The newest celebrity edition of the show will star James McAvoy, Kelly Holmes, Daisy Ridley, and Dizzee Rascal
https://london.eater.com/22255874/great-celebrity-bake-off-new-series-james-mcavoy
The special sweetened powder will also turn your mac and cheese hot pink
You ever bite into a creamy, comforting forkful of mac and cheese and think that what it really needs is some sugar? No! You have not! But maybe Kraft is suffering from quarantine brain because that’s exactly what it’s offering this Valentine’s Day. “Candy Kraft Mac & Cheese is made with the same cheesy Kraft Mac & Cheese Americans know and love, but includes a candy flavor packet to turn the mac & cheese pink and add hints of sweet candy flavor,” the company says. We assume eating the pink, sweet pasta together is intended to force couples into trauma bonding.
Kraft of course understands that this is a troll move, and perhaps we’ve fallen into its marketing plan a bit by being so aghast. And actually, the first part isn’t so bad. If it were just pink mac & cheese, fine. It’s not like that orange color is “natural” anyway, so might as well get weird with it. But it’s holding the “sweet candy flavor” in the mind’s eye, thinking of eating tangy, artificial cheddar with a hint of conversation heart, that’s really hurtling us into a damaged weekend.
To get a box, one must enter a contest on the Kraft website and the company will be sending 1,000 boxes of the stuff, which from the promo photos evokes raw beef or perhaps Russian beet salad, to 1,000 lucky (???) winners. Kraft, in an explanation for its crimes, says “love makes people do strange things.” Which, no. Love makes people listen to their partners podcasts. Love makes people buy almond milk instead of regular because that’s what their spouse prefers. Love does not make people pour pixy stix onto dinner. Like, was this a way for Kool-aid, which is also owned by the Kraft Heinz company, to offload some flavor powder after a summer low on cookouts? Does anyone out there want this?
What else is there to day? This sucks, man. This fucking sucks.
The special sweetened powder will also turn your mac and cheese hot pink
You ever bite into a creamy, comforting forkful of mac and cheese and think that what it really needs is some sugar? No! You have not! But maybe Kraft is suffering from quarantine brain because that’s exactly what it’s offering this Valentine’s Day. “Candy Kraft Mac & Cheese is made with the same cheesy Kraft Mac & Cheese Americans know and love, but includes a candy flavor packet to turn the mac & cheese pink and add hints of sweet candy flavor,” the company says. We assume eating the pink, sweet pasta together is intended to force couples into trauma bonding.
Kraft of course understands that this is a troll move, and perhaps we’ve fallen into its marketing plan a bit by being so aghast. And actually, the first part isn’t so bad. If it were just pink mac & cheese, fine. It’s not like that orange color is “natural” anyway, so might as well get weird with it. But it’s holding the “sweet candy flavor” in the mind’s eye, thinking of eating tangy, artificial cheddar with a hint of conversation heart, that’s really hurtling us into a damaged weekend.
To get a box, one must enter a contest on the Kraft website and the company will be sending 1,000 boxes of the stuff, which from the promo photos evokes raw beef or perhaps Russian beet salad, to 1,000 lucky (???) winners. Kraft, in an explanation for its crimes, says “love makes people do strange things.” Which, no. Love makes people listen to their partners podcasts. Love makes people buy almond milk instead of regular because that’s what their spouse prefers. Love does not make people pour pixy stix onto dinner. Like, was this a way for Kool-aid, which is also owned by the Kraft Heinz company, to offload some flavor powder after a summer low on cookouts? Does anyone out there want this?
What else is there to day? This sucks, man. This fucking sucks.
The vacuum insulated travel mug keeps drinks hot for hours
Maintaining some semblance of a social life these days isn’t easy. Going to a friend’s house is out of the question, and even outdoor dining, which promises some level of comfort with its heaters and elaborate shelters, feels increasingly risky as coronavirus rates remain high and a new, more contagious variant shows up around the country. This basically leaves socially distanced walks as the most attractive way to catch up with people IRL, but even this conciliatory option presents problems. The biggest one: It’s cold.
In New York at least, temperatures this time of year are consistently below freezing. Strolling in a full-on snowsuit is one way to stave off chill, but recently, I found another winter accessory that makes hanging outside (mostly) tolerable. On a December evening, post sundown, I agreed to meet some friends for a walk around the block; they promised to bring along some homemade hot toddies and presented the drink a Zojirushi stainless steel vacuum insulated mug. Smart! I thought, as I took a sip and was immediately warmed from the inside. An hour or so later, I returned home, not yet miserably cold, and with half of the hot toddy left. As I poured it into a mug more appropriate for the indoors, it was still steaming. Then, I thought, I need to get one of these.
The Zojirushi mugs come in a range of colors and patterns, from basic black to “hedgehog mint” (I’m partial to the light blue and pearl pink). The lid opens at the push of a button, so there’s no cap to fumble with, and I experienced none of the spillage around the opening that’s happened with other travel mugs I’ve tried. They’re available in a 12-oz and 20-oz size, but the 16-oz seems ideal for holding in one mittened hand while making the neighborhood rounds. Most importantly, they keep drinks hot (or cold if that’s how they started out) for hours. The friend whose mug I borrowed has given them as unsolicited wedding gifts — that’s how much she believes in them.
But now, as we face many more weeks of convincing ourselves it’s perfectly pleasant to embark on leisurely walks in 30 degree weather, they seem less a nice gift and more a personal must-have. Sure, you could pick up a cup of coffee or mulled wine from a local business serving those things to-go, but the paper cup and lid will only promise the benefits of a warm drink for minutes. Plus, with a Zojirushi thermos you can still support those businesses — simply pour your restaurant-prepared beverage into your thermos and go on your merry way, with the knowledge that you’ll have a warm beverage for the entire length of your time outside.
The Japanese brand has been called out here before: The “utterly perfect” Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker has held up to more than a decade of weekly use. I’m confident that the vacuum insulated mugs will similarly stand the test of time, and even after the indoors are safe for socializing again, they’ll come in handy (I’m told camping is a voluntary recreational activity for some). And in that too-far-off future, the hot toddies sipped from a Zojirushi among friends will likely be even more enjoyable for having been a choice, and not the only option for seeing friends at all.
The Venezuelan restaurant created the sauce by accident, but it’s come to be one of its most enduring hits
There are condiments that work best when they’re added to other foods, and then there are condiments so good that they’re a star attraction in their own right. Such is the case with Caracas Arepa Bar’s spicy, sweet, and tangy house sauce — or, as Caracas co-owner Maribel Araujo calls it, “salsa Caracas.”
I first encountered the gleaming, yellowish-green sauce in 2008. I was 19 years old, and had just moved to New York from my parents’ home in Gurgaon, India, to attend college. On one of my first solo outings to Manhattan, I made my way straight to Caracas. Although I didn’t know much about the city or its food scene, an aunt had told me that I had to check out the restaurant, which served what she described as the perfect street food.
And so I found myself standing outside of Caracas’s tiny storefront on East 7th Street. When I parted the curtains that hung just past its front door, they revealed a dark, narrow room with square tables lined up along a long wooden banquette.
