurants

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

The revised bill, proposed by House democrats, would allocate $120 billion in grants for restaurants, bars, and food trucks

After four months, Congress has again decided to negotiate a new federal economic relief package. On September 28, House Democrats introduced their proposal, a new version of the HEROES Act. The $2.2 trillion proposal would provide another round of stimulus checks and increased unemployment benefits. In a new move, it would also incorporate $120 billion in grants for restaurants, bars, and food trucks.

The grant program was first proposed in June by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) as the — deep breath — Real Economic Support That Acknowledges Unique Restaurant Assistance Needed to Survive Act, aka the RESTAURANTS Act. The program would exclude chain restaurants (even if they are franchises), and would cover payroll, rent, supplies, and PPE costs. Restaurants can also request additional funds specifically to provide employees with 10 paid sick days. And unlike the Paycheck Protection Program loans, restaurants would not have to pay this money back.

“By including the RESTAURANTS Act, the revised version of the HEROES Act is the best plan Congress has put forward to protect the livelihoods of the 11 million people employed by independent restaurants across the country,” the Independent Restaurant Coalition said in a statement. “Independent restaurants are out of options, and by providing flexible grants based on revenue losses to independent restaurants who need them, Congress can ensure many businesses have a shot at surviving colder weather and getting through the pandemic.”

The bill would “prioritize awarding grants to marginalized and underrepresented communities, with a focus on women- and minority-owned, and women- and minority-operated eligible entities.” Restaurants with an annual revenue of over $1.5 million would not be eligible. Grant amounts would be determined by the difference between a restaurant’s 2019 revenues and estimated 2020 revenues for each quarter. “With winter coming, independent restaurants that are holding on by a thread will face even greater challenges to survive. Congress must seize this opportunity to provide restaurants the relief they need,” said Rep. Blumenauer in a statement.

The HEROES Act would still include PPP loans, which many restaurant owners previously found difficult to apply for, confusing to use, and not suited to the realities of how the restaurant business works. Previously, chain restaurants like Ruth’s Chris Steak House were also criticized for receiving loans while independent restaurants didn’t, and Black-owned businesses were disproportionately denied funds.

Outside of restaurants, the HEROES Act would also increase the maximum SNAP benefit by 15 percent. “This $2.2 trillion Heroes Act provides the absolutely needed resources to protect lives, livelihoods and the life of our democracy over the coming months,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. Of course, now the legislation must be voted on by the Democratic-majority House, and the Republican-majority Senate, which previously has tried to slash relief plans. It’s unlikely the HEROES Act will get passed as is, but you know, a floundering industry can dream.

Scores of Napa Wineries, Restaurants, and Resorts Have Been Damaged by the Glass Incident Fire

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Calistoga Ranch, Fairwinds Winery, and many others have been leveled by the flames

Fast-Food Buffets Are a Thing of the Past. Some Doubt They Ever Even Existed.

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

A McDonald’s breakfast buffet. An all-you-can-eat Taco Bell. This isn’t the stuff dreams are made of, but a real yet short-lived phenomenon.

When we think of buffets, we tend to think of their 1980s and early ’90s heyday, when commercial jingles for Sizzler might have been confused with our national anthem. We think of Homer Simpson getting dragged out of the Frying Dutchman, “a beast more stomach than man.” I think of my parents going on buffet benders resembling something out of Hunter S. Thompson’s life, determined to get their money’s worth with two picky kids.

What we don’t typically think about, however, is the fast-food buffet, a blip so small on America’s food radar that it’s hard to prove it even existed. But it did. People swear that all-you-can-eat buffets could be found at Taco Bell, KFC, and even under the golden arches of McDonald’s.

That it could have existed isn’t surprising. The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake. It was the physical manifestation of the American id: endless biscuits, popcorn chicken, vats of nacho cheese and sketchy pudding — so much sketchy pudding. Why, then, have so many of us failed to remember it? How did it become a footnote, relegated to the backwoods of myths and legends? There are whispers of McDonald’s locations that have breakfast buffets. Was there, in fact, a Taco Bell buffet, or is it a figment of our collective imaginations? Yes, someone tells me — an all-you-can-eat Taco Bell existed in her dorm cafeteria. Another person suggests maybe we were just remembering the nachos section of the Wendy’s Superbar.

