What Will Saweetie’s McDonald’s Meal Do to the Chicken Shortage?!
July 30, 2021
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The Saweetie Meal | McDonald’s
The rapper’s signature order features a four-piece McNuggets at a time when demand for chicken is outpacing supply
McDonald’s announced it’s continuing on the limited-edition celebrity collaboration meal track, this time with rapper Saweetie. The Saweetie Meal, debuting August 9, features a Big Mac, a four-piece Chicken McNuggets, medium fries, medium Sprite, Tangy BBQ Sauce, and something called “Saweetie ‘N Sour” sauce.
Recently, Saweetie has emerged not only as a musician, but as an amateur chef. She published a set of recipes for things like “Oysters a la Top Ramen” and “Secret Alfredo Sauce” on The Ringer, and will be featured in Paris Hilton’s new cooking show, Cooking With Paris. She also went viral for putting ranch dressing on pasta. In a statement, Saweetie says she hopes her love of mashing up flavors is apparent in her meal.
“McDonald’s and I run deep – from growing up back in Hayward, California, all through my college days – so I had to bring my icy gang in on my all-time favorites,” she said. “Depending on the mood I’m in, there are so many ways to enjoy my order.”
McDonald’s released an image of ways to mix and match the meal, including putting fries in the Big Mac, or putting Chicken McNuggets between the buns.
McDonald’s
The meal is being released at a time when the U.S. is facing supply chain shortages in many staple ingredients, including chicken. Due in part to the fast food chicken sandwich wars (which McDonald’s recently attempted to enter again), chicken supply is low, and chickens can’t hatch enough eggs to meet demand. “In addition to breeding woes, the American chicken industry that is concentrated largely in the South contended with a severe winter storm in February that killed hundreds of thousands of birds,” according to Bloomberg. It’s gotten so bad that Popeyes began stockpiling chicken ahead of the release of its new chicken nuggets.
McDonald’s has also faced supply issues with its celebrity collaborations before. The Travis Scott meal was so popular that it resulted in a shortage of quarter pounders, and they had to ration ingredients to make sure restaurants each had adequate supply. McDonald’s is probably prepared to handle a McNugget shortage, but where it could be affected is prices. McDonald’s has not said how much the Saweetie meal will cost, only that prices will “vary by location.” It wouldn’t be out of the question for McNuggets to be more expensive. At least until these chicken sandwich wars die down.
Yalonda M. James/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
The highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19 is explosively spreading among the unvaccinated. Fears of breakthrough infections and efforts to stem the tide threaten to throw restaurant owners, workers, and diners alike into further uncertainty.
For a few months, it seemed like the U.S. was on the path toward post-pandemic life, with constant mask-wearing and endless anxiety largely a thing of the past. Highly effective, widely available vaccines had curbed case counts and allowed people to gather safely across the country throughout the spring and early summer. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the fully vaccinated could, for the most part, stop wearing masks indoors. Diners and restaurant workers alike were able to relax as bars and dining rooms filled back up and friends met to celebrate some form of normalcy.
But the emergence of the highly contagious delta variant — which now comprises some 80 percent of new infections in the U.S. — amid low vaccination rates in certain parts of the country has changed the national outlook: Another wave of the pandemic appears to loom. Nationally, new cases have been spiking, to an average of almost 67,000 on July 28 — more than quadruple the number of daily cases one month ago — and there has been a surprising uptick in reports of vaccinated people contracting the virus, in what are known as breakthrough cases.
On July 27, following weeks of scattered reinstatements of mandates and regulations in cities where cases have recently surged, the CDC reversed its mask guidance for vaccinated individuals, signposting that the tide has turned again in the fight against COVID-19. The agency now recommends that fully vaccinated people should still wear masks indoors if they are in “an area of substantial or high transmission,” which covers about 66 percent of U.S. counties.
In the days and weeks leading up to the CDC’s revised universal mask guidance, some localities did take matters into their own hands as they scrambled to contain the virus, encouraging — and in some cases, requiring — people to put their masks back on. In California’s Bay Area, seven counties banded together on July 16 to strongly recommend mask-wearing for their citizens, in response to a rise in cases as the delta variant spreads. In Los Angeles County, where the COVID-19 positivity rate jumped to 3.75 percent — more than triple what it was a month earlier — an indoor mask mandate was reinstated on July 17, barely a month after it was first lifted. Though the change did not come with a renewed capacity limit for restaurants, diners must now wear masks indoors when they aren’t eating or drinking.
Following the reinstatement of indoor mask mandates in Los Angeles, other cities around the country followed suit. In Savannah, Georgia, an indoor mask mandate was reinstated on July 26, and is set to extend for at least a month. This mandate requires both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals to wear masks in “government buildings, hospitals, early childhood centers, elementary and secondary institutions and federally regulated transportation.” Restaurants are encouraged, but not required, to enforce the mandate. Savannah’s mayor, Van Johnson, said in a press conference that the return to mask-wearing was a response to the tripling of COVID-19 cases in the past two weeks; he attributed the spike to a combination of group gatherings, low vaccination rates, and the highly aggressive delta variant. A mask mandate was also reinstated in St. Louis County on July 26, and another is set to go into effect in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 2. But the measure in Kansas City is already being ferociously opposed by Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, who claims his aim is to protect people’s freedoms — illustrating the deeply uncertain political and regulatory environment that restaurants are working within.
The recent uptick in cases of COVID-19 across the country has been fueled by the explosive spread of the delta variant in unvaccinated individuals. The strain was first identified in December 2020, and caused a devastating spike of cases in India as it tore through the country; it has since become the dominant strain of the virus in the United States. The World Health Organization describes delta as the “fastest and fittest” variant, highlighting the threat it presents, particularly to unvaccinated people. “Delta is spreading 50 percent faster than alpha, which was 50 percent more contagious than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2,” said F. Perry Wilson, a Yale Medicine epidemiologist, in conversation with Yale Medicine. “In a completely unmitigated environment — where no one is vaccinated or wearing masks — it’s estimated that the average person infected with the original coronavirus strain will infect 2.5 other people... In the same environment, delta would spread from one person to maybe 3.5 or four other people.”
Though there is evidence of breakthrough infection among fully vaccinated people, it’s overwhelmingly unvaccinated people who are being infected by the delta variant. “The most important thing that we need to say is that we have a lot of this country that has a lot of viral burden. That’s driven a lot by people who — and mostly — by people who are unvaccinated,” Rochelle P. Walensky, the CDC director, said at a news briefing. “Most of the transmission across this country is related to people who are unvaccinated.” The unvaccinated currently represent more than 97 percent of those admitted to the hospital.
Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In many parts of the country, unvaccinated people who choose to drink and dine indoors are at high risk at the moment, according to experts like Jonathan Reiner, a CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, who said in an interview with CNN that “if you are not vaccinated right now in the United States, you should not go into a bar, you should probably not eat at a restaurant. You are at great risk of becoming infected.”