I sat down and watched servers walk by with plates of what looked like tiny white sandwiches bursting with different fillings — I would later learn they were arepas, which I had imagined would be more like savory pancakes. It was my first time eating in a New York City restaurant, and my first encounter with Venezuelan food. I was curious and excited, and when I noticed a plastic squeeze bottle on the table, I squeezed a few dabs of sauce onto my finger. Trying sauces at restaurants long before the food arrives is a habit I’ve never been able to rid myself of, and this one reminded me why. It was spicy, but not in a fiery way, just enough to tickle my throat. It also had citrusy, herby flavor and a creamy sweetness, almost as if it was made with coconut milk.
I found myself going in for one dab after the next. Eventually I began to feel a little guilty that I might not have any left to eat with an arepa, and wondered if anyone had watched me greedily drain the bottle.
In a recent phone conversation, Araujo told me I wasn’t the only one consuming copious amounts of her salsa before the food had even arrived at the table. She said that servers frequently encounter customers asking for multiple squeeze bottle refills. On one occasion, she recalled, a server had to chase after a diner who was trying to make off with one of the bottles.
The sauce’s popularity is even more surprising to Araujo because it came about entirely by accident. Soon after Araujo opened the restaurant in 2003, Valerie Iribarren, the head chef at the time, was trying to find aji dulce peppers to use in various dishes but was having a hard time procuring them. Someone suggested a different chile pepper, but it wasn’t quite right. Iribarren didn’t want it to go to waste, so she decided to use the pepper to create a version of the traditional green guasacaca sauce that’s typically served alongside arepas in Venezuelan restaurants. Its ingredients include avocado, fresh herbs like cilantro or parsley, and chile peppers — though Araujo keeps her own recipe and its ingredients a closely guarded secret. Although the experimental sauce didn’t go down particularly well with Venezuelan customers, some of whom told Araujo it was a tad too sweet, it was an instant hit among most other diners like myself.
After Caracas opened, Araujo and co-owner Aristides Barrios began handing out the sauce in little to-go containers for diners to take home; by the end of their first year in business, they were selling bottles of it.
In the years following my first memorable outing, I returned to Caracas over and over again. I introduced friends to the restaurant, brought my parents along when they visited for my college graduation, and took my boyfriend, who later became my husband. Each visit created new salsa Caracas acolytes.
But it wasn’t until several years after my first visit that I took home a bottle of my own, from the more expansive Williamsburg outpost that Caracas opened in 2008 (the restaurant also had a location on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk until last fall). I found myself drizzling copious amounts of the sauce on fried eggs at breakfast, sandwiches at lunch, and often onto just plain white rice at dinner. And yes, I ate it many, many times all by itself, squirting generous amounts straight from the bottle into my mouth.
Late last year, I was devastated to learn that Caracas was closing its East Village home after almost two decades. A major part of my New York City history was no more. But I took solace in the sauce, each dab a memory of my days as a young adult in the city. I can’t wait till I can make my way back to Caracas’s Williamsburg location again, and for the days when it might feel safe once more to squeeze sauce from a communal bottle and drizzle it atop Caracas’s pulled chicken and avocado arepa. And of course, I can’t wait to take a bottle — or two — home.
Caracas Arepa Bar’s house sauce ($11) is available for purchase at the restaurant or for local delivery through the restaurant’s website. Araujo says they’re also looking into making the sauce available for national and international shipping.
Update: This article has been updated with a clarification on the origin of the salsa
The Venezuelan restaurant created the sauce by accident, but it’s come to be one of its most enduring hits
There are condiments that work best when they’re added to other foods, and then there are condiments so good that they’re a star attraction in their own right. Such is the case with Caracas Arepa Bar’s spicy, sweet, and tangy house sauce — or, as Caracas co-owner Maribel Araujo calls it, “salsa Caracas.”
I first encountered the gleaming, yellowish-green sauce in 2008. I was 19 years old, and had just moved to New York from my parents’ home in Gurgaon, India, to attend college. On one of my first solo outings to Manhattan, I made my way straight to Caracas. Although I didn’t know much about the city or its food scene, an aunt had told me that I had to check out the restaurant, which served what she described as the perfect street food.
And so I found myself standing outside of Caracas’s tiny storefront on East 7th Street. When I parted the curtains that hung just past its front door, they revealed a dark, narrow room with square tables lined up along a long wooden banquette.
I sat down and watched servers walk by with plates of what looked like tiny white sandwiches bursting with different fillings — I would later learn they were arepas, which I had imagined would be more like savory pancakes. It was my first time eating in a New York City restaurant, and my first encounter with Venezuelan food. I was curious and excited, and when I noticed a plastic squeeze bottle on the table, I squeezed a few dabs of sauce onto my finger. Trying sauces at restaurants long before the food arrives is a habit I’ve never been able to rid myself of, and this one reminded me why. It was spicy, but not in a fiery way, just enough to tickle my throat. It also had citrusy, herby flavor and a creamy sweetness, almost as if it was made with coconut milk.
I found myself going in for one dab after the next. Eventually I began to feel a little guilty that I might not have any left to eat with an arepa, and wondered if anyone had watched me greedily drain the bottle.
In a recent phone conversation, Araujo told me I wasn’t the only one consuming copious amounts of her salsa before the food had even arrived at the table. She said that servers frequently encounter customers asking for multiple squeeze bottle refills. On one occasion, she recalled, a server had to chase after a diner who was trying to make off with one of the bottles.
The sauce’s popularity is even more surprising to Araujo because it came about entirely by accident. Soon after Araujo opened the restaurant in 2003, Valerie Iribarren, the head chef at the time, was trying to create a version of the traditional green guasacaca sauce that’s typically served alongside arepas in Venezuelan restaurants; its ingredients include avocado, fresh herbs like cilantro or parsley, and chile peppers. Iribarren was having a hard time finding the aji dulce peppers used in the recipe, so she decided to experiment with a different, milder chile. Araujo won’t say which one — she keeps the recipe and its ingredients a closely guarded secret — but it worked, and salsa Caracas was born. Although the experimental sauce didn’t go down particularly well with Venezuelan customers, some of whom told Araujo it was a tad too sweet, it was an instant hit among most other diners like myself.
After Caracas opened, Araujo and co-owner Aristides Barrios began handing out the sauce in little to-go containers for diners to take home; by the end of their first year in business, they were selling bottles of it.
In the years following my first memorable outing, I returned to Caracas over and over again. I introduced friends to the restaurant, brought my parents along when they visited for my college graduation, and took my boyfriend, who later became my husband. Each visit created new salsa Caracas acolytes.
But it wasn’t until several years after my first visit that I took home a bottle of my own, from the more expansive Williamsburg outpost that Caracas opened in 2008 (the restaurant also had a location on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk until last fall). I found myself drizzling copious amounts of the sauce on fried eggs at breakfast, sandwiches at lunch, and often onto just plain white rice at dinner. And yes, I ate it many, many times all by itself, squirting generous amounts straight from the bottle into my mouth.