The fast-food buffet lives in a strange sort of ether. You can’t get to it through the traditional path of remembering. Was there actually a Pizza Hut buffet in your hometown? Search your subconscious, sifting past the red cups that make the soda taste better, past the spiffy new CD jukebox, which has Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind and Paul McCartney’s All the Best under the neon lamps. Search deeper, and you might find your father going up for a third plate and something remaining of the “dessert pizzas” lodged in your subconscious. This is where the fast-food buffet exists.

The history of the buffet in America is a story of ingenuity and evolution. Sure, it originated in Europe, where it was a classy affair with artfully arranged salted fish, eggs, breads, and butter. The Swedish dazzled us with their smorgasbords at the 1939 World Fair. We can then trace the evolution of the buffet through Las Vegas, where the one-dollar Buckaroo Buffet kept gamblers in the casino. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese immigrant families found loopholes in racist immigration laws by establishing restaurants. They brought Chinese cooking catered to American tastes in endless plates of beef chow fun and egg rolls. By the 1980s, buffets ruled the landscape like family dynasties, with sister chains the Ponderosa and the Bonanza spreading the gospel of sneeze guards and steaks, sundae stations and salad bars along the interstates. From Shoney’s to Sizzler, from sea to shining sea, the buffet was a feast fit for kings, or a family of four.

And of course, fast-food restaurants wanted in on the action. As fast-food historian and author of Drive-Thru Dreams Adam Chandler put it, “every fast food place flirted with buffets at some point or another. McDonald’s absolutely did, as did most of the pizza chains with dine-in service. KFC still has a few stray buffets, as well as an illicit one called Claudia Sanders Dinner House, which was opened by Colonel Sanders’ wife after he was forbidden from opening a competing fried chicken business after selling the company. Wendy’s Super Bar was short-lived, but the salad bar lived on for decades.”

In a 1988 commercial for the Superbar, Dave Thomas says, “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I like it when families eat together.” A Wendy’s executive described the new business model as “taking us out of the fast-food business.” Everyone agrees the Wendy’s Supernar was glorious. And gross, everyone also agrees. How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce.

“I kind of want to live in a ’90s Wendy’s,” Amy Barnes, a Tennessee-based writer, tells me in between preparing for virtual learning with her teenagers. The Superbar sat in the lobby, with stations lined up like train carts. First, there was the Garden Spot, which “no one cared about,” a traditional salad bar with a tub of chocolate pudding at its helm, “which always had streams of salad dressing and shredded cheese floating on top.” Next up was the Pasta Pasta section, with “noodles, alfredo and tomato sauce…[as well as] garlic bread made from the repurposed hamburger buns with butter and garlic smeared on them.” Obviously, the crown jewel of the Superbar was the Mexican Fiesta, with its “vats of ground beef, nacho cheese, sour cream.” The Fiesta shared custody of additional toppings with the salad bar. It was $2.99 for the dining experience.

The marriage of Wendy’s and the Superbar lasted about a decade before it was phased out in all locations by 1998. Like a jilted ex-lover, the official Wendy’s Story on the website makes zero mention of Superbar, despite the countless blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts devoted to remembering it. At least they kept the salad bar together until the mid-2000s for the sake of the children.

Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet. Googling the existence of such a thing only returns results of people questioning the existence of this McMuffin Mecca on subforums and Reddit. Somebody knows somebody who passed one once on the highway. A stray Yelp review of the Kiss My Grits food truck in Seattle offers a lead: “I have to say, I recall the first time I ever saw grits, they were at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet in Alexandria, Virginia, and they looked as unappetizing as could be.” However, the lead is dead on arrival. Further googling of the McDonald’s buffet with terrible grits in Alexandria turns up nothing.

I ask friends on Facebook. I ask Twitter. I get a lone response. Eden Robins messages me “It was in Decatur, IL,” as though she’s describing the site where aliens abducted her. “I’m a little relieved that I didn’t imagine the breakfast buffet since no one ever knows what the fuck I’m talking about when I bring it up.”

“We had traveled down there for a high school drama competition,” she goes on to say. “And one morning before the competition, we ate at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet. I had never seen anything like it before or since.”

I ask what was in the buffet, although I know the details alone will not sustain me. I want video to pore over so I can pause at specific frames, like a fast-food version of the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot footage. Robins says they served “scrambled eggs and pancakes and those hash brown tiles. I was a vegetarian at the time so no sausage or bacon, but those were there, too.”