Despite the growing fear of breakthrough infections, the risk to fully vaccinated individuals remains low. Experts nonetheless encourage those who are vaccinated to take more than their own health into account when making decisions. “It’s a reasonable time for us to be a bit more cautious,” says David W. Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist and an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “If we are talking about groups of people where everyone in that group is vaccinated, the risk to that group and to others around them [in a restaurant], is relatively low — I would say low enough to be something that would be safe.”
The delta variant is concerning, but Dowdy emphasizes that the rise of breakthrough cases is not a sign that vaccines are ineffective: The chances of contracting COVID have simply gone up as we all come into contact with greater numbers of infected people. “The vaccine is not 100 percent effective, and you’re going to run up against a certain number of unvaccinated people in your daily life,” he says. “Let’s say that in a month you’re going to be in contact with 100 people who are unvaccinated. If one out of those 100 is going to have COVID, and you’re vaccinated, you’re most likely not going to get the disease. But if 10 of those people have COVID, then your risk of getting that breakthrough infection just went up 10 times. Everyone’s risk of a breakthrough infection in the past month has gone up four to five fold, because we’re just seeing that much more infection.”
Dowdy says that wearing a mask indoors when vaccinated provides additional protection, and encourages others who may not be vaccinated to do the same. When a certain portion of the population takes off their masks, Dowdy says that it becomes more likely that others — including those who are unvaccinated — will follow. “If you don’t want to get sick, and you’re vaccinated, the best thing you can do is your small part to get infection levels down in your community.” According to Dowdy, that means wearing a mask whenever possible. “From a practical perspective, the only way that you’re going to get unvaccinated people to wear masks as a large group is going to be to require that everyone does.”
Over the past few weeks, the sense that we’re not out of the woods just yet has grown among restaurant operators, who have begun taking extra precautions beyond state or local mandates: maintaining distance between tables, prioritizing outdoor dining instead of indoor dining, requiring workers to be fully vaccinated, and requiring diners to wear masks, show proof of vaccination, or both if they wish to eat indoors. No one Eater spoke to for this story is closing just yet, or changing course on reopening, but the surge in delta variant cases — and the reemergence of mask mandates in some cities — is yet again changing how restaurant operators are thinking about safety protocols inside their dining rooms, even in areas like Boston where vaccination rates outpace the national average.
Anthony Caldwell, who owns 50Kitchen in Dorchester, Massachusetts — and has never lifted his restaurant’s mask requirement — told Eater in May that he was nervous about the loosening of state guidelines because he thought it would allow unvaccinated people to behave in a way that wasn’t safe. “It creates an honor system, and we know there are a lot of people who aren’t honest,” he said.
In San Francisco, where community spread is substantial, the Bar Owner Alliance, which represents about 300 bars across the city, is recommending that local bars check for proof of vaccination before allowing patrons to gather indoors beginning July 29. Its president, Ben Bleiman, who also owns a pair of bars, says that checking for proof of vaccination is “what we need to do to protect our staff and families ... The data doesn’t lie. I don’t care what Joe Rogan says. People who are unvaccinated are much, much more likely to hurt somebody who is unvaccinated.”
Across the bay in Oakland — where COVID cases have also spiked in recent weeks — the Kon-Tiki and sibling restaurant Palmetto are requiring that guests show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test before they enter. Co-owner Matthew Reagan says that it was yet another tough decision after a year and a half of tough decisions, and he knows it will turn some people off, but in the end he and his business partner had to think about the health and safety of their staff and customers. “As much as this can be seen as authoritarianism or altruism, it’s also a business decision,” he says. “We have staff with friends who are vaccinated and testing positive — some with symptoms, others without — and they’re worried ... We don’t want to get anyone sick.”
Yalonda M. James/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
As it stands, however, it’s another burden that falls on individual restaurant operators and their overworked staff. Replying to a tweet about the SF Bar Owner Alliance’s decision to recommend its member bars check for vaccination cards, Pim Techamuanvivit, the owner of the critically acclaimed restaurants Nari and Kin Khao, wrote: “Unless the city make[s] it a mandate, then you’re leaving it to vulnerable restaurant workers to face potentially volatile situations on our own.”
Throughout the pandemic, restaurant workers have dealt with an epidemic of angry customers over masking requirements and other COVID safety protocols, which sometimes led to outright abuse or assault. As long as local and state legislators don’t act to reinstate COVID restrictions, restaurant workers and operators will be the ones tasked with enforcing the rules at individual restaurants that choose to tighten protocols. “Unless there is some concerted effort from the city, from the county, or from the state to help us enforce it, it’s just a paper tiger,” Techamuanvivit told Eater. “Until the city, the county, or the state comes up with some standardized way of proving someone’s vaccination record without violating their privacy, and also make it easy for us to be able to verify these things, then I don’t know how we’re supposed to do it.”
At Techamuanvivit’s restaurants, guests are still expected to wear masks whenever they’re not seated at their tables, and her staff must be fully vaccinated and continue to wear masks at all times. But that’s as far as she feels she can go, short of legislative intervention. “When there was a mask mandate, even when it was a mandate from the city and from the county, it was such a mess,” says Techamuanvivit. “And this is even worse, right? Requiring to see someone’s evidence of vaccination or tests?”
“You’re creating all of this potential for explosive interactions.”
Roots Chicken Shak owner and Top Chef contestant Tiffany Derry, who operates restaurants in food halls in Austin and Plano and a brick-and-mortar just outside of Dallas, kept a mask mandate for guests and staff for much of the pandemic, an unpopular decision in Texas. In an essay for Eater in March, she wrote that she was “overcome with a mix of emotions — mostly shock, anger, and disbelief” when Abbott rescinded the state’s mask mandate.
“In Texas, we are already feeling the effects of Gov. Abbott’s decision,” wrote Derry. “Restaurants like mine are starting to see backlash from guests who don’t want to support us for trying to keep everyone safe. Some businesses have received threats, guests have caused public scenes, and Yelpers are leaving negative reviews based on mask policies.”
Months later, Derry and her business partner Tom Foley continue to recommend that their staff wear masks, but they are no longer requiring that their guests do so. “We take a firm stance that this is a health issue, not a political issue,” says Foley. “But masks have breached and straddled health and politics, and sometimes those recommendations are not understood in terms of health prioritization.” In other words, masking has become such a politically contentious issue in Texas that restaurant operators don’t feel as if they can possibly require customers to wear them inside their restaurants, even amidst a new surge in COVID cases.
In what might mark a tidal shift, Danny Meyer, one of the most influential restaurateurs in the country, just announced that his New York-based Union Square Hospitality Group will require proof of vaccination from all indoor diners and drinkers, as well as current employees and new hires. “This is the most logical thing I’ve ever seen,” Meyer said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “I’m not a scientist, but I know how to read data and what I see is that this is a crisis of people who have not been vaccinated, and I feel strong responsibility, on our part as business leaders, to take care of our team and our guests, and that’s what we’re doing.” Meyer says he’ll give employees 45 days to get vaccinated.
