The Best Loaf Cake Recipes, According to Eater Editors
October 29, 2021
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From banana bread to pumpkin bread to French-style yogurt cake, the easy baking recipes we keep returning to
Banana bread became a pandemic staple for an obvious reason — baking in a loaf pan is possibly the easiest kind of baking there is. And as autumn practically demands a treat that’s simple and comforting and best paired with a warm beverage and some kind of knit throw, here now are the loaf cake (and yes, sometimes bread) recipes that Eater’s editors return to for fall vibes, time and again.
As someone of the belief that the combination of miso and maple is akin to godliness, I am the target demographic for Dorie Greenspan’s miso-maple loaf. Out of the 150 recipes in her new cookbook, Baking with Dorie, it is the one I baked first, impatient to devour whatever emerged from the oven. Needless to say I wasn’t disappointed. This is a plain but potent loaf, faintly reminiscent of pound cake but with a savory edge from the miso. That said, this is not a loaf that screams MISO and MAPLE but rather mentions them in a more normal conversational tone. The two work with the loaf’s other standout ingredients, buttermilk and orange zest, to create a warm, layered, sweet-savory loaf that is incredibly hard to stop eating, whether you’re a miso-maple true believer or not. — Rebecca Marx, senior editor
Everyone deserves easy kitchen favorites, recipes that are more meditation than consternation. One of my go-tos is this stupendously simple zucchini bread, which lives up to half its name with buckets of zucchini, but betrays itself as more of a “cake” than a “bread” with its hefty dusting of turbinado on top. Plop the zucchini strands in a bowl (no wringing out required) with wet ingredients, stir, add dry ingredients, stir, and scrape it all into the pan. In an hour, boom, zucchini cake loaded with green flecks. If you can avoid digging in immediately, it’s a worthy exercise to make it in the evening, let it rest as suggested, and reward yourself with a buttered slice in the morning; but in the spirit of the loaf cake, I say eat whenever you’re hungry. — Nick Mancall-Bitel
Rebekah Peppler,À Table: Recipes for Cooking and Eating the French Way
Many of the things that the French do well, they do simply. A crispy baguette; flaky plain croissants with golden crusts; supple and delicate yogurt cake. There’s beauty in simplicity: How can you improve on the moist tangy flavor of an ever-so-simple, no-bells-and-whistles yogurt cake for an afternoon tea or petit dejeuner? Well, what if the adaptation made it better? The expat yogurt cake recipe from Rebekah Peppler’s À Table — a French cookbook by an American writer — is a rare exception to the rule that everything French is best enjoyed in its purest form. With the addition of poppy seeds and a crumble topping, the expat yogurt cake variation gives the French traditional snacking cake a bit of American flavor, while staying true to its original purpose. Now how about that for diplomacy. — Dayna Evans, Eater Philly editor
Genevieve Gerghis,Bestia: Italian Recipes Created in the Heart of L.A.
Banana bread — so 2020 amirite? You are not. At least, not when it comes to this banana bread. Genevieve Gerghis of the Los Angeles restaurant Bestia put this recipe for her homemade butter-topped banana bread in the restaurant’s 2018 cookbook (one that, okay yes, I co-wrote, but the fact I still make this recipe on the reg should tell you something). The difference comes from bananas that are roasted first, a genius move that both amplifies their flavor and sort of cheats the whole “brown banana” requirement. Then, after baking, an entire half-cup of butter is brushed into the loaves’ split tops that makes the cake supernaturally moist, and a sprinkling of sugar while still warm creates a sweet crusty top. Do not omit the walnuts in this one if you can help it; they balance all that sweet banana flavor and also, you’re a grown up — a little texture won’t hurt. — Lesley Suter, travel editor
My favorite loaf cake — and one of the only desserts I bake that is consistently a not-disaster — only sort of follows the original recipe. I highly recommend making the very delicious original recipe first, just to get your sea legs. But when you’ve got sweet potatoes sprouting in a cupboard and you’re ready to take some chances, here’s (roughly) how I’ve adjusted this recipe: I substitute in an equal amount of sweet potato mash, from a roasted sweet potato or two; the flavor of the Japanese and Korean yellow-fleshed ones are particularly pleasing. Vegetable oil makes way for a cup of almost vegetal olive oil that adds a really nice earthiness to an otherwise-sweet loaf. Sometimes I’ll tap in a bit of turmeric for that beautiful golden glow, and an extra quarter teaspoon of salt because desserts! are never! sweet enough! I promise that if I can make this loaf, to such consistently excellent results, this recipe really is foolproof. — Elazar Sontag, staff writer
This is less a “recipe” and more just a simple set of guidelines — follow this set of extreme basics, and the world is your oyster. I like a less-sweet version (which might take this further away from the “loaf cake” parameters here), so just a half cup of sugar (instead of the 3⁄4 cup suggested) more than suffices. From there, though, I’ve added everything from extra bananas to chocolate chips to walnuts to swirls of cinnamon sugar (plan to pour the batter into the pan in three separate layers atop each other, and sprinkle a layer of cinnamon sugar on top of each). All yield equally satisfying results. — Erin DeJesus, Eater.com lead editor
Starchy, versatile, and nearly indestructible in the wild, cassava is one of the world’s most important tubers
In this country, the question of how to round out a meal of meat and vegetables with a starch usually leads straight to the potato. But in other regions of the world, particularly Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, the answer is frequently cassava. Large, starchy, and seemingly inedible when raw, the tuber can initially be intimidating, especially if you’ve never prepared one or lack a cultural connection to it — its rough skin and rootlike appearance might make you question how long it will need to boil until you can realistically sink your teeth into it. But for much of the world’s growing population, cassava is a major source of sustenance, making it a big player in our increasingly complicated food chain.
While cassava has recently become more visible in this country as an ingredient in health-conscious snacks and plant-based food products, it hasn’t quite found its way onto the average American’s dinner table. A lack of awareness is undoubtedly a factor, but cassava also finds itself the target of misinformation and even controversy. Needless to say, this important but misunderstood tuber deserves a closer look.
What is cassava?
Also commonly known as yuca or manioc, cassava is a tuber crop native to South America. The root grows similarly to potatoes, yams, or ginger by swelling underneath the earth to store nutrients for the following season. For centuries, cassava was eaten by Indigenous communities who live along the banks of the Amazon river, where it is believed to have originated.
From the ground up, cassava looks like a tall, thin tree with long leaves that can grow up to 3 meters in height. The thick roots underneath the surface are what usually get consumed as food, but the leaves are commonly eaten in West African cuisines as well.
There are two main varieties of cassava: sweet and bitter. The sweet variety is what you’ll find at your local supermarket and in cassava-based products; its flavor profile is mild, somewhat nutty, and subtly sweet. When boiled, both its taste and texture are very reminiscent of a cooked potato ready for a mash or wedge of butter.
Where does cassava grow?
As its Amazonian origins suggest, cassava grows well in tropical and subtropical climates, but its adaptability is what led it to become a global staple. One of the world’s most drought-resistant crops, it can withstand various harsh conditions and thrive in poor-quality soils. Durability and adaptability made cassava a predominant food source throughout the developing world, and today it helps feed over 800 million people across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Nigeria, Thailand, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are its biggest producers.
What is cassava used for?
In addition to being nearly indestructible in the wild, cassava is also incredibly versatile. Once the roots are harvested, they can either be sold as-is or transformed into an array of products.