Late last year, I was devastated to learn that Caracas was closing its East Village home after almost two decades. A major part of my New York City history was no more. But I took solace in the sauce, each dab a memory of my days as a young adult in the city. I can’t wait till I can make my way back to Caracas’s Williamsburg location again, and for the days when it might feel safe once more to squeeze sauce from a communal bottle and drizzle it atop Caracas’s pulled chicken and avocado arepa. And of course, I can’t wait to take a bottle — or two — home.
Caracas Arepa Bar’s house sauce ($11) is available for purchase at the restaurant or for local delivery through the restaurant’s website. Araujo says they’re also looking into making the sauce available for national and international shipping.
A chicken and pea traybake from Nigella, perfect blueberry muffins from Bon Appétit, and more
It’s week trazillion-and-four of pandemic cooking, and you’ve hit a rut. Nay, a trench. Winter’s produce is less than inspiring, you’ve done all the things one can do to a bean, and while the digital cook-o-sphere is loaded with ideas, there are just too many of them. You scroll a few blogs, flip through some cookbooks, and give up. Beany Thursday strikes again.
We’ve been there. We are there. But help is here. To sort through the noise of TikTok tortilla wraps and chickpea pastas, Eater has compiled a handful of the recipes — from blogs, magazines, publications, and cookbooks — that put the pep back in our pans this week, and which we hope will do the same for you. These are the dishes that Eater editors from across the country actually made recently, and we’re passing along any first-hand tips, hacks, or dietary substitutions that, hey, worked for us. Here, then, are this week’s must-try recipes from Eater’s very-much-average but highly enthusiastic home cooks.
Nigella’s simple, incredibly gratifying sheet pan recipe (trendy!) involves dumping a lot (seriously, a lot) of frozen peas on a half sheet pan along with chopped leeks, dill, garlic, and a big splash of dry vermouth, with chicken thighs roasted on top. The recipe calls for seasoning the chicken simply with salt and olive oil, but with half a carton of buttermilk hanging around in the back of my fridge, I opted for marinating the chicken thighs overnight a la Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. The end result was a sheet of bronzed chicken with a heap of soft-but-not-mushy peas and leeks infused with the rendered chicken fat. It’s excellent for dinner with some potatoes, and arguably better as lunch for a few days stretched out with rice. — Adam Moussa, lead social media manager
Ali Slagle’s crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter from NYT Cooking has all the hallmarks of a perfect weeknight recipe: one pan, an ingredient list focusing mostly on pantry and fridge staples, but not something I would have thought of myself. I must disclose, however, that like a total commenter, I made some modifications. I used broccoli as well as brussels sprouts because a) I didn’t have enough sprouts but b) did have too much broccoli in my fridge. I cut the butter from six tablespoons to four because I was trying to still have some of my precious Kerrygold left over, and I delayed adding the lemon zest so it’s flavor didn’t get too muted by sizzling away in the skillet. When I make this again — because I will be making this again — I’ll also add a squeeze of lemon juice just before serving. But no matter! Recipes that work well as templates for personalized futzing are the ones I’m most likely to incorporate into my regular cooking rhythm, and this one definitely does. — Hilary Dixler Canavan, Eater restaurant editor
When I was a baby Angeleno (read: a new transplant from New York), I discovered a Mexican restaurant in Silver Lake that had the most curious taco. It was drippy beef nestled in a fried corn tortilla, finished with shaggy cheddar strands, dill pickles, and hot sauce. It was gringo. It was great. I came back many times to chase a trio of these beef and pickle pockets with beer — because this was the Before Times (before I developed the gluten-intolerance endemic to Los Angeles). The restaurant closed in 2018, but one day, I found the recipe on a food blog: Joy the Baker’s adaptation of Malo’s beef and pickle tacos. So I started to make what is ostensibly cheeseburger tacos at home. The recipe is simple, straightforward, and fast — the beef mixture made more robust with chopped potato. It fell out of my cooking circuit a couple years ago, but recently, to answer a craving somewhere between burger and taco, I made them again, this time with turkey meat (and no potato) for a leaner iteration. I seasoned the meat with way more spices than the recipe calls for (use your taco night intuition), and topped it with spicy pickle chips and sharp cheddar. Slightly different than the Malo classic, but equally good. — Nicole Adlman, Eater cities manager
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Lesley Suter
I probably haven’t had a muffin in two years, which seems excessive for something so basic, but I’m just not usually a person who counts pastries as breakfast. I sugar crash by 10 a.m. if I don’t get a little more nutritive bulk. But flipping through this month’s Bon Appétit, I spied the blueberry spelt muffins from LA pastry chef Roxana Jullapat and felt a tug; it seemed approachable, nutritious (it’s form her forthcoming cookbook dedicated to whole grain baking), and gave me a chance to use up the random bag of spelt flour I purchased on a whim a while back. The muffins were all of that, and glorious — tender, sweet-but-not-too-sweet, moist, crumby, and chock full of blueberries. My kids loved picking off bits of the streusel topping then gobbling the muffins whole. The first time I made them, I mixed up most of the batter the night before and popped ‘em in the oven on a Sunday morning and they turned out perfect. A few days later I made a second batch with a few vegan swaps and again, divine. They kept me way more satisfied than the morning usual pastry — but then again, I scarfed three. — Lesley Suter, Eater travel editor
A recent chilly Austin day seemed like the perfect excuse to make something warm and soothing from the gorgeous Jubilee cookbook that I had gotten for myself as a just-cause present. The Chicken and Dumplings Soup was an all-day project, which I anticipated: there’s properly chilling the ingredients, kneading and chilling the dumpling dough (which was fun), and simmering the chicken for a while. I’d recommend using a big Dutch oven and adding that optional cup of white wine the recipe suggests. Rather than using the entire frying chicken, I opted for boneless chicken thighs cut up into smaller pieces. I’m not sure I cut the dumpling dough correctly, but my weirdly sized and shaped dumplings worked for us. Also, as I tend to like my food on the spicier side, I also added more black pepper than the recipe calls for and did not regret it, plus a touch more whipping cream (I wanted to use up the entire little carton). The result was beautiful: creamy, spiced just right, with supremely juicy chicken thighs. I slurped down the broth. — Nadia Chaudhury, Eater Austin editor
This recipe has the highest deliciousness-to-ease ratio of maybe any dessert I’ve ever made. It takes no time, requires one bowl, and uses ingredients you already have in your kitchen (assuming you keep frozen fruit in the freezer). They have the consistency of a gooey blondie but... peanut butter. And for those of us deprived of fresh fruit right now, they bring some much-needed summery sweetness to a winter kitchen. — Amanda Kludt, Eater editor in chief
A global pandemic, misplaced goat shanks, and fat slabs of Texas brisket all helped this dish find its footing in Austin
https://austin.eater.com/22243046/birria-tacos-quesabirria-food-trucks-austin
Eat fresh what exactly??