For some operators, business has been tough for more than a year, so the latest mask mandate doesn’t really change much in terms of trying to remain open. John and Roni Cleveland, owners of Los Angeles restaurant Post & Beam, told Eater they’ve required that staff and guests wear masks since the beginning of the pandemic. They don’t anticipate that a second mandate — or a proof of vaccination requirement — will affect business any more than the pandemic already has.
Back in Oakland, Reagan of Kon-Tiki noticed that sales had gone down as infection rates began to spike in the Bay Area. But in the last week, after beginning to require proof of vaccination or a negative test result, according to Reagan, sales, price per ticket, and server tips have already gone up — indicating that where there is some level of assurance about COVID safety, diners may remain undeterred about venturing out.
“We’re not taking a position on why or why not to get vaccinated,” says Reagan. “But we’re saying that customers and staff are both demanding it, and we just want to make sure we’re not getting anyone sick.”
Still, the delta variant marks a concerning new twist in the pandemic, and threatens to pull diners, restaurant workers, and business owners alike into further precarity, where one thing remains certain: The best thing anyone can do is get vaccinated and wear a mask.
Now Is the Time to Make Your Kitchen More Sustainable. Here’s How.
July 29, 2021
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Even renters with gas stoves can make meaningful changes now
For decades, Americans have punted on the climate. But in 2020, as the pandemic trapped folks inside, the weather raged outdoors: fires in California, snow in Texas, hurricanes in the Gulf, the hottest year on record. Now, as many cities excitedly burst out of COVID restrictions, the weather forecast for 2021 may put a damper on that jubilation.
“There is an ongoing conflict between the level of commitment you have to make and the convenience-sacrifice for environmental action that feels pretty real,” says Sarah Rich, a freelance editorial director who has written extensively at the intersection of food, design, and sustainability. “If you have to spend more money on something, or if it takes too long, or if it’s difficult to figure out, or requires a huge change in habits, then those are all barriers to adoption.”
COVID took care of some of those barriers, forcing many of us to adopt new habits. We had to do meal prep to save time, but we accidentally increased our energy efficiency too, by adding more food to each pot and more pans to the hot oven. We bought ingredients in bulk to avoid trips to the grocery store, but also reduced packaging waste and saved gas on car trips. We redesigned our kitchens to make them more liveable, but also upgraded to energy-efficient appliances. We picked up cast-iron cookware to improve our cooking game, but also invested in items that will last for generations.
As people reemerge into the outside world, there’s no reason to leave behind these lessons of indoor life, and this transitional period is an excellent time for any stragglers to adopt new sustainable practices. “Once you have to make an adaptation to your habits you might discover something in there you want to sustain,” Rich says. “There are certain things people had to do, and then if you do it long enough it becomes part of your routine.”
The next normal, whatever it is, will take place on this same Earth, in our same kitchens. Now is the time to examine the practices and tools that can help us make the best of it.
Invest in energy-efficient big appliances
Like an electric vehicle, the greenest kitchen is only as climate-friendly as its power, so sourcing green energy should be your first step. “Buying clean energy from your utility company is a very important step that most people can take,” says Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Green energy from solar panels (which come with tax credits in some states) or programs like Clean Choice Energy in the Northeast may be cheaper than fossil fuels.
Even if you draw your power from a clean source, it’s still a good idea to reduce your overall consumption by investing in energy-efficient devices, especially with your largest appliances like refrigerators and ovens. “Energy Star deserves a shoutout,” says Sandra Goldmark, director of campus sustainability and climate action at Barnard College, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department program that identifies energy-efficient devices.
However, sometimes the greenest thing to do is to stick with what you’ve got. “It’s like a car: If you’re driving a crazy clunker gas guzzler, go ahead and change that out for an electric car now,” Goldmark says. “If you just bought a moderately energy-efficient car, wait for new technology.” She explains that even energy-efficient appliances come with embodied carbon: the resources, materials, and human labor required to construct them. While very old appliances are relatively inefficient, in many areas you can find lightly used (and cheaper) items for sale that are only a year or two old.
Stop using (so much) gas to cook
With increasing evidence that gas stoves are bad for us and bad for the environment, we’ll all need to upgrade to electric or induction models eventually (or more immediately if you live in California). For anyone — especially renters, who can’t alter a gas line or replace a stove — Dawn Danby, cofounder and principle of environmentally minded design studio Spherical, suggests popping the grate off one of your gas burners and putting a one-burner induction stove in its place, allowing you to dip your toes into electric cooking.
If even that is too ambitious, Danby adds, “Pressure cookers are incredibly efficient, far more so than a lot of other ways of cooking. There’s a reason there’s a cult of the Instant Pot.”
Consider your ingredients
Sustainable food systems are a much larger conversation that has been addressed in more depthelsewhere, but Maibach puts it succinctly: “Eating a diet rich in grains, fruits, and vegetables, and cutting back on meat and dairy, is good for our health and good for our climate.”
Buy fewer tools and appliances, and plan on repairing what you have
For smaller appliances, Goldmark suggests legacy brands like Cuisinart, which sell replacement parts so you don’t have to buy a whole new machine when something breaks. Elsewhere, try to invest in quality and take care of your things. That means oiling your cutting board so it doesn’t splinter and seasoning your cast iron so it lasts longer.
As for all the other tools and objects in your kitchen, don’t go out and replace everything with a laundry list of sustainable alternatives. “We are living in a context where systems change is being positioned as affected through consumer choice, which is a completely false construct,” Danby says. “Cloth bags for your broccoli, little scrubbers made out of bamboo and horse hair, these are lovely things to have in the world,” she explains. “They can also be a distraction. They are symbolic of change. Meanwhile, you bought oat milk in a giant plastic container once a week and you’ve already bought far more plastic than you avoided with your little scrubber.”
Overall, just buy less. Goldmark points out that in 2020, for the first time in human history, all human-made stuff on Earth outweighed all organic matter. Beyond the embodied carbon of those extra spoons and mugs and kitchen gadgets, Goldmark argues excess stuff begets more waste. An overpacked kitchen drawer can make someone buy a new garlic press to replace the one they thought they lost, the same way an overfilled fridge makes someone neglect produce and dairy in the back until it’s rotten or expired. Channel your inner Marie Kondo, audit your kitchen, donate everything you don’t need, and try not to immediately refill your space with junk.
Do what you can keep doing
Since the pandemic began, many of us have adopted efficient shopping and cooking practices out of necessity, but maintaining those habits post-pandemic could help make our lifestyles greener (and easier) in the long run. Look for stores reintroducing self-serve bulk sections and invest in quality food containers to continue saving money on ingredients in bulk, cut down on packaging, and reduce the number of trips to the store. Even if you return to the office, continue prepping meals on weekends and remain flexible with how you use ingredients to ensure you always have a decent meal after work. Clean the kitchen faster by integrating composting into your cooking routine, and reorganize your fridge to keep perishable ingredients visible to avoid food waste in the back. And pass down all these good habits to your kids, along with family recipes, to make them great helpers in the future.