If bought whole, the roots can be peeled, boiled, and then fried, mashed, or pureed. Their high levels of starch can be extracted to create tapioca, a common thickener for desserts, soups, and manufactured foods. Tapioca is also the key ingredient to the jelly-like pearls that so many of us enjoy in boba teas.
“Cassava is the most popular food crop in the whole of West Africa,” says Lookman Afolayan, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Buka. Opened in 2010, the Nigerian restaurant has become a gathering place for the local Nigerian community and others who are fans of West African cooking. “Preparation varies according to region, but every part of the cassava plant is used in West Africa,” Afolayan explains. “You can soak garri (fermented cassava flour) in cold water and eat it like a cereal with sugar or you can mix it in boiling water to make eba. The young, fresh leaves of the plant are used to make soups with smoked fish. It’s also the most common source of animal feed for goats and can be used as firewood once it’s dried.”
Tell me more about cassava flour.
Cassava can be ground and dried into a gluten-, grain-, and nut-free flour, making it a popular baking alternative for those with dietary restrictions.
“Ninety-five percent of my customers love our dough, while 5 percent ask if it’s undercooked because they’re not used to the chewy texture of cassava bread,” says Jorge Flores, owner of Cassava Empanadas in Chicago. Born and raised in Ecuador, Flores grew up eating meat-filled empanadas and pan de yuca (cheese-flavored cassava rolls) made from the root’s nutty flour.
“When I go back to Ecuador once a year, pan de yuca is the first thing I want,” he says of his decision to open his own cassava-focused shop. “There is some nostalgia that comes with eating these in the U.S., but I also liked the idea of having my own business.” When he first opened in 2010 he enjoyed a good reception, but was “more surprised by how many customers love our empanadas or bread because it’s gluten-free,” Flores says. “Now about 20 percent of my clientele is either celiac or gluten-free, so we slowly made it a big part of our concept.”
Sophia Pappas
Where can I buy cassava?
Raw cassava is commonly found in American grocery stores, especially those with extensive Latin American and Asian food sections. You can also often find cassava peeled and prepackaged in frozen food aisles. Latin American, Asian, and African food stores typically stock cassava-based products, and many health food stores sell cassava flours and sweeteners.
How do you prepare cassava?
As mentioned above, raw cassava should always be peeled before being prepared. If you buy it frozen, the pieces of cassava will come pre-peeled and ready for a boil in salted water. Once it’s soft and thoroughly cooked, the root can be fried to create delicious yucca fries, which are great with aioli, Parmesan cheese, or a steak dinner. You can also soak, ferment, grate, and press raw cassava in a cheesecloth to create garri flour, which is a process that typically takes about three days (you can also buy garri flour at the store).
“You’ll see every student in Nigeria with a bag of garri, which gets soaked in cold water and sweetened with sugar or honey to create a cereal. Garri is also how you make eba, which is a swallow food. In West Africa, swallow food is a type of soft food we eat with our meals,” says Afolayan.
On the sweet end of the spectrum, grated cassava can also be cooked with sugar and coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaves, and boiled to form suman, a Filipino snack similar to the Mexican tamal. Other sweet recipes include Indonesian kuih bingka ubi (a baked tapioca cake), tapioca puddings, and other various cakes.
“Once you boil it, you can fry cassava with some butter and garlic, which tastes great. But I’d say I eat cassava as a root about once a year,” says Flores. “I much prefer it as a flour to make empanadas or baked bread.” In its flour form, cassava can also be toasted for a salty side dish like or act as the base for some gluten-free flour tortillas and crackers.
But wait: I’ve heard that cassava is toxic. What gives?
The answer to this complicated question is: It depends. While that might not sound too reassuring, please note that sweet cassava (the variety sold commercially) has very low levels of cyanide, most of which is in the peel, which gets removed entirely when cassava is prepared properly. At least 50 percent of the root’s cyanide content is removed by boiling, and further reduced by other cooking methods like frying and baking. Cassava flour, which has been dried and pounded, has lost almost all of its cyanide content by the time it’s sold.
Cassava contains cyanogenic glycosides, which release cyanide into the body when consumed. Soaking or cooking the root thoroughly will eliminate small traces of cyanide, but those who consume yuca in large quantities, prepare it improperly, or don’t eat enough protein (which helps rid the body of cyanide) are still at risk, particularly if they consume bitter cassava, which has up to eight times the amount of cyanide as sweet cassava per kilogram. Consequently, the FDA warns against the consumption of bitter cassava since it requires a more thorough preparation process than sweet cassava to make it safe to eat. Although it can be found in markets in parts of Africa and South America, it is often used to make byproducts like cassava starch, flours, and condiments such as Guyanese cassareep, all of which involve heavy processing. It can also be used for bioethanol.
One case of cassava poisoning that made international headlines took place in Venezuela in 2017. Following the country’s economic collapse and subsequent food shortages, 28 people in a Caracas suburb died within days of each other, leading some to fear that a deadly virus was spreading within their community. The actual culprit was bitter yuca, which is illegal to sell as food in Venezuela, but had been sold by black market vendors looking to make a quick profit. Their victims had prepared the toxic tuber like its sweet counterpart, and therefore hadn’t thoroughly processed it to make it safe for consumption.
“Only two or three people have asked me if it’s safe to eat cassava in the past 11 years, but I usually reassure them that it’s safe to eat when cooked and that many things in our daily diet, like apple seeds, cherry pits, or bitter almonds, can be potentially toxic,” says Flores. When he makes his empanadas, he uses an already processed cassava flour that’s free of harmful toxins.
Almonds provide a good comparison to cassava. Like the root, there are both sweet and bitter types of almonds, with the bitter variation containing significantly higher amounts of cyanide.
Does cassava have any ecological benefits?
Because so much of the developing world relies on cassava for food security, the crop’s mass harvesting and subsequent ecological impact have made it a target for controversy. It’s widely believed that improperly managing cassava harvesting can lead to soil degradation, as the crop depletes essential nutrients from farmland. As populations in the developing world continue to rise, so does both the need for food security and the demand for cassava. The result is mass deforestation and lower yields for other essential crops.
And yet, if properly harvested, cassava can have ecological benefits. According to a recent report by the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, there is evidence that planting cassava may revive degraded land, making it suitable for other essential crops to grow. Studies on these possible benefits are ongoing, as environmentalists continue to voice concern about further deforestation in areas designated for cassava harvesting. But the effects of climate change, such as rising temperatures and more frequent droughts, mean that the hardy crop will remain a necessary component of our future food supply.
So what does the future of cassava look like?
“Latin Americans use cassava almost just as much as Africans do,” says Afolayan. “I can see it going mainstream, but I don’t think our communities have done a good job of promoting it. People haven’t been talking about it, but it’s used for too many things. People even bake bread with it.”
We can expect cassava to play a more prominent role in our day-to-day lives as we combat the side effects of climate change. The changes to our environment have encouraged research on cassava as a substitute for maize, which has experienced yield declines as temperatures rise and annual rainfall levels drop. Some modern-day uses include the manufacturing of fabrics, paper, and building materials like plywood. Cassava has also been used in the pharmaceutical industry as an ingredient in medications, as well as a source of feed for livestock. With less corn being harvested, cassava has been seen as a probable supplier of sucrose syrup and bioethanol fuel. In other words, expect to see cassava more frequently discussed in the worlds of environmentalism, science, and, hopefully, cooking. The next time you find yourself scratching your head about what potato recipe to serve guests, try your hand at any of the countless cassava-based recipes that span our world’s diverse gastronomies.