Earlier today, the Washington Post reported that Subway’s tuna sandwiches are actually made of a delicious sounding melange called “concoctions.” According to a lawsuit filed by Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the filling is “made from anything but tuna,” and is instead “a mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna, yet have been blended together by defendants to imitate the appearance of tuna.” Multiple lab samples of the filling allegedly found no trace of tuna, nor fish at all. Dhanowa and Amin are suing Subway for fraud.
Subway, of course, denies the allegations, saying they use wild-caught tuna in their sandwiches. On a nutrition guide on its website, Subway lists the ingredients of its tuna salad as “flaked tuna in brine (tuna, water, salt)” and mayonnaise. A spokesperson told the Post, “Tuna is one of our most popular sandwiches. Our restaurants receive pure tuna, mix it with mayonnaise and serve on a freshly made sandwich to our guests.” However, a 2019 report showed that about 20 percent of fish is mislabeled, with fraud or misidentification happening at multiple points in the supply chain.
This is just the latest instance of Subway ingredients allegedly not being what they seem. Last year, the Irish Supreme Court ruled that Subway’s bread could not legally be considered bread, due to its sugar content. In December, a class action lawsuit filed in Quebec alleged Subway misrepresented its chicken, which a 2017 report found to be only 53.6 percent chicken (the chicken strips were apparently only 42.8 percent chicken). And of course, let’s not forget the great “Footlong Is Actually 11 Inches” lawsuit of 2015. This all raises the question: If the bread isn’t bread, the tuna isn’t tuna, the chicken isn’t chicken, and the footlong isn’t a foot long, then what the hell did I just eat?
Subway is hardly the only fast food chain to come under questioning for what they’re putting in their food or how they’re preparing it, either by lawsuit or by viral TikTok. And cold-cuts have always been cut with water, broth, and corn syrup. But there is something slightly egregious about Subway’s motto, “Eat Fresh,” applying to sort-of chicken, maybe-bread, and sodium-laden turkey slices. Yes, there are the vegetables, which Subway touts as coming from many family farms across the country. But otherwise what, exactly, is fresh about any of it?
In 2019, Eater’s Hillary Dixler Canavan wrote about the trend of upscale restaurants serving birds with their heads and beaks and claws still attached. “The dead birds...make a radical claim about their authenticity,” she wrote. “You can’t point to a specific chicken that’s sandwiched inside your Popeyes bun, and it’s hard to articulate what Impossible Burgers are even made of or how they can ‘bleed.’ But you sure as hell know what you’re eating when the feathers and claws are right there telling you.” Crowing (sorry) over the provenance and purity of one’s food can be bougie and precious, as the hand-wringing over nebulous “chemicals” in packaged food often has little to do with nutrition. But trusting that what you’re eating is actually what you’ve been told you’re eating is unfortunately becoming a luxury experience.
But who needs clarity when you have “concoctions”?
Following his 2020 pop-up Touk, and first cookbook deal, Montreal chef Chanthy Yen is now trying to realize some regal ambitions
https://montreal.eater.com/2021/1/28/22240587/chanthy-yen-touk-montreal-cookbook-cambodian-king
The “magnetic” first employee at the Memphis-style barbecue chain worked there for 30 years
https://dc.eater.com/2021/1/28/22254452/sonny-mcknight-pitmaster-red-hot-blue-barbecue-obituary
Produce, pizza, and the power of a union.
https://www.grubstreet.com/2021/01/hunts-point-market-strike-ending.html
Coronavirus confirmed it — the ’gram is the fastest and free-est way for restaurants to reach customers
https://sf.eater.com/22252997/restaurant-instagram-accounts-influencers-marketing
From Burlap & Barrel to Diaspora Co., get to know the spice companies making it their mission to support farmers and educate consumers
Farmers Võ Ngọc Dũng and Vuong Huu Thanh move closer together so both their faces fit into the Zoom camera frame. Behind them, in the central Vietnamese province of Dak Lak, lush vines snake up tall trees. The wobbly camera moves up to a vine, showing off a cluster of tiny berries: peppercorns. Their audience, a group of mostly American spice lovers, quiz them through the chat function. How tall are the ladders they use to harvest the pepper? How do they like to cook with peppercorns? How much pepper does a single vine produce? The pair answers through a translator: around 20 feet high; grilled with snails or stewed with beef; about two kilograms. The comment section lights up with praise.
Ethan Frisch, who’s facilitating the conversation from his own screen in New York, loves this sort of interaction. For the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin, direct-to-consumer spice company, connecting farmers with the people who cook with their crops is essential. While this usually occurs via social media and Burlap & Barrel’s website, the company’s first Zoom event grew out of the “Meet the Farmer” sections on the company’s online shop, and the “culture of online events” the pandemic has created. Frisch says more virtual farm tours and chats with partner farmers are in the works to teach consumers about how spices are grown.
Burlap & Barrel is just one of several businesses to emerge over the last five years that urge chefs and home cooks alike to think about who grows their dash of cardamom or heaping spoonful of chile. Despite the growing demand for spices around the world, the industry remains opaque when it comes to regulation. For centuries, colonial powers grew, sold, and transported spices at the expense of the communities that cultivated them, and the structures that Europeans established to subjugate and disenfranchise farmers linger today. According to Frisch, from India to Zanzibar to Guatemala, in spice-growing regions around the world, “the system is built on farmers making no money.”
Traditionally, in the spice trade, middlemen take a large cut of the profits. By the time a jar of nutmeg from a farmer in Sri Lanka arrives in your grocery store, there could be up to 15 collectors, brokers, traders, processors, wholesalers, and distributors involved, estimates Nadee Bandaranayake, owner of Cinnamon Tree Organics, another mission-driven spice company. This also means it usually takes years for that nutmeg to reach a supermarket shelf, Bandaranayake says. And when it arrives, it could be mixed with nutmeg from a handful of countries, not to mention artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives to make the seeds or ground powder look homogenous and stay fresh. By that point, she says, “the whole purpose of adding spices to a meal — the flavor, the aroma, the color, the health benefits — to me, they’re all kind of gone.”
But Frisch, Bandaranayake, and a crop of other entrepreneurs are working to change this. They’re combating deeply entrenched systems that not only treat farmers unfairly, but also shortchange shoppers, and they’re utilizing modern technology and social media to connect directly with farmers from across the world, cut out middlemen, and shed light on the workings of a notoriously closed off industry. Here, get to know a few of these founders.
Frisch, a chef turned humanitarian aid worker, started bringing spices back in his luggage from trips abroad around 2012. Food-industry pals couldn’t get enough of the wild cumin from Afghanistan or black pepper from Zanzibar. He and co-founder Ori Zohar, an entrepreneur and longtime friend, sensed an opportunity. “If chefs were this excited, we knew home cooks would be excited, too,” Zohar says.
They have been. Since founding the company in 2016, Burlap & Barrel has grown to include around 300 farmers according to Frisch — in 2020, Frisch says, Burlap & Barrel imported 40 tons of spices from 14 different countries — and amassed a devoted following. “People say, ‘I didn’t know cinnamon could taste like this.’ You see their eyes light up,” Zohar says. “Even if you don’t know or care” where they come from or who grows it, “good spices make your food taste better.”