McDonald’s isn’t the only chain with a buffet whose existence is hazy. Yum Brands, the overlord of fast-food holy trinity Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, is said to have had buffets at all three restaurants. I confirm nothing, however, when I reach out to the corporate authorities. On the KFC side, a spokesperson offers to look into “some historical information,” but doesn’t get back to me. My contact at Taco Bell tells me, “I’ll look into it. Certainly, nothing in existence today. I’ve never heard of it. Looks like there are a couple threads on Reddit.”

Reddit, of course, speculates a possible Mandela Effect — the phenomenon of a group of unrelated people remembering a different event than what actually occurred — in the existence of Taco Bell buffets. But I have a firmer lead in Payel Patel, a doctor who studied at Johns Hopkins, who tells me there was a Taco Bell Express in her dorm that was included in an all-you-can-eat meal plan option, though it only lasted one fleeting year. “You could order anything, like 15 nachos and 11 bean burritos,” she says, “and they would make it and give it to you, and you walked off without paying a cent.” A Johns Hopkins student newsletter published in 2001 corroborates the existence of the utopian all-you-can-eat Taco Bell, saying, “you can also gorge yourself on some good old Taco Bell tacos and burritos. Don’t forget, it’s all-you-can-eat. Just don’t eat too much; you don’t want to overload the John.”

There are some concrete examples of fast-food buffets that still exist today. When a Krystal Buffet opened in Alabama in 2019, it was met with “excitement and disbelief,” according to the press release. Former New Orleans resident Wilson Koewing told me of a Popeye’s buffet that locals “speak of as if it is a myth.” When I dig deeper, I come across a local paper, NOLA Weekend, which covers “New Orleans Food, things to do, culture, and lifestyle.” It touts the Popeye’s buffet like a carnival barker, as though it is simply too incredible to believe: “The Only Popeye’s Buffet in the World! It’s right next door in Lafayette! Yes, that’s right: a Popeyes buffet. HERE.”

Somehow, the KFC buffet is the most enduring of the fast-food buffets still in existence. And yet everyone I speak with feels compelled to walk me through the paths and roads leading to such an oasis, as if, again, it were the stuff of legends. There are landmarks and there are mirages, and the mirages need maps most of all.

To get to the KFC buffet in Key Largo, Tiffany Aleman must first take us through “a small island town with one traffic light and one major highway that runs through it. There are the seafood buffets and bait shops, which give way to newfangled Starbucks.”

New Jerseyan D.F. Jester leads us past the local seafood place “that looks like the midnight buffet on a cruise ship has been transported 50 miles inland and plunked inside the dining area of a 1980s Ramada outside of Newark.”

Descriptions of the food are about what I would expect of a KFC buffet. Laura Camerer remembers the food in her college town in Morehead, Kentucky, as “all fried solid as rocks sitting under heat lamps, kind of gray and gristly.” Jester adds, “for all intents and purposes, this is a KFC. It looks like one, but sadder, more clinical. The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die.”

Then Jessie Lovett Allen messages me. “There is [a] KFC in my hometown, and it is magical without a hint of sketch.” I must know more. First, she takes me down the winding path: “the closest larger city is Kearney, which is 100 miles away and only has 35K people, and Kearney is where you’ll find the closest Target, Panera, or Taco Bell. But to the North, South, or West, you have to drive hundreds of miles before you find a larger city. I tell you all of this because the extreme isolation is what gives our restaurants, even fast-food ones, an outsized psychological importance to daily life.”

The KFC Jessie mentions is in North Platte, Nebraska, and has nearly five stars on Yelp, an accomplishment worthy of a monument for any fast-food restaurant. On the non-corporate Facebook page for KFC North Platte, one of the hundreds of followers of the page comments, “BEST KFC IN THE COUNTRY.”

Allen describes the place as though she is recounting a corner of heaven. “They have fried apple pies that seem to come through a wormhole from a 1987 McDonalds. Pudding: Hot. Good. Layered cold pudding desserts. This one rotates. It might be chocolate, banana, cookies and cream. It has a graham cracker base, pudding, and whipped topping. Standard Cold Salad bar: Lettuce, salad veggies, macaroni salads, JELL-O salads. Other meats: chicken fried steak patties. Fried chicken gizzards. White Gravy, Chicken Noodle Casserole, Green Bean Casserole, Cornbread, Corn on the Cob, Chicken Pot Pie Casserole. AND most all the standard stuff on the normal KFC menu, which is nice because you can pick out a variety of chicken types or just have a few tablespoons of a side dish.”