Overall, look for ways to make these new behaviors easy and fun. Climate action doesn’t have to — and in fact shouldn’t — feel like a chore. “Nobody does anything because of guilt. They do for a minute, but it gets old,” Danby admits. She suggests looking for ways you can create environmental habits that also bring you joy. “I prefer using the induction range. I prefer using the cast iron. I prefer cooking in bulk because then I don’t have to cook as much. I prefer not having as much particulate matter in my kitchen,” she says, referring to recent research on the dangers of gas stoves to indoor air quality. “Those are all intrinsic motivators that aren’t tied to my having a dashboard on the wall telling me what my carbon footprint is. Those have more sustained effects.”
Collective action
While individuals replacing old refrigerators and cooking in bulk may help to a certain point, Maibach emphasizes, “The most important action we can take, however, is to tell our elected officials that we need them to implement climate-smart policies, including and especially policies that will give us 100 percent clean, renewable energy as soon as possible.”
The climate change conversation has shifted from convincing people that climate change is real to convincing them it is immediate and personal. “Most Americans accept that climate change is a problem,” Maibach says, “but they see it as a distant problem — in time (not yet), space (not here), and species (not us).” While COVID has helped some people connect the dots in their own lives, large systems change likely can’t be accomplished by individual consumers.
But it’s important to recognize that the pandemic has also shown how individual action can turn into communal action. The two are not mutually exclusive. Goldmark rejects the argument that individual actions don’t matter in the global fight against climate change. That thinking is damaging, absolving people of responsibility and negating their power.
“If fixing your toaster means you’re not going to fight for the right policies and you’re not going to vote and you’re not going to march, then fine, don’t fix your toaster,” she says. “But I think for most people, taking those individual actions galvanizes them. It’s a way to educate each other, to socialize these important behaviors, and to talk about it at the level where cultural change actually happens, which is in the community, in the schools, in the home.”
I do a lot of my grocery shopping at the bodega on my corner, and my diet is shaped more by the produce — the trusty broccoli, a plastic tray of grapes, an occasional pre-sliced mango — I find on its shelves than I should probably admit on this food site. But it is through this kind of grab-and-go subsistence that I fell in love with turkey bacon.
On a recent trip to buy breakfast essentials, I realized my corner store is halal — compliant with Islamic dietary law — and only sells turkey bacon, and not the pork I was looking for. The turkey variation was the same color as deli ham, the same shape as pork bacon, but without any sign of fat or marbling. I was not optimistic, but I grabbed some and headed home.
In the pan, the turkey bacon was about as promising as it was on the shelf. Without any fat, it sort of steamed as it cooked through, letting off way too much water as I flipped it back and forth. I doubted that these pink strips of turkey would light up my brain the way a really good slice of bacon does, or would even be crisp enough to hold their form as I dragged them through pools of egg yolk.
I tipped a little olive oil into the pan in hopes of nudging the turkey bacon in the direction of life, and that’s when it transformed. The edges crisped up, the pinkish meat turning a pleasingly bacon-like brown. Whereas the lack of fat initially worried me, I was thrilled to find no coating of grease across my kitchen, and no bacon smell seeping into everything I own, as it would with pork. And the turkey bacon itself? Delicious.
Before I’m crucified by the well actually, turkey bacon isn’t even real bacon people, I should say that I was never — even back in the mid-aughts when bacon was in everything from cookies to perfume — that big a fan. I like bacon, but I find the saltiness more satisfying coming from a round slice of Canadian bacon, and the crispness more appealing on a crackling slice of broiled pork belly. Bacon is good enough at everything it does — adequate and capable, but never amazing. Sure, it’s good next to a tall stack of pancakes, but so is anything doused in maple syrup. The fanciest bacon — that super thick-sliced, perfectly smoky-sweet stuff — is fantastic, yes, but rarer and harder to find than bacon fanatics would have us believe.
Regular turkey bacon, on the other hand, doesn’t harbor all the stubborn fat when it’s cooked to a chewier texture, and if it’s crisped further, it doesn’t become as dry and brittle like the pork stuff. It gained popularity in the 80s and 90s, bolstered by diet culture’s incessant and berating calls to eat less fat and sacrifice flavor in pursuit of cutting calories. But as a late 90s baby, I missed out on most of this, and had never eaten turkey bacon before I accidentally came across it at my bodega. Maybe, because I’m free from memories of the low-fat diet era, I didn’t hesitate to add fat to the pan to make the turkey bacon excel. It takes a very generous glug of olive oil to transform the unpromising strips into an ideal breakfast.
Admittedly, turkey bacon is not quite as straightforward a product as its pork cousin. While bacon bacon comes from a pig’s belly, turkey bacon comes from… everywhere. A mixture of light and dark turkey meat is ground and pressed into a bacon-like form. But that’s fine. Whatever the cut and process, I’m into it.
I now fold my newly precious turkey bacon into sandwiches, I eat it alongside eggs, pancakes, or waffles. I — you get the idea — treat it just how I treat other bacon. It is definitely less rich, but that just leaves space for me to eat about twice as much. I won’t sit here trying to convince anyone that turkey bacon tastes more like bacon than actual bacon. It doesn’t. But it does deliver in all the ways I want it to, something regular bacon never has.
You Don’t Need to Pay $12 for Mac and Cheese Ice Cream. Make It Yourself Instead.
July 28, 2021
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How to make Van Leeuwen’s savory-sweet flavor using Kraft mac and cheese
A few nights ago, I had the pleasure of stopping by Palizzi Social Club — a hundred-year-old members-only Italian spot in South Philly — for an after-dinner drink. At the bar, in between rounds, my friend suggested that since we’d already eaten, we should order Palizzi’s famous dessert instead. Soon after, we were digging into a big old slice of Mom’s Ricotta Cheese Pie: rich, crumbly, tangy, salty, and sweet, with an almost-savory almond crust. With an Amarena cherry on top, the pie — a dessert complemented by the savory flavor and creamy texture of cheese — was the perfect nightcap.
Cheese and sugar — or creamy richness amplified by sweetness — is a match made in heaven, but you wouldn’t know that based on the indignation people registered when Van Leeuwen announced its limited-edition Kraft macaroni and cheese ice cream. The chorus of voices reacted with confusion and revulsion and even outrage. “Cheese ice cream?” Hoda Kotb said with a grimace on the show she co-hosts with Jenna Bush Hager. Kotb visibly winced as she tasted it, adding, “It’s just not ringing my bell.” Stephen Colbert was more equivocal, saying coyly, “It’s happening.” The Cut, on the other hand, wrote what many people were thinking: “This Is What Greets You at the Gates of Hell.”
It’s strange that the combination of cheese and sugar seems to inspire such derision. What’s not to love about a rich, salty ingredient gussied up for an after-dinner sweet course?
Consider the best-known of the cheese desserts: the cheesecake. Most are made with actual pounds of cream cheese and cups of sugar and little else beside eggs, but you rarely hear people complain that cheesecake is the devil’s dish. Then there are the rich ricotta pies, the delightful cannoli, the tangy cheese blintzes covered in fruit preserves — nothing to see here but delicious treats for all occasions. Have you ever had fruit and cottage cheese for breakfast? Have you ever enjoyed a slice of baked brie with raspberry jam at a cocktail party? For holidays, do you not eat apple pie made with cheddar cheese? Or cardamom-flavored ras malai? Or hot melty kanafeh covered in shredded crispy phyllo pastry and sweet rose syrup? Cheese shows up in dozens of desserts and cultures, and that’s because rich, cheesy things taste good when they’re made a little sweeter.