But that “lightbulb moment,” Frisch says, does get people to care. When they taste a particularly floral, woody, or smoky spice, cooks realize they aren’t “just ground colorful powders,” but potent plants. After that, “it’s a short step to realize the farm itself matters,” he says.
The company aims to help partner farmers grow their businesses by being clear about who uses their spices and how, and by finding new markets for their crops (such as selling the leaves of cinnamon trees rather than composting them, or finding a wholesale buyer for a farmer’s black limes when there was a poor harvest of their main crop, cardamom).
Farmers, the duo says, appreciate the transparency. Typically, once growers hand their wares over to a local broker, such as a truck driver or small shop owner, or sell their harvest at an auction, they have no idea where it ends up. Burlap & Barrel’s farmers can see how cooks use their spices on the brand’s Facebook spice forum, and Frisch and Zohar bring the finished, packaged product to farmers when they visit.
But visits to farms have been put on hold by the coronavirus, just as Burlap & Barrel has seen demand spike from more people staying in and cooking. It’s made an already tricky logistical operation even more difficult. Still, Frisch and Zohar, who both caught and recovered from the virus (and temporarily lost their sense of smell), are expanding the business. Working with nonprofits and local governments for the past few years, they say, has laid a solid groundwork of partner farmers. Word has spread quickly, too, among farmers, with new growers reaching out via WhatsApp or Facebook. This technology, Frisch says, lets them “work as true partners,” plus keep up that two-way interaction between farmers and shoppers. “In what other Facebook group can you message the farmer who grew the spices you made in your recipe? It’s unprecedented.”
“We’ve grown so much in the last couple months,” says Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of direct-trade, sustainably farmed spice company Diaspora Co. “It is a wild time right now.”
Dismayed by how little had really changed about the spice trade, in 2017, Kadri began Diaspora Co. “We’re rooted in equity,” she says. “I started this company so farmers could have a market to earn really, really well.” She started by selling heirloom turmeric from India, where Kadri lived until moving to the U.S. for college (she now splits her time between the two countries). Three years later, fans of that original heirloom spice can also buy black pepper, cumin, cardamom, coriander, black mustard seeds, and chile from the farms Kadri partners with. She’s been able to provide health insurance to 250 laborers, rolling out a pilot program with the Lona Project that provides preventative and immediate health care, as well as fresh produce, to the mostly female farmworkers; the goal is to keep expanding the program.
Diaspora Co.’s website provides a wealth of information about its supply chain, including how the commodity spice trade works. A bottle of grocery store turmeric, for example, is likely a mixture of multiple farmers’ crops and multiple varieties, rather than, like Diaspora’s, of a single variety or from one farm or region. That approach, the company says, allows it to ensure a better product and work closely with individual partner farms.
Kadri is also working on helping people better understand that spices, like many other crops, are seasonal. “People don’t understand why we sell out, but it’s the same as how the best tomatoes are only in season in the summer. We grow at the rate of nature.” Sometimes, she says, if “you want the best stuff, you’ve got to wait for it.”
Kadri is hopeful that other independent, direct-to-consumer food companies — including other mission-driven spice companies — are similarly pushing consumers to think differently about how we eat and where we spend our money. “We’re all growing the industry for the better so that 10 years from now, this will be the norm.” But taste alone wins people over, too. Some shoppers “may not love our politics or that we’re queer-owned, but they love our turmeric.”
A decade ago, Rushi Sanathra was volunteering with cotton farmers in the state of Gujarat. There, he saw that “folks wanted to do organic farming, but there wasn’t an outlet to sell the product,” he says. And the alternative he witnessed wasn’t just disenfranchising these villagers, it was making them sick. “They would spray pesticides on their cotton and be ill for days,” he says. The farmers often asked him if he could find a market for sustainably grown crops in the United States.
An avid home cook, he began to explore creating such a market for spices instead; he pictured American cooks building their own versions of his mother’s spice box — a staple in every Indian family’s kitchen, he says. He spent two years “ideating and researching and doing background work” on the side, while working in operations at a children’s subscription box company. When he lost his job in January, and then the pandemic hit, he decided it was time to devote his attention to spices.
Sanathra called his company Zameen, which means earth in Hindi. He also decided on a subscription box model: Each month, subscribers receive a mini Mason jar with 1.3 to 2 ounces of a spice, information about the farmers, tips on storing spices, and recipes. This way, he figured, he could gauge interest for his products. Upon launch, he sold most of the subscriptions almost immediately. Turns out “people get excited about spices,” he says.
The recipes included in Zameen boxes are Sanathra’s creations, inspired by family recipes or dishes he learned to make when living in the village, such as kheer eaten around Diwali or a dal served at weddings. But, ultimately, he wants people to feel comfortable cooking intuitively with the turmeric, cardamom, black and white pepper, cinnamon, and allspice. “When I lived in the village, if a spice wasn’t available, they’d just omit it and keep going,” he says.
As a brand-new business, Sanathra works with Krishi Janani, an organization that supports organic, sustainable farmers. Through them, he’s found family-owned farms and sustainable foragers in the Kerala and Tamil Nadu states. He’s also looking into adding star anise, Indian bay leaves, garam masala, and chai masala to his roster, along with grains like rice and millet.
Less than a year into running Zameen full-time, the self-described one-man show says he’s still learning how to manage demand, how to explain to consumers why Zameen’s spices cost more, and how to expand the business responsibly. It’s been “an eye-opener to different world,” especially “as a gay man running a business like this. I’m just doing the work and representing [the farmers] to break the colonial cycle.”
Nadee Bandaranayake immigrated from tropical Sri Lanka to Calgary, Canada, at age 20 with her family. It was food from home, she says, “that kept us grounded and comforted.” But, no matter how hard her family tried, recipes never turned out quite the same. Though she was able to find staples such as turmeric and cinnamon, she says, “the flavors were off. We just were not finding what we remembered.” It’s something she says she heard from many other South Asian immigrants.
In Bandaranayake’s case, it was especially true for cinnamon. Ceylon cinnamon, or “true” cinnamon, is native to Sri Lanka; it’s something she says is a matter of national pride. In North America, though, it’s more common to find cassia, a less expensive, more potent variety, she explains. “It’s a completely different spice to me, and completely throws off” the savory dishes — lentils, meat, fish — in which Sri Lankans typically use cinnamon.
Bandaranayake left her Washington, D.C., marketing and communications job last year to focus on selling this Ceylon cinnamon with Cinnamon Tree Organics. Her company also sells black and white pepper, nutmeg, moringa, lemongrass, cardamom, clove, turmeric, chile flakes, ginger, cayenne, masala chai, and a Sri Lankan curry blend. The more she got into the business, the more she felt “it was high time somebody tried to disrupt” the supply chains that, she quickly learned, haven’t changed much in centuries.
She hopes that consumers who already buy fair-trade coffee, chocolate, and tea, and who drink turmeric lattes in droves, “are more open to hearing the details” when it comes to where their spices come from — details like how the mass market values spices for uniformity and color, not necessarily flavor and aroma. Growing cardamom pods to be the greenest and most uniform, rather than for their taste, for example, puts pressure on small farmers to leave behind generations of farming practices and heirloom spice crops. “They want to keep and preserve our nature, culture, and knowledge,” she says. And with a market to sell to, they can.