Then she adds that the buffet “is also available TO GO, but there are rules. You get a large Styrofoam clamshell, a small Styrofoam clamshell, and a cup. You have to be able to close the Styrofoam. You are instructed that only beverages can go in cups, and when I asked about this, an employee tells me that customers have tried to shove chicken into the drink cups in the past.”

In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed. The chains folded. The senior citizens keeping Ponderosa in business have died. My own parents reversed course after their buffet bender, trading in sundae stations for cans of SlimFast. Fast-food buffets retreated into an ethereal space. McDonald’s grew up with adult sandwiches like the Arch Deluxe. Wendy’s went on a wild rebound with the Baconator. Pizza Hut ripped out its jukeboxes, changed its logo, went off to the fast-food wars, and ain’t been the same since. Taco Bell is undergoing some kind of midlife crisis, hemorrhaging its entire menu of potatoes, among other beloved items. At least the KFC in North Platte has done good, though the novel coronavirus could change things.

In the age of COVID-19, the fast-food buffet feels like more of a dream than ever. How positively whimsical it would be to stand shoulder to shoulder, hovering over sneeze guards, sharing soup ladles to scoop an odd assortment of pudding, three grapes, a heap of rotini pasta, and a drumstick onto a plate. Maybe we can reach this place again. But to find it, we must follow the landmarks, searching our memory as the map.

MM Carrigan is a Baltimore-area writer and weirdo who enjoys staring directly into the sun. Their work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and PopMatters. They are the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly. Tweets @thesurfingpizza.

Everyone’s Obsessed With the Hilarious, Horrifying Cake Busts From ‘The Great British Bake Off’

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

More like Zoggy Sturdost

Now that everyone has had some time to digest the premiere of the latest Great British Bake Off season — which hit Netflix on Friday, three days after the U.K. air date — it’s time to fully unpack the first episode’s cake bust showstopper challenge. Asked to create edible, three-dimensional effigies of their personal celebrity heroes, the 12 contestants came up with likenesses that can best be described as “haunting.” The list of hallowed heroes include David Bowie, Bob Marley, Charles Darwin, Lupita Nyong’o, Marie Antoinette, Freddie Mercury, David Attenborough, Chris Hoy, Louise Bennett-Coverley, Bill Bryson, Louis Theroux, and Tom DeLonge.

The cake busts quickly captured the hearts and minds of viewers, who for some reason kept coming back to the theme of “expectation versus reality” in a year in which literally everything has gone off the rails. Ah well, no use psychoanalyzing that particular fixation.

The more grotesque the creation, the more it delighted viewers (remember, we are a society that celebrates the colossal baking failures of Nailed It!). Case in point: Ziggy Stardust’s fleshy, craggy cake dome.

The shrunken head-like cake tribute to pop-punk icon/alien enthusiast DeLonge (of Blink-182 fame) also elicited strong reactions, namely terror.

In fact, there were a lot of invocations of therapy, which is great, I’m glad people are finally more comfortable speaking out publicly about mental health.

Credit where credit is due: making these cake busts, under extreme time pressure, in competition against 11 other contestants, cannot be an easy task. Any effort should be met with polite applause, or at the very least, gratitude that these bakers have given us the gift of schadenfreude during objectively Dark Times. Laughter truly is the best medicine, barring a vaccine deemed safe and effective by clinical trials.

And remember, these cakes cannot hurt you, despite their best efforts!

For a full recap of Episode 1, head over to Eater London.

Napa’s Three-Michelin-Starred Restaurant at Meadowood Has Burned to the Ground

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

“Whatever it takes to rebuild and reopen, we’ll do”

The New ‘Top Chef’ Season Begins Filming With Past Winners and Contestants Returning as Judges

September 29, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Plus, Michelin will not release the 2020 guide to Singapore, and more news to start your day

Top Chef is in production again, and will feature a returning slew of familiar faces

With The Great British Bakeoff leading the way for culinary competition shows to resume filming amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Bravo has announced, via its Daily Dish site, that Top Chef has begun filming its 18th season in Portland, Oregon.

According to the network, production is following strict health protocols and has a “safety plan developed in accordance with CDC guidance, all state and local orders, as well as NBCUniversal’s own safety guidelines.”