People save a very particular kind of revulsion for any ingredient that is conspicuously savory or otherwise controversial in ice cream. In the early aughts, when scoop shops in the U.S. started to experiment with flavors like corn and green tea, there were similar expressions of doubt and confusion. But ice cream — by dint of its dairy-forward ingredients alone — is the perfect foundation for the rich, sharp complement of cheese. Ice cream can be too saccharine and one-note, and cheese provides a savory balance to its potentially cloying sweetness. In the Philippines, brands like Magnolia and Selecta make cheese and ube ice cream and cheese and corn ice cream, sometimes with real cubes of cheese mixed in. In Mexican cuisine, there are recipes for queso fresco ice cream that play up the sharp, salty flavors of goat’s and cow’s milk. Even the American brand Cold Stone Creamery sells a kind of cheese ice cream: Their cheesecake variety is made with cream cheese flavoring, whatever that means.
It’s understandable that mac and cheese would seem out of place in ice cream, especially if you think there are actual pieces of noodle in it (which there aren’t) — but don’t knock it until you try it. Like cheesecake, ricotta pie, blintzes, and the countless other cheese desserts we all enjoy at other times and in other places, once you taste it or make it yourself, you may realize that actually, it makes perfect sense. Here are two ways to try it:
Mac and Cheese Ice Cream Recipe
Yields approximately 1 quart
Ingredients:
1¾ cups heavy cream
1¼ cup whole milk
½ cup sugar
⅓ cup light corn syrup
⅛ teaspoon salt
4 large egg yolks
2 packets of Kraft macaroni and cheese powder
Instructions:
Step 1: Combine heavy cream, whole milk, ¼ cup sugar, corn syrup, salt, and cheese powder in a medium saucepan. Heat over medium-high for 5 to 7 minutes, whisking frequently until milk is steaming or the temperature reaches 175 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
Step 2: While the mixture heats, whisk egg yolks and remaining ¼ cup sugar in a medium-sized heatproof bowl until thoroughly combined. Keep whisking until you have a light-yellow mixture. Don’t do this step too far in advance, as the sugar will burn the eggs, causing the protein to clump together — if this happens, it’s irreversible and best to start over.
Step 3: Remove hot cream from heat and pour about a third of the mixture in a steady stream over the egg yolks, whisking constantly. This is the tempering stage; failing to whisk the egg mixture will cook the egg yolk and cause it to have irregular lumps.
Step 4: Pour the yolk mixture back into the saucepan and return to the stove, cooking over medium-low heat until the temperature reaches 170 degrees, or when the mixture coats the back of a spoon.
Step 5: Immediately remove from heat and place bowl in an ice bath, stirring to cool the mixture down. The mixture will taste sweet, but the sweetness will mellow as it cools.
Step 6: Cover and refrigerate until cold.
Step 7: Strain custard through a fine-mesh sieve, then transfer to an ice cream maker. Churn until the mixture resembles soft serve, about 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the make of your machine. Make sure not to over-churn. This will cause the ice cream to become dense.
Step 8: Freeze until firm, 4 hours or preferably overnight.
Herbed White Cheddar Mac and Cheese Ice Cream Recipe
Yields approximately 1 quart
Ingredients:
1¾ cups heavy cream
1¼ cups whole milk
½ cup sugar
⅓ cup light corn syrup
⅛ teaspoon salt
4 large egg yolks
2 packets of Annie’s Shells & White Cheddar cheese powder
10 sprigs fresh sage, or 6 sprigs fresh rosemary, or ¼ cup of whole black peppercorns (optional)
Instructions:
Step 1: Combine heavy cream, whole milk, ¼ cup sugar, corn syrup, salt, cheese powder, and optional herbs or peppercorns in a medium saucepan. Heat over medium-high for 5 to 7 minutes, whisking frequently until milk is steaming or the temperature reaches 175 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
Step 2: While the mixture heats, whisk egg yolks and remaining ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar in a medium-sized heatproof bowl until thoroughly combined. Keep whisking until you have a light-yellow mixture. Don’t do this step too far in advance as the sugar will burn the eggs, causing the protein to clump together — if this happens, it’s irreversible and best to start over.
Step 3: Remove hot cream from heat and pour about a third of the mixture in a steady stream over the egg yolks, whisking constantly. This is the tempering stage; failing to whisk the egg mixture will cook the yolk and cause it to have irregular lumps.
Step 4: Pour the yolk mixture back into the saucepan and return to the stove, cooking over medium-low heat until the temperature reaches 170 degrees, or when the mixture coats the back of a spoon.
Step 5: Immediately remove from heat and place bowl in an ice bath, stirring to cool the mixture down.
Step 6: Cover and refrigerate until cold. When cold, taste the mixture — if the flavor of the herbs hasn’t fully absorbed to your taste, add additional sprigs to taste and leave the mixture in fridge for 12 additional hours.
Step 7: Strain custard through a fine-mesh sieve, then transfer to an ice cream maker. Churn until mixture resembles soft serve, about 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the make of your machine. Make sure not to over-churn, as this will cause the ice cream to become dense.
Step 8: Freeze until firm, 4 hours or preferably overnight.
Some ice cream-making tips:
Freeze a glass or metal container before pouring in the churned ice cream for storing in the freezer. This prevents the ice cream from melting. It becomes dense and hard if it melts.
It’s important to strain the custard through a double-meshed sieve or a splatter screen to remove any lumps that could get in the way when the custard is churning.
It’s very possible to make the custard base a day ahead before churning in an ice cream machine to ensure it is properly chilled.
Another good idea is to place a piece of wax or parchment paper over the ice cream’s surface to prevent contact with air, inhibiting freezer burn.
Always follow your ice cream machine’s manufacturer instructions. If you have a unit that uses a frozen bowl, freeze it overnight so it remains cold during the churning process.
Louiie Victais a chef, recipe developer, food photographer, and stylist living in Las Vegas. Recipes tested by Louiie Victa
All the Best Japanese Snacks to Eat While Watching the Olympics
July 27, 2021
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We can’t be there in body, but we’re definitely there in stomach
With more circumstance than pomp, the Tokyo Olympics began on Friday with a toned-down opening ceremony that sought to set the mood for the games. And in a way, it has. A smaller Parade of Nations marched in front of empty stands, and a moment of silence acknowledged those lost in the past year (if not the full realities of the ongoing pandemic). The bumpy path to Tokyo 2020 has highlighted long-standing issues with the Olympics that often get lost among the stories of athletic prowess. For every athlete beating the odds to reach the games, there is another who had their body policed, or was denied the access and support they rely on to compete. For every glitzy new stadium, there are throngs of residents displaced by the rapid expansion required of the host city.