Sweetgreen’s IPO Proves, Once and for All, That It’s a Big Boy Tech Company
October 28, 2021
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Custom salad being made at a Sweetgreen in Washington, D.C. | Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
The salad chain has a billion-dollar valuation and no profitability in sight
This week, fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen announced its intent to go public and start trading on the New York Stock Exchange. As part of its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange commission to begin the IPO process, the company finally proved that it is, as it’s been arguing for years, actually a tech company and not just a run-of-the-mill expensive salad chain — by following in Uber and Doordash’s footsteps and posting consistent yearly net losses in the millions of dollars. As Dan Primack at Axios points out, those losses reported in the IPO filing — occurring every year since 2014 — contradict the chain’s claims in 2018 and 2019 that it was profitable.
Sweetgreen’s IPO follows in the footsteps of many restaurant brands (including Oregon-born coffee shop Dutch Bros. and Chicago hot dog favorite Portillo’s) — to pursue going public in the last year alone. It’s a huge step for the company, which plans to double the number of restaurants it operates across the country in the next five years, which would mean more than 280 locations for the chain scattered across 13 (or more) states. After its latest funding round, the company boasted a $1.78 billion valuation.
Sweetgreen’s owners have long insisted that the company sells a whole lot more than just salads. In a 2018 interview with Recode, co-founder Jonathan Neman described the chain as a “food platform,” not simply a restaurant. Eventually, it hopes to build a full “food ecosystem” that can facilitate delivery, managing its supply chain, and operating its stores via its proprietary tech platforms.
“In the media world, you had networks and distributors that took the content and distributed it. In our world, you now have these platforms. These Uber Eats of the world,” Neman said in 2018. “Our goal is to be a content creator and a food platform. So a full vertically integrated food system, from supply chain, production, content creation and ordering.”
In its S-1 filing, the chain reports that despite serving more than 1.3 million customers in the 90 days prior to its filings and raking in revenues of more than $300 million, Sweetgreen is not a profitable business — and it’s unclear when it will be. The company blames the pandemic for lower revenues in 2020, but the company is also burning tons of cash as it pursues both growth via new restaurants and making acquisitions like Spyce, a company that makes service robots which could, theoretically, end up making Sweetgreen’s salads instead of human workers.
In the world of tech, of course, this is par for the course. Plenty of wildly popular tech start-ups, like Uber and Netflix, were not profitable before going public. More than a decade after it was founded in 2009, Uber is finally hoping to have its first profitable quarter — ever! — this year. In the world of tech investing, growth is king. As long as Sweetgreen continues to promise its investors that it will open new stores and work on fancy salad robots, it’s likely that the company’s hype among investors will stay fully intact.
But what happens when, in five years, there is a Sweetgreen on every corner and it has to now, you know, be a restaurant? When every salad costs $30 because of inflation and supply chain shortages, and when we’re all tired of eating the same damn kale and quinoa salad for lunch every week? There are only so many ways to make a salad, and it’s unclear whether or not, even considering plans to add side dishes and desserts, Sweetgreen will ever be able to reach Chipotle or Starbucks levels of ubiquity. That question also becomes more complicated considering that the COVID-19 pandemic is still lingering. Sweetgreen’s business has largely been fueled by office workers, many of whom will now be able to work from home permanently. The company’s financials indicate that it has been able to replace some of the revenue lost from restaurants in central business districts by opening new restaurants in the suburbs, but it’s hard to think that the fates of in-person work and Sweetgreen aren’t intertwined, even as the popularity of delivery apps and ghost kitchens grows.
What is clear, though, is that the latest “restaurant unicorn” to be valued at more than $1 billion is maybe just a regular old tech unicorn, at least in the eyes of the venture capitalists that have already fueled its rise. What exactly that means for those of us who are more interested in the salads than stonks, remains to be seen.
Rocco DiSpirito Partners With NFT Curation Company for a Recipe NFT, If Any of That Makes Sense to You
October 28, 2021
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Chef Rocco DiSpirito | Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for NYCWFF
You could be the proud owner of a receipt to a recipe!
At this point it looks like the non-fungible token, or NFT, trend is not going away. Despite NFTs being an ecological disaster that don’t even guarantee someone won’t just copy-paste whatever digital painting you bought and use it for themselves, people keep buying them, and artists keep finding new things to turn into NFTs. Recently, Martha Stewart began selling portraits of herself as NFTs, and Pizza Hut sold off digital images of pizza (?). And now, chef Rocco DiSpirito will be unleashing a “Custom Recipe NFT” on the world.
DiSpirito has been laying low for a while, but it makes sense he’d be the name attached to an NFT recipe. He became the first chef to use reality TV as a vehicle to stardom with his 2003-2004 show The Restaurant, and had been a regular personality on shows like Top Chef, Guy’s Grocery Games, and Dancing With The Stars. And despite becoming famous for his Italian-fusion cuisine, he recently pivoted toward wellness, with a Keto cookbook and a line of protein powders and nut breads. The man knows how to spot a trend.
The recipe will launch on October 28 during the NFT festival NFT.NYC, along with the company Metaversal, which describes itself as “the first company to combine a venture studio and investment firm focused on NFTs.” The recipe will be “paired with The Fractals of Taste by Dustin Chan, a loopable 5-min video that complements the flavors and reflects colors referenced in DiSpirito’s first cookbook.”
While Metaversal is marketing this as the first “custom” NFT recipe, it’s not the first time a chef has gone into the NFT world. In July, Marcus Samuelsson auctioned off his Fried Yardbird recipe as an NFT, with proceeds going to the James Beard Foundation’s Restaurant Relief Efforts. Of course, that recipe was already published in The Red Rooster Cookbook, and subsequently online, so people were probably paying more for the private dinner for two at Red Rooster. It also looks like DiSpirito has even done a custom NFT recipe before, this past April as part of an Oscar benefit for the Colon Cancer Foundation. It’s unclear if the recipe being unveiled here is this same recipe, or a new one DiSpirito will be creating.
It’s important to note that, legally, a recipe is very different from a work of art. While a great deal of work goes into developing and writing successful recipes, under copyright law they are considered more akin to instructions. In a 2015 case in which the defendants were accused of copyright infringement for using the plaintiff’s recipes for a catering menu, the court ruled “the list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed, facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, a recipe’s instructions, as functional directions, are statutorily excluded from copyright protection.” Recipes can be copyrighted if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression,” such as detailed and flowery directions, or personal anecdotes to give context to the recipe.
Eater has reached out to Metaversal for more information on how this recipe will be created and conferred, and to see if DiSpirito’s recipe might include enough literary expression to warrant being more than a list of ingredients. But even then, “ownership” is slippery. “When you buy an NFT, you hold the right to claim ownership of the NFT itself and the right to exclude others from claiming ownership of the NFT. Beyond that, it will depend on whatever terms govern the NFT,” writes Frankfurt Kurnit on Lexology, and “unless the NFT includes a transfer of copyright in the underlying asset — which is not the case by default, then the author, not the NFT holder, owns the copyright.” This means that you might be paying thousands for a video file and a recipe that, while custom-made for you, you might not even own the IP of and thus could be published anywhere else at any time.