In a new move for the show, the judging and dining tables will be filled by a rotating group of previous Top Chef winners and contestants, including Kwame Onwuachi, Nina Compton, Dale Talde, and Richard Blais. The Portland season will air in 2021.

And in other news...

• Major companies like PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Walmart pledged to halve food waste by 2030. Let’s hope we make it that far! [Food Dive]
• Schaefer Beer, the one-time signature brew of Ebbets Field, is back in New York. The team it sponsored — the Dodgers — is not. [NYT]
• A new version of the HEROES act, introduced by House democrats, could provide $120 billion in COVID-19 relief to restaurants. [Nation’s Restaurant News]
• But what can restaurants do for YOU? Answer: Offer more reward programs. [CNN]
• Because of extended closures, Michelin will release this year’s guide to Singapore. [Bloomberg]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Chicago Softens COVID-19 Indoor Restrictions for Restaurants and Bars

September 28, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Customers will have to wear mask unless they’re eating or drinking

One of D.C.’s Top Nightclubs Will Reopen on a Giant Rooftop Without DJs or Dancing

September 28, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Heist arranged a pop-up lounge atop the Kennedy Center with table service that includes single-serve mixers

Wine Country Fires Destroy Historic Vineyard, Black Rock Inn

September 28, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Miami Imposes Its Own Set of Rules as Rest of Florida Opens at Full Capacity

September 28, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Bars and nightclubs can now be open statewide

How Community Gardens Became Outlets of Innovation for Former Restaurant Workers

September 28, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Hold Onto Summer With This Crab and Corn Fritters Recipe

September 28, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Chef Joe Krywucki’s quick and easy recipe is a sweet and savory snack

The world doesn’t know a diet without corn. Corn is grown in all 50 states — primarily across the Corn Belt of the US— a region of the Midwest with ideal maize-growing conditions that includes Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and South Dakota, and more than 90 million acres of land are dedicated to planting and harvesting the grain.

It’s also produced on every continent except for Antartica, though the United States is in fact the world’s largest producer and even exports between 10 and 20 percent of its annual production. (Not to mention you can find corn in high fructose corn syrup [which you can find in a lot of things], potato chips, salad dressings, baked goods, alcohol, breakfast cereals, and fuel ethanol.)

Its history has been traced back in the last decade or so to teosinte, a Mexican grass that’s believed to be the parent plant of modern-day corn. Then, over a considerable amount of time, the crop was domesticated by Native Americans and turned into the high-yielding, easy-to-harvest food we know. In particular it has become a cornerstone of Southern cuisine, with dishes like cornbread, hush puppies, catfish or okra that’s battered and fried in cornmeal, corn pudding, and corn fritters.

Traditionally, Southern corn fritters are a sweet and savory snack made with corn kernels, flour, egg, and milk or cream. They can either be deep-fried, shallow-fried, or baked. They can also be stuffed with lump crab meat like chef Joe Krywucki of Bushel and a Peck in Clarksville, Maryland prefers to do. For Krywucki, the crab and corn fritter recipe (which you can find in full below) is the best representation of the restaurant’s Chesapeake Bay inspiration.

Jumbo Lump Crab and Corn Fritters

Ingredients:

For the fritters:
1 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon chives
2 eggs, beaten
6 ounces heavy cream
2 cups fresh corn cut off the cob
1 cup Maryland jumbo lump crabmeat
Vegetable oil
Salt

For the chipotle lime aioli:
1 cup mayonnaise
2 ounces chipotle peppers in adobo, pureed
2 teaspoons fresh lime juice

Step 1: Combine flour with baking powder in a medium mixing bowl then add sugar and a pinch of salt.

Step 2: Combine beaten eggs with heavy cream and add to dry ingredients and mix into a light batter.

Step 3: With a spatula fold in corn, chives, and crab meat. Mix gently while avoiding breaking up the crab meat too much.

Step 4: While the batter rests, make the chipotle lim aioli by mixing all ingredients in a bowl; set aside.

Step 5: Using a sauté pan over medium heat, add enough vegetable oil to coat the pan. Using a ladle or a small portion scoop, add fritter batter and gently press down with a spoon to form a pancake. Cook approximately 2 to 3 minutes on each side until golden brown. Once cooked on both sides, remove from heat and serve with chipotle lime aioli. Enjoy!