My father ran track and field in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, so I learned to love the mythology of the games before I learned almost anything else. Even as I approach this year’s Olympics with a hair less wide-eyed awe, I still can’t help but admire the lifelong path that brings athletes to the games: Years of training and sacrifice for a single moment in front of an audience of the entire world.
But this year in Tokyo, the stands are mostly empty, and I’m looking for another way to support these amazing competitors. As the author of a snacks-focused newsletter, I logically turned to snacks for the answer. Snacking is a fitting homage to Tokyo, the capital of a nation whose own snack culture is all-encompassing. Picking just one Japanese snack is as overwhelming as deciphering the NBC Olympics broadcast schedule. The best approach, I find, is trying as many as possible. Here then are a handful of my favorite snack standouts, as well as recommended sport pairings — a fitting way to honor the athletes of Tokyo 2020. Happy snacking.
If gummy candy ever surprises you, it usually comes from the flavor instead of the texture. These squares combine fluffy opaque gummy with smaller flavor-packed translucent bits. The white peach variety is fragrant and slightly floral without crossing into cloying sweetness. The bouncy flavor will send your tastebuds flying almost as high as the gymnasts stringing together combinations midair.
The innovation of Japanese Kit Kats knows no bounds, with flavors that draw inspiration from local Japanese ingredients like sake, adzuki beans, and even the matcha flavor that used to be rare but can now be found at Asian markets across the U.S. and even in the international aisle of some grocery stores. This is the first Kit Kat to use whole-grain flour to give the wafers a unique texture. And much like the incredibly fancy horses of dressage, whole grains like oats will do your body good (even if they are in a candy bar).
At the heart of Japan’s snack culture are konbini, convenience stores like Lawson, and 7/11. Built to serve customers on the move, the packaging of the products they carry often reflects that frantic energy. Coolish shakes are packaged in a pouch that softens in your hands to reach the ideal creamy consistency, no cup or straw required. Flavors range from classics like vanilla and Belgian chocolate to melon soda float. These can be hard to find in the states, but Klondike just launched pouch shakes that try to recreate the same experience. Because if you can rush into the terrifying abyss of the ocean with just a wetsuit and a surfboard, you don’t need a bowl and spoon for your frozen treats.
If you are already a fan of ramune sodas — the ones that come in a glass bottle sealed with a fancy marble — this candy that shares the same name is right up your alley. They’re small pressed-sugar candies, similar in texture to Smarties (the American non-chocolate ones) or Sweetarts, with a fizzy bite. Even though they taste delicious, an energy drink candy without actual energy feels pretty similar to the promotional push behind skateboarding’s Olympic debut in a country that largely discourages skateboarding in public spaces.
The Black Thunder bar started life as an underdog put out by a small confectionery and grew in popularity to become one of Japan’s most famous candy bars. Its rise to fame is for one reason: It is very good. Puffed rice and cookie crumbles come together with chocolate in a bar where no two bites are the same, but every bite is enjoyable. This special edition uses cultured butter to create a salty-sweet nod to the heavily French-inspired Japanese pastry culture. If I had to climb a mountain without ropes, I hope the uneven terrain would be a combination of cookie crumbles and puffed rice because I am not great with heights.
It might seem excessive to make a potato-themed potato chip but these take a lot less effort than actual Hasselback potatoes with just as much flavor (even though the shape looks a bit more like an accordion than an artfully sliced potato). The chip is precision-engineered to deliver flavor in record time, like a canoe weaving through the slalom gates.
Lemon with salt is a popular summer flavor in Japan and you’ll find that it shows up in both sweet and savory applications. Pretz are Pocky’s savory cousin and the simple, thin sticks hold more flavor than the tiny size would lead you to believe. Grab one and shout “En garde!” as you challenge a fellow snacker to a bout.
If you took the cheesy powder out of Cheetos and used their unbeatable crunch as a canvas for other flavors, you’d have the Calbee Grill-A-Corn line. Mala spice is a standout flavor because it has a warm, slow-building heat that seems negligible until you accidentally eat a whole bag and your mouth is on fire. The crunch works like a bike gaining momentum on the track: You can’t stop it.
Tiny rice crackers that resemble persimmon seeds give this snack its name and unsalted peanuts are their complement. It’s a simple snack with a small price and a big payoff. You could eat them all day. They are so iconic that Starbucks created a special-edition Frappuccino to showcase their glories. The individual components seem similar but, like the individual runners in each leg of a relay, they each have different roles and skills that make this snack a winner.
The time difference between Japan and the United States means that a few of the highest-profile events will be broadcast at hours that are not conducive to sleep. This canned coffee, a vending machine standby in Japan, is a good choice for a quick jolt of energy. You can drink it cold or warm it up by putting the can in a small heat-proof container and pouring in hot water until it is mostly submerged. It is powerful and versatile, like a rugby team on the hunt for a try.
Calpis (or Calpico) concentrate is my secret weapon for making drinks, both non-alcoholic and spiked, at home. It is a sweet fermented yogurt beverage syrup similar to Yakult that tastes incredible mixed with seltzer or fruit juice and soju. It comes in limited-edition fruit flavors like grape and orange, but the original will always have a place in my heart because of its versatility. It is an absolute knockout, any way you drink it.
There are no apples in this cider. Drinking Mitsuya feels like chugging ginger ale at 10,000 feet on a plane, and the flavor falls somewhere between a soda fountain Sprite and a citrus-flavored seltzer. It’s refreshing without being too heavy and once you try it, you’ll wish you had access to it every day. Like a good dive, it doesn’t make much of a splash, but that restraint is the real skill.
Pocari Sweat
Pair with Modern Pentathalon
The name might give you pause but Pocari Sweat is a sports drink without frills. The mild grapefruit taste has a touch of salt and is formulated to match the electrolytes lost when you, as the name implies, sweat. I can’t vouch for the efficacy of that claim but I can say that Pocari Sweat is what you want to drink on a humid summer day when a Gatorade is too sugary. Or when you are competing in a sport that combines every athletic skill known to man.
Folu Akinkuotu is a home cook and author ofUnsnackable, a weekly newsletter about the glory and agony of inaccessible international treats. You can find her onInstagramandTwittersearching for the golden ratio of selfies to snacks.
How to Make ‘Bake Off’ Star Nadiya Hussain’s Saag Paneer Spanakopita
July 27, 2021
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An impressive savory bake perfect for novice bakers
Nadiya Hussain may still be known to most from her star turn on the Great British Bake Off in 2015. She won the TV competition, but even if she hadn’t, it’s likely she would have ended up right where she is now — with her own show, multiple cookbooks, and a devoted fan base. But although baking is what introduced Hussain to the world, she didn’t publish a baking book until September 2020, when Nadiya Bakes came out in the U.K. “I had waited five years to get to a point where I was really happy and I wanted to make the best baking book that I possibly could,” she says. “That was a lot of pressure.” Hussain’s U.K. audience “really enjoyed” the book, and now Nadiya Bakes is available in the U.S., complete with measurements in cups and tablespoons and plenty of “flavor” over “flavour.”