NFT-defenders always say they are a boon for artists and creators, allowing everyone to see exactly where a work comes from and whose hands it has passed through, preventing anyone from ripping off something and claiming as their own. And the conversation around who owns and should be credited for recipes has become more urgent in the past few years, as more people have called for recipe developers to cite their sources and influences. But owning this recipe would not make one the creator of it, nor would it prevent other people from cooking it without your knowledge or permission, if that’s even the goal, which would go against the entire spirit of the concept of “recipes” in the first place. So the question remains — why the fuck would you buy this?
The only answer, like with so much of what drives the internet, is “because I can, lol.” It’s an act of great irony and greed to get a digital deed to a digital recipe that costs over a hundred times what you might spend on a whole cookbook just to be able to say you did it. Or you’re just a real Rocco DiSpirito superfan. Godspeed either way.
A Recipe for Crispy Za’atar Tteokbokki with Tomato Jam That Knows No Borders
October 28, 2021
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Louiie Victa/Eater
Korean rice cakes and Lebanese za’atar join together in a blissful culinary marriage
Mention tteokbokki and what often comes to mind is an image of plump, cylindrical rice cakes swimming in a pool of spicy red sauce with fishcakes and maybe some soft-boiled eggs on the side. But not all tteokbokki is spicy and saucy. In fact, the name tteokbokki is made up of two words: tteok (rice cakes) and bokki (stir-fried), a combination that nods to the many possibilities that the beloved Korean street food presents.
For my first pop-up at Edy’s Grocer, a Lebanese grocery and deli in Brooklyn, I wanted to share a different side of tteokbokki as part of the Korean-Lebanese menu I was planning with Edy’s chef and owner Edy Massih. Rice cakes, I realized, were the perfect canvas to display the Lebanese flavors I’d been introduced to through my friendship with Edy. He had opened the door to a wide world of Lebanese food, from mezze like labneh and silky-smooth hummus to savory man’oushe, or flatbread. In return, I showed him the spicy, sweet, tangy flavors of Korean cuisine. Our friendship grew from our mutual passion for sharing our cultures through food, and this pop-up was an exciting opportunity for us to create something new together. After bouncing ideas off each other, we landed on a concept that deliciously captured the essence of our pop-up: crispy za’atar tteokbokki.
Za’atar is both a wild herb and a seasoning whose ingredients vary in different parts of the Middle East; generally, it’s a combination of thyme, sumac, sesame seeds, marjoram, and oregano. When mixed with olive oil, za’atar becomes a delicious paste ideal for smearing on man’oushe, marinating chicken, or tossing with crispy rice cakes.
Like any oil-based tteokbokki, the rice cakes here get lightly pan-fried with plenty of oil until they’re crispy all over; after that, they’re tossed with pre-made za’atar paste until fully coated. In a traditional Korean tteokbokki, the rice cakes soak up all the flavors of a gochujang-heavy sauce. But in this marriage of two Korean and Lebanese culinary staples, the crispy, chewy texture of the rice cakes accentuates the potent flavors of the za’atar. In my opinion, both preparations deserve to be appreciated in the diverse world of tteokbokki.
Although za’atar tteokbokki is good as it is, the addition of spicy tomato jam makes it even better. Tomato jam is one of Edy’s best-selling products, and I replicate it here by blending store-bought tomato sauce with olive oil infused with Aleppo peppers and garlic. When it’s baked in the oven, all of the moisture evaporates from the sauce, creating a thick, jammy texture that’s perfect for dipping. Rich and spicy, the tomato jam has many uses: you can toss it with pasta, or serve it with any grilled protein — or pair it with za’atar-coated tteokbokki for a dish that will erase culinary borders and blow your mind.
Crispy Za’atar Tteokbokki with Spicy Tomato Jam
Note: You can also serve this recipe as tteok-kochi, or rice cakes on skewers. After the rice cakes cook, just take them out of the pan and place 4-5 on each skewer, and serve with tomato jam.
Serves 3-4
Ingredients:
For the spicy tomato jam:
1 (24-ounce) jar tomato sauce, preferably Rao’s Marinara
1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes
1 tablespoon kosher salt
3 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons dried oregano
3 bay leaves
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
8-10 garlic cloves, sliced
2-4 tablespoons Aleppo pepper flakes, depending on your desired spice level
Step 2: In a glass or nonreactive 9x13 baking dish, combine the tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, salt, sugar, oregano, and bay leaves. Mix everything well and set aside.
Step 3: In a small saucepan, combine the olive oil, sliced garlic, and Aleppo pepper over low heat. Simmer for 8-10 minutes until the oil becomes fragrant.
Step 4: Pour the infused oil over the tomatoes in the baking dish and mix everything well. Put the dish in the in the oven for at least 90 minutes or longer, scraping the sides of the dish and mixing the tomatoes every 15-20 minutes to prevent browning, until the mixture has a thick, jam-like consistency.
Step 5: Set the baking dish aside. Once the jam has cooled completely, it can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weekd, or in the freezer for up to a month. Just remember to warm up it when serving.
Make the za’atar tteokbokki:
Step 1: Make the za’atar paste by combining the za’atar and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a small bowl. Set aside.
Step 2: Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to a non-stick pan over high heat. Add the rice cakes to the pan, being careful not to crowd them — rice cakes stick together easily, so you may need to work in batches. Lightly pan-fry the rice cakes for 5-7 minutes until they’re golden-brown and crispy all over.
Step 3: Turn off the heat. If you’ve worked in batches, return all of the rice cakes to the pan and add the za’atar paste to them. Mix everything well until all the rice cakes are fully coated with za’atar paste.
Step 4: Serve immediately with a side of spicy tomato jam and extra sprinkles of za’atar seasoning.
Louiie Victais a chef, recipe developer, food photographer, and stylist living in Las Vegas.Recipe tested by Louiie Victa
In a world with overwhelming choices, the banality of Chili’s prix fixe date meal for two might be exactly what you need
I think about food a lot. An unreasonable amount, actually. There is, of course, my day job as a food writer, but also the countless hours spent browsing the New York Times cooking app for complicated new recipes to try and building an encyclopedic knowledge of local restaurant menus for when it comes time to make weekend dinner reservations. But when it comes to actually making the decision of where — and what — to eat in the moment, thinking about the mundane practicality of food can be seriously fucking exhausting.
When that feeling, a combination of frustration and despair and good old-fashioned “hanger,” strikes, there’s nothing more compelling than scoring a deal on a (slightly) overcooked steak and cheese-topped mashed potatoes from, of all places, Chili’s.
Admitting my obsession with Chili’s 2 for $25 promotion feels like revealing a secret shame. Snobbery is endemic in our culinary culture and I am certainly guilty of engaging in lots of shit-talk about mediocre chain restaurants like it. But Chili’s doesn’t care that it is patently uncool and doesn’t look good on Instagram — it eschews pretentiousness and trends in favor of a remarkable consistency that is nothing short of pure comfort in tumultuous times. Applebee’s may have gotten its very own hit country song, but the unsung hero of the mid-tier chain restaurant is the Chili’s 2 for $25.
For those who have not encountered the 2 for $25, the concept is simple and wonderful: for less than half the cost of the average dinner for two, Chili’s will serve you an appetizer, two entrees, and a dessert. You can upgrade those entrees if you’re feeling fancy — a 10-ounce sirloin instead of the 6-ounce that comes standard, for example — or add on cocktails to double down on the date night vibe. It’s available both in the restaurant and for curbside pick-up, for which a Chili’s employee will package your fajitas delicately enough that the juice from the meat and peppers doesn’t make the tortillas soggy on the drive home.