Bandaranayake says she pays the handful of farmers she works with more than what other buyers or middlemen offer. With better pay, she explains, these farmers can grow their operations, become certified organic, and buy machinery. However, “there are some things that can’t be done with machinery,” Bandaranayake says. Those neatly rolled cinnamon sticks? Called “cinnamon quills” in Sri Lanka, “they’re all done by human hand,” she says, an “art and science taught in families from generation to generation,” and one that’s in danger of dying out. “We have to treat them well and pay them well to keep it going.”
Saffron is one of the world’s most famous, and famously expensive, spices. But Mohammad Salehi has found, beyond that, Americans don’t know all that much about what he calls the “queen of spices.” When he first tried selling the delicate crimson threads from his family’s farm in Afghanistan to grocery stores, they didn’t bite.
It was with chefs that Salehi’s business got going. A former translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, he was forced to seek asylum in 2013 after his life was threatened. On the advice of a friend in the army, he settled in Chicago. Looking to go into business for himself and support small saffron farmers, such as his own family, which has been farming in the Herat province for generations, Salehi started selling saffron to restaurants. He won over enough of them — including Gibsons Italia in Chicago and Black Shoe Hospitality in Milwaukee — to leave his job at a real estate company in 2017 to run Heray full time.
Although restaurants were his main customers, Salehi sold online to individuals, too. And while he suspects chefs posting about his saffron on Instagram gave an initial boost to this direct-to-consumer business, pandemic home cooking has seen it take off. “Millennials, they care,” he says. “They want to know, ‘Who built this product? How can I buy something that has a positive effect?’”
Salehi explains to his customers that, by working with him, they’re directly supporting his family and other saffron farmers; today, he works with a group of 24 growers. “I know each single farmer and their family’s names,” he says. Heray also uses a portion of profits to buy school supplies for children in danger of dropping out due to poverty.
Harvesting saffron is highly labor intensive — it requires plucking the threads by hand from crocus flowers. It takes 75,000 flowers, Salehi estimates, to yield just a pound of the precious threads, making it more expensive than many other spices. Currently, Heray sells one gram of saffron for $17. The delicate and limited nature of its harvest, and the resulting cost, means saffron is typically sold in small quantities, just a couple grams at a time. But Salehi says, Heray customers need to use only a few saffron threads to robustly flavor and color a dish.
Salehi is keen to one day add cumin, black pepper, and dried figs and apricots to his offerings. Right now, though, he’s focused on educating customers, teaching them how to cook with saffron and the best ways to suss out the real deal from saffron that’s adulterated (saffron swindlers have been known to mix the spice with corn silk or safflower petals and add dyes to bump up the color). Salehi, who’s finishing up a master’s degree in business and information technology, also wants “people to know Afghanistan through its beauty, to give a picture of the country besides the war,” he says. “When you feed someone, it’s the best influence a culture can have on others. When I do a transaction in saffron, I am not only helping someone, but transferring a cultural legacy through food.”
Sophia F. Gottfried is a writer based in New Jersey. Joules Garcia is a freelance illustrator based in Burlington, Vermont.
With indoor dining still not an option in much of the country, hotel restaurants are using empty rooms as private dining suites
There are few restaurants Hector Tamez frequents more than Uni, the izakaya located in Boston’s boutique Eliot Hotel. Consider the presentation, he says, or how the staff feels like family. Then, of course, there’s the Chiang Mai duck carnitas. “I would take it over several highly ranked Michelin-starred restaurants that I’ve been to any day,” Tamez says.
When the pandemic hit, Tamez continued to support local restaurants, Uni among them, by ordering takeout, but the food was never quite as good, he says. By the summer, Tamez was dining out again, alfresco, limiting his visits to just a handful of restaurants, including Uni. Although indoor dining in Boston resumed in late June, Tamez, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, wasn’t comfortable sitting down to eat indoors anywhere that wasn’t his home — until he discovered a workaround.
In October, shortly before Halloween, Tamez saw a post on Uni’s Instagram announcing a new feature: Enjoy the restaurant’s a la carte menu in the privacy of one of the Eliot Hotel’s suites. With a maximum of six guests per room and a 90-minute time limit, the experience seemed to Tamez to be a way to enjoy all the perks of indoor dining (like warmth, for one) with the safety of eating at home. “Sure, there’s no data to support that this is necessarily safe,” says Tamez, “but I feel safer in this decision.” He and his wife have dined in the Eliot’s rooms several times in the months after the concept’s debut in early November.
For nearly a year, since the pandemic forced the closure of dining rooms nationwide, restaurants have operated on the brink of collapse. With constantly changing restrictions on indoor dining and the precariousness of relying on revenue from outdoor dining, especially in the midst of brisk winter conditions in much of the U.S., restaurants are forced to regularly innovate in order to stay afloat. Hotels have suffered similarly. Amid a stark decrease in business and recreational travel, hotels across the country averaged 44 percent occupancy during 2020, compared to 66 percent the year prior, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association. For restaurants housed within hotels, with plenty of empty suites to spare, an inevitable union emerged: Why not briefly fill rooms by offering an exclusive evening of private pandemic dining?
Like a high-end version of room service, diners who come for Uni’s in-suite experience are shown to their bedless private dining area in one of the hotel’s 14 suites allocated to the restaurant. The multiroom suites at the Eliot are divided by a French door; each suite accommodates two parties, separated by this door. The menu is QR-coded, and a masked and gloved server enters the room and takes the party’s entire order in one go. Dishes are then carted from the restaurant into rooms all at once, and diners can enjoy them at their leisure. All the while, the restaurant’s throwback hip-hop soundtrack plays through the bedside Sony alarm clock — simultaneously through all 28 rooms. Sake casks and bottles adorn the credenzas and side tables.
Uni is far from the only hotel restaurant experimenting with in-room dining, though each operation has its idiosyncrasies. The Crossroads Hotel in Kansas City is throwing in an overnight stay with a meal, while at Minneapolis’s Hewing Hotel, pre-recorded videos on each room’s TV describe every course. Some restaurants have repurposed nearby rooms into staging areas in which to plate dishes. For others, anything a customer might need during the meal — more drinks, napkins, or condiments — just requires a quick call to the front desk.
Paramount to the concept’s success is employee safety. In many hotel private dining programs, servers only enter rooms to take orders and then leave the meals on a cart parked just outside the suite. If the staff does have to enter the room multiple times, patrons must be masked. At the Hewing Hotel, Hotel Du Pont, Detroit Foundation Hotel, and Crossroads Hotel, only one party is permitted per room each night, allowing for deeper sanitization and air filtration. Uni’s private dining spaces see two groups per night. At the Crossroads Hotel, chef Ian Wortham has meal delivery down to a science, recording the amount of time it takes each group to complete each dish. That way, Wortham says, “you can go off of time as opposed to having to keep checking in to see where the people are in their meal,” effectively limiting the amount of times a staff member would need to enter the room.