In her return to a baking focus, Hussain covers all the bases, with chapters divided into categories familiar to Bake Off fans: tarts and pies, cookies, breads and buns, celebration bakes, and desserts, which includes recipes like tutti-frutti pavlova and Earl Grey sticky toffee pudding. There’s also a chapter on no-bake bakes and one on savory bakes. The goal was to offer up a recipe for anyone who wants to bake, no matter their experience level. “When I was writing this book it was about reminding myself of myself 10, 15, 16 years ago when I was a novice baker,” she says. “I wanted it to be the kind of book that can span all abilities so if you’re a novice baker, there’s a recipe in the no-bakes section and if you’re an accomplished baker, somebody who likes to spend lots of time in the kitchen, there are recipes in the celebration bakes that take a long time.”
But none of the recipes from either camp are basic. Hussain’s “money can’t buy you happiness” brownies have layers of cheesecake and nuts encased in dulce de leche. The only doughnuts you’ll find are stuffed with shredded chicken and dusted with a sugar and spice blend. “I think the recipes people like the most are the ones that are the most kind of ‘hmm’ — the ones people think that I’ve completely lost it and it’s like actually that can’t possibly be right, or there’s a typo or an error, or that recipe shouldn’t be in there. Those are the best recipes,” Hussain says.
Her inspiration for such recipes comes from all over. “A lot of it comes from things I’ve eaten, and I’ve never visited the country, things I grew up with, and things I’ve eaten in the U.K.,” she says. “It’s definitely a lot of hybrid baking.”
This recipe for saag paneer spanakopita falls into that latter category. It’s a dish Hussain had at a restaurant in the U.K. She loved the simplicity of the ingredients, as well as the use of phyllo, which despite its showstopper look makes this one of those recipes that even beginners should attempt. “[Phyllo dough] is one of those things that a lot of us are not willing to make no matter how good a baker we are,” she says. “There is no need for anyone to make phyllo pastry.”
Saag Paneer Spanakopita Recipe
Serves 4
Prep: 30 minutes
Cook: 50 Minutes
Ingredients:
For the filling:
1 pound 10 ounces (750 grams) spinach
¼ cup (60 grams) ghee, clarified butter, or unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
1 to 4 teaspoons chile flakes, depending on how hot you like it
1½ tablespoons (8 grams) cumin seeds
8 ounces (225 grams) paneer, grated
6 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 small onions, finely diced
1½ teaspoons salt
6 tablespoons (100 grams) ricotta
1 large egg, lightly beaten
Handful of cilantro, chopped
Handful of chives, chopped
For the pastry crust:
9½ ounces (270 grams) phyllo pastry, defrosted if frozen
7 tablespoons (100 grams) ghee, clarified butter, or unsalted butter, melted, for brushing
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
Instructions:
Step 1: Start by making the filling. Put the spinach in a large bowl, pour boiling water all over it, and use a spoon to dunk all the leaves under the surface. Let wilt for 5 minutes.
Step 2: Drain and rinse under cold water and, as soon as it is cool enough to handle, squeeze out as much moisture as you physically can. Chop then finely slice the clumps of spinach, before setting aside.
Step 3: Now add the ghee or butter to a nonstick frying pan. As soon as it is hot, add the chile flakes and cumin seeds and heat gently until the seeds begin to pop. Add the paneer and cook for 5 minutes, until you start to get some golden color on it. Add the garlic and onions and cook for 5 minutes, until the onions are soft.
Step 4: Add the salt and spinach and cook until there is no moisture at all left at the bottom of the pan.
Step 5: Take off the heat and let cool totally. Then add the ricotta, egg, cilantro, and chives and mix well.
Step 6: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease the inside of an 8-inch square baking pan.
Step 7: Brush a sheet of phyllo all over with ghee or butter and pop it into the center of the greased pan, leaving overhang on two sides.
Step 8: Get another sheet, brush it with ghee, then pop it into the pan as before, making sure that this time the overhang is on the other two sides. Do the same with another sheet, but this time place it in the pan at an angle, and do the same with another sheet, adding that on the opposite angle.
Step 9: What you should have now is the pan lined with phyllo, and with overhang on all the sides. Grease your three remaining sheets of phyllo and set them aside while you put the cooked filling into the pan and flatten the top.
Step 10: Fold the overhanging pastry edges up and over the top, ruffling them gently as you do. Now take each of the extra sheets, crumple them up, and place them gently on top until the filling is entirely covered. Sprinkle with the sesame seeds.
Step 11: Put into the oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the filling is hot and the pastry is crisp and golden. Let cool for 15 minutes before eating.
From sushi in a luxe private tatami room to gastropub steaks in a rooftop igloo, here’s where to eat in Utah’s fanciest ski town
Just 35 minutes from Salt Lake City International Airport, Park City is an easily accessible alpine oasis that has something for everyone: a walkable downtown, picture-perfect mountains, and an enviable food scene. When big events come to town — looking at you, Sundance Film Festival — the parties are next-level, with a bit of Hollywood glamour taking over the town’s historic Main Street. Come summer, adventure enthusiasts descend on Deer Valley, the Canyons, and Park City Mountain for biking, hiking, fly-fishing, rock climbing, and rafting, plus the Park Silly Sunday Market, a weekly farmers market-meets-street festival that stretches from June through September.
Whether the occasion calls for a lavish dinner and drinks after shopping in town or fueling up with brunch before ripping through trails on your mountain bike, Park City’s restaurants have you covered. From traditional Thai to healthy fast casual to the world’s best lobster roll, here are the essential restaurants of Utah’s most famous ski town and summer destination.
Update July 2021: Even though the Sundance Film Festival was virtual this year, winter in the Wasatch Back proved a relative financial success, despite the pandemic. Park City is expected to be “incredibly busy,” with few COVID restrictions left in place, though individual businesses may still enforce their own rules. Just in time for you to head for the hills on vacation, we’ve updated our restaurant guide, highlighting the most popular spots, from fine dining favorites to enduring cheap eats — all run by folks who should be applauded (and amply tipped) for making it through their toughest season ever.
Note: The inclusion of restaurants offering dine-in service should not be taken as an endorsement for dining inside. Studies indicate a lower exposure risk to COVID-19 outdoors, but the level of risk is contingent on social distancing and other safety guidelines. Check with each restaurant for up-to-date information on dining offerings. For updated information on coronavirus cases in your area, please visit theSummit Countywebsite orofficial state resources.
Katie Shapiro is a freelance cannabis and travel journalist who lives life at its highest and writes about it from her home base in Aspen. She is a senior contributor for Forbes and High Country columnist for the Aspen Times, with other work appearing in the Denver Post, Modern Luxury, Curbed, Thrillist, and more.