On its face, Chili’s 2 for $25 deal is an obvious marketing gimmick. It locks the buyer into a specific minimum purchase, one that might be higher than if that buyer just ordered the burger or ribs à la carte. It throws in incentives, like appetizers and desserts, that are inexpensive for the restaurant to make. There are only six or so entree options, and desserts are limited to either a slice of cheesecake or a large chocolate chip cookie that’s allegedly cooked in a skillet before it’s topped with a puck of pre-packaged vanilla ice cream.
To be sure, there is nothing jaw-dropping about the entrees at Chili’s, but therein lies their appeal; they are always familiar. The chicken crispers — Chili’s version of a tempura-style battered chicken tender — taste just like they did when I was 15 years old and skipping class with friends to share an order at the Chili’s that was a short walk away from my high school in small-town East Texas. The six-ounce sirloin won’t win any prizes at a steak cook-off, but it is always (basically) cooked to my preferred temperature. No one judges when I order two sides of mashed potatoes loaded down with cheese and bacon bits in lieu of broccoli, either.
Even though its social status has waned dramatically in recent years, it’s important to remember that Chili’s was once a tastemaker in middle American cuisine. Founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1975, it helped introduce the world outside of Texas to the compelling flavor profiles of Tex-Mex cuisine, and opened restaurants in far-flung locales like Morocco and Costa Rica. In the late 1990s, the chain commissioned one of the most iconic and infectious commercial jingles to ever enter the zeitgeist. Just a decade or so later, though, it was being lampooned (or celebrated?) by NBC sitcom The Office as bumbling boss Michael Scott’s favorite place to take a date or business clients or, in the case of one iconic episode, both. In the 2010s, pundits wrung their hands over whether or not the notoriously “foodie” millennial generation would “kill” Chili’s and restaurants of its ilk thanks to our supposed obsession with upscale dining.
But even as its status as a cultural heat point diminishes, Chili’s survives. In fact, the chain’s parent company actually did better economically during the pandemic, specifically citing increased sales in its dining rooms and via delivery apps. After enjoying a couple of 2 for $25s, the “why” is immediately obvious: What a meal like this lacks in glamour, it makes up for in utilitarian comfort. There’s appeal in shrinking down a world full of food options into a couple easy choices, like picking between chicken and steak at a wedding, but with Awesome Blossoms.
When the dizzying array of options on UberEats, Postmates, Grubhub, Caviar, Seamless, and all those other delivery apps is too overwhelming, Chili’s does some of the deciding for you. It sounds absurd, but being limited to those few options and being forced to operate inside a very specific rubric, feels like freedom from the inevitable decision paralysis that will inevitably strike when you live in a world where basically any food, from any cuisine, can be delivered to your door on demand.
We have, in a very real sense, over-glamorized the food that we eat. Food is, after all, the “new rock and roll,” and has been for a decade. Our constant pursuit of the world’s most epic, best-ever burger or a scientifically perfect steak has left us in a place where the perfectly edible, totally satiating steak at Chili’s just isn’t good enough because nobody’s going to be impressed when they see it on your Instagram feed. Considering that we have to eat food thrice per day just to stay alive, it’s probably time to consider making that process a little less complicated at least some of the time.
It’s perfectly okay to fall into the comfort of a Chili’s 2 for $25 whenever the craving strikes. Or maybe, for you, it’s downing three baskets of those perfect Cheddar Bay biscuits at Red Lobster before the entree even comes. Or picking up Olive Garden’s trusted soup and salad for lunch. Sometimes food can just be good enough, and sometimes good enough is actually preferable to good.
Whatever suits your fancy, now is the time to seek out the mid-tier chain restaurant meal that can become your ol’ reliable when the idea of scrolling through the same old boring (and expensive) options on UberEats just seems like a little too much to bear, or God forbid, you’re getting anxious over what to cook for dinner. Whenever that time comes for you, Chili’s will be there, waiting to welcome you with two scoops of loaded mashed potatoes that will, without fail, taste and cost the same pretty much everywhere.
From tomato-rubbed pa amb tomà quet to crisp-topped crema catalana
When it comes to food, Barcelona isn’t so much a Spanish city as a Catalan one.
An ancient, triangular-shaped region with 7.5 million inhabitants, the autonomous region of Catalunya has had its own language, history, culture, and traditions for close to a thousand years. While today, language might be the thing that most defines Catalan identity, its distinctive food follows closely behind. And the capital of Catalunya itself is also the undisputed capital of la cuina catalana — Barcelona.
From the 12th century, the principality of Catalunya had been in a union with the medieval kingdom of Aragon, and together they controlled a giant swath of the western Mediterranean, including what’s now southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and parts of Greece. Even then, la cuina catalana — rooted in elements of its Greek, Roman, and Arab past — was highly regarded, with collections of its recipes printed throughout the Middle Ages (the Llibre de Sent SovÃ, published in 1324, is among the oldest surviving manuscripts in Europe). This cooking was representative of a rich, independent culture that included its own constitution, laws, and political structure, and Catalunya retained these even after the 15th-century marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella joined Aragon and Castile and laid the foundations for a modern, unified Spain. It wasn’t until the fall of Barcelona in 1714, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, that Catalunya lost its long-held autonomy. It would take (with a brief exception around the Spanish Civil War) more than 250 years to get it back.
But over these centuries, the region continued to foster its distinct identity. And its cuisine continued to absorb influences, especially with the arrival of products from the Americas, in dishes from European chefs working in Barcelona during the 19th century, and from the immigrants from other parts of Spain drawn to Catalunya’s economic prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s as the country grew more industrialized.
During Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), Catalans suffered particularly stringent cultural repression, including the prohibition of their language in public spaces. Yet Catalan food was neither political nor politicized. Even if scarce at times, it was always a constant. It has survived more recent turbulence, too — in the fall of 2017, Catalunya’s autonomy was suspended, its parliament dissolved, its leaders arrested, and direct rule imposed from Madrid for more than seven months due to the Catalan government’s push for independence from Spain. Still, the cuisine has continued to thrive and evolve as newer waves of immigration from Latin America, North Africa, and around Europe have added another layer of global ingredients and flavors to the Catalan canon.
El Pont del Bisbe in the Gothic Quarter.
Sunseekers along the beach in Barcelona.
“A country’s cuisine is its landscape in a pot,” goes a dictum attributed to Catalunya’s foremost food writer, Josep Pla. This cuisine is much more than a coastal one. Bordered to the north by the Pyrenees Mountains and France, to the east by 360 miles of Mediterranean coast, and with an interior of farmland and agricultural plains, the region’s products find their way into Barcelona’s markets, and ultimately, its kitchens. They’re combined by Catalan cooks in all sorts of unique ways, stewing the mar i muntanya (sea and mountains) or the dolç i salat (sweet and savory) together in the same pot. Chicken with langoustine. Lobster with chocolate. Meatballs with cuttlefish. Squid stuffed with ground pork. Spinach with pine nuts and raisins.