The same day Uni announced its suite dining program on Instagram, Le Crocodile, the French brasserie at Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel, opened reservations for its private dining rooms, dubbed Le Crocodile Upstairs. The concept began as an offhand comment chef Aidan O’Neal made at an April public relations meeting in response to the pandemic. He joked that by summer, Wythe Hotel rooms would be utilized for private dining. “It seemed like a crazy idea in April, but as the year progressed, we revisited the idea and then followed through on it,” he says.
What began in a handful of rooms eventually expanded into a 13-room operation, which added 70 seats on top of Le Crocodile’s outdoor patio and indoor service in the restaurant, O’Neal says. When it was up and running, $100 per person allowed parties of up to 10 people to enjoy three courses from the a la carte menu, milling in the hotel room as long as they liked until the 11 p.m. curfew, making for one party per room per night. Each room had the beds removed and replaced with dining tables, beverage storage, and air filters. Demand was immediately and consistently high throughout Le Crocodile Upstairs’ nearly two months of operations.
In accordance with New York City’s current ban on indoor dining, Le Crocodile has temporarily paused all service — including in-suite dining. Though hotel rooms are technically considered a private residence, O’Neal says, “it’s definitely in a gray zone of, is it a restaurant or is it a hotel room? You book the room and you’re not really in the restaurant.” Le Crocodile sought the advice of the governor’s office, which advised the team to consider private dining to be indoor dining and cease operations. Even when indoor dining is permitted in New York City again, O’Neal says his priority lies not in private dining, but in getting the restaurant’s main dining room and patio back up to speed.
While Le Crocodile erred on the side of caution, other proprietors see the hotel room dining loophole as a much-needed opportunity. At Philadelphia’s Walnut Suite Cafe, the private-dining union between Walnut Street Cafe and the AKA University City hotel, restaurant operators embraced in-room supping as a way around the city’s indoor-dining ban that’s been in effect since early December. “If you go and check into the Four Seasons today and order room service, you’d be able to and somebody would bring it into your room,” says Branden McRill, founder of Fine-Drawn Hospitality, which owns and operates Walnut Street Cafe. McRill claims Walnut Suite Cafe’s program is much more akin to room service — where a staff member delivers all the food to your room in one shot — than private dining, and therefore doesn’t flout restrictions.
But it’s the exclusivity of the private-suite experience that has permanently altered the way Hector Tamez, the Harvard cardiologist, views dining out. Restaurants are sometimes too loud, too crowded. In a hotel room, you’re shielded from the masses, you feel important, he says. “You feel like you’re the only person in the restaurant. If the pandemic were to be over tomorrow, and Uni had the opportunity to keep the suite dining, even for a surplus charge I would probably still do it.”
Allie Volpe is writer based in Philadelphia. She has contributed to the New York Times, Playboy, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, and more. Carolyn Figel is a freelance artist living in Brooklyn.
LA chef Brooke Williamson talks lockdown and customer generosity on Eater’s Digest
A funny thing happened at Playa Provisions, celeb chef Brooke Williamson’s LA restaurant, a couple weeks ago. When an order came through to the kitchen, the ticket featured the following note in the field for allergies or special requests: “Here’s the deal. We live in Texas, but back when traveling was a thing we loved you guys. So we want to buy someone breakfast today. If someone in [sic] staff is hungry, let them eat or just pick someone.”
Touched, Williamson posted the message to her personal and restaurant Instagram accounts. Followers started sending in more orders from around the country and then around the world. Some requested the food go to the next person who came through the door, some to staffers, some to people in need. In the end, over 200 customers participated in this burst of good will, allowing the restaurant to donate hundreds of meals.
“I think it was just such a testament to what people wanted to be seeing, and wanted to be involved in, and how people really just wanted to be part of something bigger and genuine,” Williamson says on this week’s episode of Eater’s Digest, where she tempers this feel-good story with the reality of the hardship restaurateurs like her are facing as they try to keep their businesses alive and staffers paid through the pandemic.
After we talk to Williamson, we discuss how Starbucks is helping with vaccination in Washington, Biden’s $15 minimum wage plan, the latest in the state of winter outdoor dining in New York, and more.
Listen and subscribe to Eater’s Digest on Apple Podcasts. And read the full interview with Williamson below.
Amanda Kludt: We have chef and restaurateur, Brooke Williamson with a feel good story, something that I’ve been craving all week. So Brooke, welcome to the show.
Brooke Williamson: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
AK: So, there’s this funny thing that happened that I saw on Instagram where a customer, I guess, bought your staff a meal, and then that spread to more and more customers. Can you explain what happened?
BW: Yeah. So, it was a Sunday morning and if you order directly through our website, it basically sends the tickets directly into the kitchen. And so, we got a ticket for a breakfast sandwich and the explanation on the ticket in the modifier section, where normally you would write like an allergy or a sauce on the side or something. The modifiers said, “Here’s the deal, we live in Texas, we won’t be picking this meal up, but we would like to donate it to someone who needs a good breakfast, whether that be a staff member or...” I don’t remember exactly what the ticket said, it’s posted.
Anyway, basically the gist of it was that they would not be picking that meal up and they wanted to donate it. And, they also ordered some cocktails. They ordered some canned cocktails, which came in through a separate ticket. But, it was such an unbelievably sweet gesture of someone who really just wanted to support one of their favorite restaurants from afar, and pay it forward to someone else. I posted a picture of that ticket on my Instagram, and people immediately started following in their lead, and it started this crazy snowball effect.
AK: That’s so cool. How many people ended up buying meals and writing in like that.
BW: Over the course of the next, I’d say three days, we got over 200 tickets.
It started sort of in a across the country way, and then it moved all over the world within... By the end of the first day, we were getting orders from China, and Africa, and Norway and Germany. It was insane how quickly this post spread and people started sharing with each other. And, I think it was just such a testament to what people wanted to be seeing, and wanted to be involved in, and how people really just wanted to be part of something bigger and genuine. And, within the first three days we got a lot of tickets, but then after that, we started seeing, we were being tagged in people placing orders to other restaurants all over the country. Which is really kind of where I hoped it would go, was that it would turn into a much larger movement than simply supporting us in our immediate community. But, that the voice was heard all over the world, really.
Daniel Geneen: What did you do with the food?
BW: Well, that first day we didn’t foresee it happening for more than one day.
The first day, there were a couple of tickets that specifically said like, “Please give this drink to the next person who walks in the door or...” And, we tried to follow that direction as much as possible, but there were a lot of orders that said, “Just give this to someone in need.” That first day we bought lunch and dinner for our local Playa Del Rey fire department. And then, I realized that this was something that would need to be sort of thought of on a slightly larger scale. And, I immediately put together an order of a couple of hundred meals to be delivered to a local hospital, so we did that like three days later. We also were able to send our staff home with a lot of food, and welcome staff in who are not currently employed to come in and pick up meals.
We’ve tried to offer that all along, but at this point we could actually afford to do that, so that was nice.
AK: Wow. That’s really fantastic. For context for our listeners, your restaurant Playa Provisions is in Los Angeles, and I imagine you’re still under a lockdown of no outdoor indoor dining.