The hot new restaurant design trend taps into our need for escape
New restaurants are taking their decor on vacation.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the hospitality group Gin & Luck has opened Little Palm in the Ryder Hotel. Instead of the dark, moody, and dramatic interiors of Gin & Luck’s Death & Co bars in New York, Denver, and Los Angeles, Little Palm is decked out in pink palm-frond wallpaper and turquoise tile. Further south in Miami, at Pharrell Williams and David Grutman’s new restaurant Strawberry Moon in the Goodtime Hotel, designer Ken Fulk channeled midcentury resort destinations like Havana and Acapulco, with a pink scalloped bar dotted with green tile, pink-and-white-striped curtains, and wicker everywhere.
The look is not relegated to warm-weather locales. In Brooklyn, Fandi Mata’s soaring warehouse space is adorned with Moroccan tiles and filled with potted palms for a Mediterranean-meets-industrial vibe. Kokomo, a restaurant that opened last summer in Williamsburg, also transports diners with a bamboo bar, a plant-filled patio, and Bob Marley’s iconic lyric “Everything is gonna be alright” painted as a backdrop for their lively outdoor dining area. The New York version of vacay vibes is a little bit darker and grittier, but the impulse to make restaurants feel like sunny retreats is the same: We’re all desperate for a break from the daily grind — even if it’s just for a few hours over dinner.
A lot has been written about how COVID-19 will change the design of restaurants. From touchless technologies to four-season outdoor dining, the forecasts all point to how the layout and operations will change. As new bars and restaurants have begun to open again, we can finally start to see how all that time at home is impacting restaurants’ interiors — especially in Miami, which has had full-capacity dining since September 2020. With just a handful of new spots, it’s hard to predict where things are headed, but nostalgia-laced vacation decor is one of the first clear trends we can name looking at post-vax restaurant interior design.
Take a look at the biggest openings, and you’ll see glimmers of decades past, and in particular the 1920s and ’50s, two periods when America partied after wars (and in the ’20s, after a pandemic, too). In July, Los Angeles-based H.Wood Group is opening an outpost of their roaring ’20s-themed supper club Delilah inside the Wynn Las Vegas; it’s influenced by the earliest supper clubs of Las Vegas from the 1950s. In addition to the ’50s-influenced Strawberry Moon, Fulk designed the newly opened ZZ’s Sushi Bar with hints of midcentury styling, including bentwood banquettes, palm-frond lights, and clamshell-shaped dining chairs.
Todd-Avery Lenahan, president and chief creative officer of Wynn Design & Development, suggests this craving for a sense of history has been building for years. “A younger audience has been drawn to legacy design because millennials in particular have become fatigued by the trendy throwaway quality of so much that’s forced upon consumers today,” Lenahan told Eater. “Therefore design that has a greater sense of story and permanence has become highly appealing during this turbulent socioeconomic era.”
“Trendy throwaway” design has been the hallmark of the so-called millennial look described in Molly Fischer’s essay “The Tyranny of Terrazzo,” published ominously in early March 2020. In that essay, Fischer writes, “Ever since modernism brought industry into design, tastes have cycled between embracing and rejecting what it wrought. A forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial appeal will give way to one that’s backward-looking, handmade, authenticity-obsessed — which will then give way to some new variation on tech-forward mass style.” The millennial style — clean but quirky, cute but occasionally self-serious — touched everything from dishes to deodorant. And then millennials got locked inside their houses and apartments, staring at all those blob-adorned ceramics, minimally designed skincare products, and pastel-packaged third-wave coffee.
In this post-pandemic moment, diners are craving something more layered, more nuanced than the pale pinks and blond woods that dominated pre-pandemic. We want a sense of history, but instead of the pure nostalgia of the aging MAGA crowds, young diners recognize that the past was only great for a privileged few. What diners are responding to is history with a twist — maybe even a sense of humor. Fulk points out that his designs, and indeed other nostalgic-seeming spaces, are not pure historical recreations of, say, Acapulco’s Los Flamingos hotel in its midcentury zenith. Instead, Fulk says, “They feel evocative of another time or place, even if that place didn’t ever really exist. I don’t know what Miami in the 1950s was like, but I can imagine what it might’ve felt like to be there in its heyday — a glamorous time when my parents might have danced to a big band on their honeymoon. You take that feeling and create something that’s utterly modern and unlike anywhere else.”
That harkening-back-while-looking-forward is seen in the Panorama Room, designed by Snøhetta for the Graduate hotel on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Designers Marc Rose and Med Abrous told Vogue the design for the new 18th-floor restaurant was inspired by the Futurism of the early 20th century. “Because we felt we were doing something unprecedented in NYC, we decided to really embrace the future,” says Rose. The chrome and glass call back to Futurism’s obsession with the speed and motion of the Machine Age, and the velvet booths are vaguely retro. But the overall effect of the space feels like something from the not-too-distant future.
Alluding to the near past can also summon a feeling of escape. The Reagan-era revival that has swept the design world for the last five years can still be seen in restaurants, but this time around it’s more Miami Vice than Memphis. The Ettore Sottsass-inspired designs (all that terrazzo, all those squiggles) are being replaced with something that looks more like a chic grandma’s place in Boca (see those clamshell chairs at ZZ’s). “The 1980s was a very American sort of moment,” says Fulk. “They had that bit of flash and fun, but also that attitude of confidence.” (It’s a trend you’re likely also to see reflected in diners’ outfits too, as there is seemingly no end to ’80s and ’90s fashion trends to be revived.) For older millennials like me, the Miami Vice vibes are a reminder of our childhoods, but I wonder if there’s something else at work here. In the cyclical nature of design, it’s typical for trends to get plucked out from the period just before you were born. So if the ’80s-90s aesthetic appeals to Gen Z, it might have the bonus of making millennials feel young and hip, too.
Millennials craving the next new thing may also be responsible for the pendulum swing away from the black boxes and minimalist white interiors that were so popular in the aughts and early teens. In 2021 restaurants are full of happy colors with swaths of turquoise, orange, and especially pink (Little Palm and Fandi Mata both feature the rosy hue). Restaurant designers have dialed up the intensity from the pre-pandemic dusty pastels to decidedly pop-y shades. Color feels current again.
The poolside bar at Little Palm at the Ryder Hotel in Charleston.
Mike Ledford
The Little Palm dining room.
The connective thread through the various influences right now — the ’50s abundance, the ’80s confidence, the candy colors — is optimism. Line up photos of the new restaurants and it’s clear they share an aesthetic of unapologetic joy — think playful wallpaper, cheerful lighting, and peppy stripes.
Together, these style trends suggest restaurant diners want a break — not just after the pandemic, but from the darkness of the Trump years. We want to dine in a Wes Anderson version of a Boca Raton beach club, to put our troubles behind us while we put the rest of the pieces of our world back together. After nearly a year and a half of dining at home, these happy places feel right: Don’t you want to enjoy your first meals out in a place designed to make you smile?
“It’s hard to describe it as a design direction, but I do think that part of the DNA of them is that they are these incredibly optimistic spaces,” says Fulk of Strawberry Moon and ZZ’s Sushi Bar. “They are hopeful fun spaces that are purposely designed to celebrate, come together, and to actually be near one another. Who would have ever thought that that felt like such a rarefied thing?”
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Mike Ledford
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