There are other defining signatures of Catalan cooking, like sofregit — a sweet pulp of onions and tomatoes patiently cooked down in olive oil. It’s not a sauce but the flavorful foundation on which countless dishes are built. Then there’s picada, a paste pounded in a mortar from garlic, parsley, and almonds or hazelnuts, plus maybe saffron or even chocolate (in its ancient guise as a spice). It’s stirred in toward the end of cooking to give everything from pots of lentils to braised meats more body, depth of flavor, and earthiness.
Perhaps all this makes Catalan cooking sound baroque. But as a rule, it isn’t. The focus remains on les matèries primes, high-quality ingredients that are cooked in ways that draw out and heighten their inherent flavors, not hide them. This is one reason why Barcelona has 39 covered food markets and thousands of small specialty shops. If the point is to fully taste that sea bream baked with just a pinch of salt or those wild rovelló mushrooms on the grill, then they’d better be fresh.
Here, the seasons’ offerings are often celebrated for themselves: a cargolada for cargols (snails), a calçotada when calçots (local spring onions) ripen in late winter, a sardinada for sardines in summer. People here particularly like doing things in groups, and the Catalan table is often a crowded one — especially when the celebration is food itself.
It isn’t the lack of interest from tourists that threatens it today in Barcelona, but rather, the sheer popularity of the city. It is easy to miss many of Catalunya’s potent culinary traditions in the sea of globalization and often poorly prepared tourist grub being served to visitors.
The 16 dishes that follow are classics of the Catalan kitchen, and you can find them all in Barcelona, the region’s capital and culinary crossroads. So skip that pre-prepared paella and giant mug of sangria on Las Ramblas, or even a bowl of grains in that third-wave coffee shop, and seek out these dishes instead.
Pa amb tomà quet at El Quim.
Pa amb tomà quet
(country bread rubbed with tomato and olive oil)
Nothing is more emblematic of the Catalan table than pa amb tomà quet, wide slices of (usually) toasted country bread rubbed with tomato, generously drizzled with olive oil, and sprinkled with sea salt. For breakfast, for lunch, for a snack, with cured cold cuts, roasted escalivada vegetables (see below), or a piece of Spanish tortilla, alongside grilled meats or sardines on the barbecue, pa amb tomà quet is simple, practical (it likely began as a way to rescue old bread), and ubiquitous. There is even a special tomato grown just for this: tomà quets de penjar, small and intensely flavored tomatoes braided together with twine in clusters. Harvested in summer, thick-skinned tomà quets de penjar can hang without refrigeration until spring. Be prepared to make pa amb tomà quet yourself in rustic restaurants. Pro tip: The garlic is strictly optional. Peel the clove and lightly rub it on the bread before the tomatoes.
Escalivada
(roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions)
The name of the dish derives from the Catalan word meaning “to cook on hot embers,” which gives the roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions their characteristic smoky flavors. The vegetables are roasted whole, peeled, torn into long strips, drenched in olive oil, and served cold. Order it as an appetizer with plenty of pa amb tomà quet.
Esqueixada de bacallà at Can Cortada.
Esqueixada de bacallÃ
(shredded salt cod and tomato salad)
Ever since the Basques began bringing dried and salted cod to Spain back in the Middle Ages, the country’s cooks have been developing a seemingly inexhaustible number of ways to prepare it. The Catalans developed their own range of unique bacallà dishes, including the deeply popular esqueixada. The name is from the Catalan verb esqueixar (to shred), referring to the small, hand-torn pieces of cod in this magnificent salad with tomatoes, black olives, and olive oil.
Escudella i carn d’olla
(two-course soup)
This two-course soup was a daily staple for centuries in Catalunya, and remains so beloved that a full version is served as part of a traditional Catalan Christmas meal. Essentially, bones and pieces of meat (beef, pork, poultry), a large, oblong meatball called a pilota, chickpeas, and herbs and vegetables get boiled for a flavorful broth. These are removed, and short, thin fideus noodles or another small soup pasta are cooked in the broth. (For Christmas, the pasta is a large snail shape called “galets de nadal” — literally, “Christmas cookies.”) The soup with pasta (the escudella of the name) is ladled into bowls and the carn d’olla (“meat from the pot”) and chickpeas are served on a platter as the second course.
Espinacs amb panses i pinyons
(spinach with raisins and pine nuts)
Mixing sweet and savory is a hallmark of Catalan cuisine, and nowhere are these combined as simply — or deliciously — as in spinach with plump raisins and toasted pine nuts. So associated with the region is this vibrant dish that elsewhere in Spain it is known as espinacas a la catalana.
Peeling the calçots amb romesco at Can Cortada.
Calçots amb romesco
(calçots with romesco sauce)
Calçots are long, thick green onions that ripen in late winter. Grilled over embers, wrapped in newspaper, and brought to the table in concave terra-cotta roof tiles, they’re usually eaten outdoors and in groups. Half of the fun is how you eat them: Peel away the blackened outside layer and drag the sweet-and-smoky white flesh through a bowl of romesco, a chunky sauce made from dried red peppers, roasted tomatoes and garlic, almonds, hazelnuts, bread crumbs, olive oil, and vinegar. Tilt your head back, hold the calçot as high as possible above you, and slowly lower it into your mouth. The cheesy bibs and plastic gloves that restaurants offer are recommended for the novice, the well-dressed, or those lacking confidence in their hand-mouth coordination. It is common to have a porró of wine with calçots. Held at arm’s length, the thin-spouted glass beaker is tilted downward and wine streams into the mouth. (Ideally; the bib might be useful for this, too.)
Arròs caldós amb llamà ntol
(soupy rice with lobster)
“Soupy” rice with lobster manages to be a perfect blend of extravagance and comfort. It incorporates many of the finest elements of local cooking, it begins with a caramelized onion and tomato sofregit base and ends by stirring in a pounded picada of herbs, garlic, almonds, and dried red peppers to thicken the dish and give it a lush, nutty background. Between these characteristic Catalan bookends comes lobster, plenty of seafood for the rich stock, and rice grown along the rim of the Mediterranean. The dish’s name derives from caldo (broth), and should be liquid enough to eat with a spoon. But just how soupy varies from kitchen to kitchen.
Arròs negre amb allioli at Can Cortada.
Arròs negre amb allioli
(black rice with allioli)
Fishermen eke out every last bit of worth from their catch. That means nothing gets wasted, not even the ink from a cuttlefish. The intense, jet-black distillation of the sea transforms this moist seafood rice dish from the Costa Brava north of Barcelona into something wholly spectacular. The key is the allioli served on the side, traditionally (and laboriously) made by pounding garlic with salt in a ceramic mortar and then adding olive oil drop by drop while stirring with the pestle until it forms a thick emulsion. It perfectly balances the natural sweetness of the ink.
Canelons de carn
(cannelloni stuffed with meat)
Catalan cuisine absorbs influences and dishes, and canelons are a case in point. Originating back in the 19th century from Italian or Italian-speaking Swiss chefs working in Barcelona, canelons became not just hugely popular, but iconic. Rolled squares of pasta are stuffed with braised and ground beef, pork, and chicken, covered with bechamel, and slid into the oven to give the topping of grated cheese a gratin crust. Few Catalan families would ever consider celebrating the Christmas holidays without a tray of canelons, traditionally prepared on December 26 using the leftovers from the escudella i carn d’olla.