BW: That’s correct. Yeah. Just take out and delivery right now, so.
Yeah, it’s been a trying couple of months. Our last day of service was the day before Thanksgiving. And so, we’ve been sort of waiting patiently, and cutting back on staff as we need to, waiting for that second round of PPP to be approved, but that’s where we’re at with no immediate change insight.
AK: What are you anticipating in terms of dining rooms being reopened?
BW: Well, I’m anticipating that probably patio seating will be the first thing to be reopened, which we’ll have to rebuild our patio that we took down in November.
And then, I would say probably gradually we’ll open percentages of availability in terms of in-house dining. But, I don’t see that happening immediately.
DG: How are people feeling about it now VS when the initial lockdown orders came out, that people were like so shocked about?
BW: I honestly feel like we were doing a really, really good job of maintaining really beautiful social distancing and safety protocols. We had been inspected multiple times by the County to make sure that we were following protocol. In my opinion, dining patios for restaurants who had to follow certain protocols were some of the safest places to be. Once this last shutdown happened, the city started building out these outdoor patios for people to pick up food and then sit outside.
And, there was no policing those areas, there was no one maintaining safety standards in those areas wiping down tables in-between customers, making sure that people were staying separated, making sure that people were wearing masks when they got up. Those were all things that we had become very good at doing. People did not get up from their tables to use the restroom without a mask on. People did not walk into my establishment without a mask on, but people were doing that all over the place, down the street outside.
So, it was devastating, really. We had kind of gotten back to the point of almost a full staff with an outdoor patio, and we had managed to keep our entire staff healthy through the course of many months. So, it was very frustrating, especially since restaurant patios were shut down, and certain other areas like dining food courts in malls were not immediately.
So, there was a lot to be frustrated about, hence my op-ed that I wrote in the L.A. Times, just because I felt like people weren’t hearing the voice of the restaurateur, they were hearing the voices of the county and the government. But, I think that there was definitely a sort of misunderstanding of what restaurants specifically were going through from the voice of the people who run those restaurants.
DG: Yeah. So, are you moving to Austin?
BW: Not quite yet, I still have one restaurant that I have to follow through with and maintain. I’m doing my best to make sure that our staff has a place to come back to.
DG: How’s delivery been? Have you at least gotten to experiment with some delivery concepts?
BW: Yes. You know what? I can not complain. We are in a very fortunate position to have a lot of eyes on us at any given moment, and we’re across the street from the beach, and people come pick up ice cream and go down to the beach, or pick up food. And, we have a very, very supportive community that we love and appreciate so much. But yeah, like the need to stay exciting and stay relevant in a time like this is definitely there. It’s also very difficult for me personally, to be creative right now when it comes to ensuring the safety and comfort of our staff, and our customers comes first, and then there’s like, “Well, what are you doing for Valentine’s Day?”
It seems like they’re very sort of divided subjects with equal importance right now. But, because people can’t go out to eat at restaurants for Valentine’s Day, so they expect us to be an option, offering something new and creative. So, there’s Super Bowl weekend, and then there’s Valentine’s Day, and then there’s something right after that. And, it’s a matter of coming up with an entirely new menu and different reheating instructions. And, while that’s all fun and creative, it’s sometimes hard to get into that creative headspace one time after another in a moment like this.
AK: Yeah. Especially when you’re in survival mode, and just trying to get through it. That’s so frustrating.
BW: With a very limited staff who are all working very hard trying to pick up 12 jobs,-
DG: Yeah, I can’t imagine. So...What are you doing for Valentine’s Day?
BW: I just had staff meeting yesterday. We were discussing the menu. I think we have it nailed down, but it’s basically a four course menu for two. Still pricing it out, so I’m not sure exactly the price points, but it will be available for pickup on the 13th and 14th. And, it will be provided cold so that people are heating and assembling food themselves. And, that’s kind of what we’ve fallen into doing for all of the major holidays. And, we’ve found it’s definitely a wonderful supplement to our everyday business to be able to offer these special menus, and something that the community also very much appreciates.
AK: Awesome. Well, our listeners can find Brooke at Playa Provisions, or just send a meal to her staff by going to their website.
BW: Can I tell you... Sorry to interrupt. Can I tell you the greatest thing, not the greatest thing, one of the most heartwarming things that I saw from that Pay it Forward Movement, that I’m not sure if people followed up on toward the end of those, like three, four days of us getting tickets. One of the women who submitted, she’s a teacher and on her Instagram profile, she had her Amazon Wish List for her classroom students, or for her classroom supplies. And, someone went and sort of tracked her down, and tried to figure out who started this whole thing. And then, went and purchased her entire Amazon Wish List, and fulfilled her classroom needs. And, several of the other teachers who were involved, classroom needs.
So I got to say that, that whole experience was just so heartwarming and such a light in the midst of a lot of darkness. And, to all of you out there who participated or followed along, thank you. We are beyond touched and appreciative till the end of time.
AK: Ah, I love it. Well Brooke, and good luck with all the special holidays and hopefully patio dining opens soon.
But that’s only the tip of the Goya drama iceberg
In what feels like seventy-five years ago but was actually July 2020, Goya’s CEO Robert Unanue faced public criticism after voicing his support of Donald Trump. “We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Donald Trump, who is a builder,” Unanue said at the announcement of the Hispanic Prosperity Initiative executive order. “We have an incredible builder. And we pray. We pray for our leadership, our president, and we pray for our country — that we will continue to prosper and to grow.” The comments sparked a boycott of the Goya brand, despite its products being a staple for many Latinx Americans and anyone who eats beans, as Trump had a history of racist and xenophobic comments, and supported policies that targeted Hispanic immigrants.
Unanue was undeterred, appearing on Fox Business on Inauguration Day where he called Joe Biden’s presidential win “unverified.” His rhetoric intensified, stating, “There is a war coming, now that the president is leaving today, they’re still coming after the United States, the working class.”
In light of those comments, the Goya executive board has chosen to censure Unanue. According to the New York Post, the CEO can no longer speak to the press without the board’s permission. “Bob does not speak for Goya Foods when he speaks on TV,” Andy Unanue, board member and Robert’s nephew, told the Post. “The family has diverse views on politics, but politics is not part of our business. Our political point of views are irrelevant.” (Andy Unanue ran for Senate as a Republican in 2008.)
This political drama also appears to be a family drama. Goya was founded by Prudencio Unanue Ortiz in 1936, and in 1976, Joseph Unanue, Prudencio’s son and Andy’s father, took over as president. But in 2004, Joseph and Andy, who was serving as the company’s vice president, were fired by the board over allegations that Andy regularly showed up to work drunk. Among those making the decision were Joseph’s nephews, Robert and Francisco Unanue. They also said Joseph was “unilaterally setting the stage for his son Andrew to become his successor.” After the ouster, Robert became president.
It’s been hard to tell if the Goya boycott worked, as it inspired a “buycott” backlash, and Goya didn’t release sales numbers. But can we please get the writers behind Succession to make a Goya drama? This is juicy as hell.
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