Suquet de pescadors
(fisherman’s stew with monkfish and potatoes)
While there’s not much in the way of liquid in this simple fish stew, a small bit of deeply flavored sauce — the suquet, the diminutive for suc (juice) — gives the dish its name. Suquet comes from the fishing villages of the Costa Brava, where pescadors prepared the dish either on their boat out at sea or beside it once back on shore, using the fish that wouldn’t fetch much in the market. That, incredibly, once included rap (monkfish), which today remains the fish of choice.
Bacallà a la llauna
(salt cod baked “on the tin”)
Dried and salted cod was the ideal fish to store in pre-freezer days. But once desalted through soaking and then cooked, it has a flavor superior to the fresh stuff. There are countless recipes for this key Catalan staple, and bacallà a la llauna is one of the best. Originating in Barcelona restaurants during the 18th century, it is prepared in a llauna (a rectangular baking tin) with olive oil, paprika, and plenty of sliced garlic.
Mongetes amb botifarra at El Quim.
Mongetes amb botifarra
(white beans with grilled pork sausages)
Many Catalans consider this pairing of white beans and fat, fresh sausages their national dish. It is pure country fare that has been widely embraced in Barcelona as well. Note the order in the dish’s name: It’s the tender beans here that are key. Be sure to generously dollop with allioli.
Mandonguilles amb sÃpia i pèsols
(meatballs with cuttlefish and peas)
One aspect of the traditional Catalan kitchen is combining the mar i muntanya (sea and mountains) in the same pot. The combinations are often original, even unexpected. One enduring favorite is this dish of stewed meatballs (rolled from equal amounts of pork and beef) with cuttlefish and fresh peas. Be sure to use plenty of bread to mop up the rich, picada-thickened sauce.
Cargols a la llauna
(snails grilled “on the tin”)
Whether cooked in a spicy tomato sauce or stewed with rabbit, snails hold an important place in Catalan cuisine. There are more than two dozen traditional Catalan recipes for cargols — more than twice that for chicken. Try them grilled a la llauna. Placed on the baking sheet with their openings facing upward, the snails are drizzled with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, given a pinch of finely chopped garlic and parsley, and cooked in their own juices.
Mel i mató
(honey with fresh cheese)
Fresh cheese smothered with honey and garnished with nuts couldn’t make for a simpler dessert. Made in Catalunya since medieval times from cow or goat’s milk (or a mixture for the two), mató is a soft and slightly textured cheese, with a great milky freshness. Sugar can be sprinkled on top but honey is the classic sweetener.
Crema catalana at El Quim.
Crema catalana
(Catalan burnt cream)
There may be no more perfect way to end a meal than breaking through a thin crust of burnt sugar with a spoon to a creamy custard scented with lemon peels and cinnamon. Crema catalana is similar to creme brulee; the Catalan version is thickened with milk, egg yolks, and starch rather than whole eggs and cream. Local legend credits convent nuns who prepared a flan for a visiting bishop. The flan failed, and the nuns added some burnt sugar to the top of the liquidy mess to salvage the dessert. When the bishop took a bite, he shouted, “Crema!”— Catalan for “It’s burning hot!” as well as for “cream.”
Jeff Koehler, winner of a James Beard Award and two IACP cookbook awards, has lived in Barcelona since 1996. He is the author of seven books, including La Paella and Spain: Recipes and Traditions.Gerard Moralis a Barcelona born and based photographer specializing in portrait, travel, and lifestyle photography.
Despite its early ties to the Celtic celebration Samhain (pronounced “sow-wen”), Halloween is a uniquely American holiday. Until recently it was only in the U.S. that we collectively mark October 31 by dressing in costume and sending our children door-to-door to ask the neighbors for candy, and even that is a relatively new tradition.
On this week’s Gastropod, Nicola Twilley and Cynthia Graber team up with historians Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson, the cohosts of Now & Then, also on the Vox Media Podcast Network. Together, they look back at how Halloween became so big in the United States and, on a sweet note, how it became synonymous with fun-size chocolate bars.
Freeman, a specialist in the Revolutionary War time period and its aftermath at Yale University, describes Halloween as “something to do with marriage, and capitalism, and candy, and Christian angst.” So yeah, about as American as it gets! It emerged as a holiday in the U.S. in the mid 1800s with the influx of immigrants from Ireland and the United Kingdom, where Samhain had — centuries prior — been appropriated by Christians and replaced with All Saint’s Day, also known as All Hallows Day, celebrated on November 1. The day before became All Hallows Eve, or — as we now know it — Halloween.
A little witchiness was involved from the jump as 19th-century young women marked the day with rituals to predict their romantic futures. “[They’d] eat special foods with the idea that it would give them visions of their future husbands,” Richardson explains. “They would peel apples and throw the apple peels over their shoulders to hope that it would fall into the pattern of their future husbands initials.”
Halloween also became a time for reckless pranks, which was really more like rioting. So by the 1920s and ’30s, in order to calm crowds, organizations like the YMCA — led by the efforts of a Kansan named Elizabeth Krebs — began putting on supervised parties, parades, and costume contests. This also coincided with sugar becoming more affordable and so candy and Halloween became intertwined, a perfect moment of fate.
Well, in actuality, there was also a big motive for candy companies to glom on to a holiday with less obvious and enduring religious themes. American families, regardless of faith, were celebrating Halloween and, because of that, buying candy. Ca-ching! Candy companies were raking it in.
Listen to the full episode to learn more about the timeline of Halloween candy, leading up to the ’70s and ’80s panic over razor blades hidden in apples, the introduction of fun-sized candy bars (a response to the faltering economy!), and Halloween’s greatest, ongoing debate: Candy corn, disgusting scourge or delicious seasonal treat?
Anthony Bourdain in 2013. | Photo by Isaac Brekken/WireImage
To remember somebody well isn’t necessarily to know them, as Laurie Woolever’s “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography” reveals — one conversation at a time
Anthony Bourdain’s success, when it arrived, didn’t come gradually; it came in a blinding flash, with the publication of his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, when he was 43 years old. He remained ambivalent and suspicious of that thunderclap for the rest of his life. “Don’t get used to it,” he once told Mike Ruffino, his composer for No Reservations and Parts Unknown. “It’s gonna go away.”
But it never did for Bourdain, and the embattled relationship between the man and his fame is at the heart of the new book Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, produced by his longtime collaborator and assistant Laurie Woolever. Precisely because Woolever didn’t approach her subject looking for the Real Bourdain, her book is the first to begin to reveal him: It’s the most splintered, fractal, and complex portrait of the star that has yet emerged, an enormous compendium of individual observations gathered from 91 people who knew him, including his mother, his brother, his ex-wives and his daughter, friends from school and college, ex-girlfriends, fellow chefs, writers, editors, and television colleagues.
Though Woolever’s observations appear only in the introduction, the biggest voice in the book is hers, deciding who contributes, what is left in or out — clarifying and amplifying the whole of her subject’s life. When I asked why she didn’t explicitly include her own voice among the chorus, she replied, “Since I was already deciding whom to interview, writing and asking the questions, and crafting the narrative based on the result, it seemed like a bit of overkill... I figured that, if there was something that I knew or recalled that no one else brought up, but that seemed crucial to telling Tony’s story, I’d include it, but that wasn’t ultimately the case.”
Woolever assembled the myriad fragments into 59 chapters, arranging them in a rough chronological order; each one focuses on a single aspect of Bourdain’s life and career, with titles like, “Such Was My Lust to See My Name in Print” (a Bourdain quote) and “Basically, He Kidnapped My Cat” (in the words of his second wife, Ottavia Busia). Rather than writing about him, the book is made of people talking about him, openly and freely, and the result is subtle and penetrating, sad and festive — like a literary wake, with people floating out and back in again, telling jokes, rethinking old grievances, remembering sad moments. Crucially, Woolever’s approach doesn’t fit into the regular celebrity categories; it’s neither a “warts and all” story nor a salacious expose (his one-time heroin addiction, about which he was open, gets fairly short shrift), and unlike the recent film Roadrunner, it doesn’t pull its punches in favor of a slickly commercial hagiography. Page by page, Woolever diminishes Bourdain’s celebrity in favor of the minutely observed, the subjective and contradictory, composing the story on a human scale and leaving the legend aside.
The paradox that emerges so clearly from the book is that Bourdain, the most human and humane of storytellers, who taught everyone a humbler, more receptive way of being in the world, was simultaneously so tormented and so revered. After reading Woolever’s 400-plus-page Rashomon, one comes away without answers. But there are insights, a sense of the relentless tide of events, relationships, ideas, and sensations — a human helplessness, almost — in the face of the overwhelming forces that anyone may have to endure. Family pressures, feelings of inadequacy, long years of professional and personal disappointment. The images layer up and resolve into what you might have guessed all along: just a man, vulnerable and alone, straining under the terrible weight of a myth.
Bourdain’s celebrity takes on dimensions here that never appeared in public. There’s a scene that will make your hair stand on end, told by musician Josh Homme, where Bourdain yells at a colossally rude fan. (“Don’t you buy any [of my] books!”) This story would never have appeared in any of Bourdain’s own writing, because his manners as a public figure were so glossily perfect, gentlemanly and restrained; it’s almost a relief to see him stop playing the part, and finally lose it.
Woolever also casts the question of Bourdain’s ambition in a new light with the casual mention of the late Gordon Howard, his roommate at Vassar College, who — according to their classmate and friend Helen Lang — had a hand in persuading Bourdain to write his first book, the 1995 crime novel Bone in the Throat. It’s an extraordinary anecdote: “Gordon gave Tony some money to just go somewhere and write, and I think Gordon was very invested in the whole thing,” Lang says. After the novel was written, Howard acted as Bourdain’s agent, and helped him sell it. But once it was published, Bourdain was ready to “kick [Howard] to the curb…. he didn’t want to be tethered by Gordon, he was more ambitious than that… I think Tony was ready for bigger things.” A fledgling writer, then, with ambition burning hot enough to push his old friend and benefactor aside on his way up?
The implication of careerism complicates the dumb-luck success story that Bourdain often told — as if everything about his fame had been casual, accidental. In fact, he was a striver. Conscious of the created effect, driven and hungry. Then, finally, he became the published author of a wise-guy crime novel with some culinary flourishes, for flavor. But sales of Bone in the Throat were disappointing, and the book’s editor, David Rosenthal, held his new author in somewhat low esteem.
I only vaguely knew that Tony was an actual chef. I had an amateur’s interest in cooking; I remember getting into an argument with Tony about how, in his manuscript, he had the hero making a beurre blanc, and adding cream to it, and I said, “That’s not how you make a beurre blanc.” The attitude I got was, he didn’t give a shit... He made it clear that he had some experience in, shall we say, low-rent Italian kitchens.
It’s a very rare thing, disorienting, to hear someone speak of Bourdain in tones bordering almost on contempt.
The book conveys the inexorable weight of unforeseen consequences, unsought responsibilities, and the uncontrollable force of a final coup de foudre. Imagine him at the cusp of his success: an ex-junkie, an obscure, fair-to-middling chef with thwarted literary ambitions and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kennedy assassination — who, at 43, was still struggling to make rent. Just one more of the many brilliant and talented middle-aged guys in New York who never made it. Suddenly, he’s the toast of the whole fucked-up, freakish, gorgeous, grossly disappointing world. For a man who felt himself conclusively to be a failure and a fraud, what did this say about the world? Maybe that his admirers were fools, for not seeing through the act. Still, he would have to face the consequences and put his self-loathing away, because he was called on now to lead, to set an example, to take responsibility for the livelihoods of dozens or hundreds of people. To help them succeed, to realize his own vision in ways he could never have imagined possible; to see himself, the man he’d so long despised, everywhere welcomed, lionized, celebrated.
Though there is still a lot left unsaid about Bourdain’s childhood and early years, this book wouldn’t be what it is without the presence of his mother and brother, Gladys and Christopher Bourdain, and his first wife, Nancy. (Pierre Bourdain, his father, died in 1987.) Gladys’s remarks are weirdly and tellingly detached. (“Part of the reason he got into the private school was that he did a long composition about some French voyager who discovered the western part of France. I forget the name.”) Still more significantly, her death in 2020 freed Christopher — a formidable raconteur in his own right — from the filial piety that had always drawn a curtain around his brother’s volcanic relationship with their mom, which involved intense mutual disappointment, silences of months and years, and the favor that made him a star: Gladys asked Esther Fein, a work colleague who happened to be married to New Yorker editor David Remnick, to read a story Bourdain had written. The story was duly published in the New Yorker, and grew into the bestselling Kitchen Confidential. In other words, the charmed life of Anthony Bourdain was three-dimensional, tempestuous, and stressful. Not the slightest bit effortless, not ever.
To judge from reviews and from Twitter commentary, a lot of readers are going to approach this book, as they did Roadrunner, looking for answers about Bourdain’s last days; there has been a lot of public conjecture about the role of the Italian actor, director, and #MeToo activist Asia Argento in his death, and, inevitably, the book ends with their fiery romance.
As producer Jared Andrukanis and others tell it, in his final year, Bourdain betrayed and hurt people he’d been close to, such as his longtime cinematographer Zach Zamboni, at Argento’s evident behest. Though Zamboni declined to be interviewed for the book, former colleagues do not mince words regarding his dismissal. Argento had fallen out with Zamboni on set in Hong Kong, where Bourdain had arranged for her to direct an episode of Parts Unknown. According to Andrukanis, Bourdain ordered him to fire Zamboni, “and I could hear [Argento] in the background, just screaming, ‘It’s me or him!’ Pressuring this guy to [fire] one of his friends.”
Woolever did not interview Argento directly, her reasoning being that Argento is a public figure who has spoken on Bourdain in public, and she has written an autobiography. But strikingly, though the diplomacy of their testimony on the subject varies, there isn’t a single person quoted in the book who approved of the relationship, or of how Bourdain’s character changed when he became involved with her. (Argento has been accused of sexual assault, and posthumously implicated Bourdain in the cover-up attempt, further complicating the narrative around herself and their relationship.)
But all this testimony, taken with the hundreds of pages that come before — woven in with the knowledge of Bourdain’s compulsive, mercurial nature, his lifelong tendency to depression, and the long, strange isolation of a professional traveler who for years spent most of his life on the road — ultimately shades the story with more, not less, complexity. Other readers may come away with a different impression, but for me the torrent of grief-stricken detail regarding Bourdain’s suicide answers the question conclusively: There is no one to blame for his death but his own inescapable nature, “the world, the flesh and the devil” inside him.
It seems clearer to me than ever that the real Bourdain never appeared on TV, and few ever knew him. He was uncomfortable with his stardom — hated it, even, much of the time, and hated what it did to the people and places he loved, however much he enjoyed the process of writing and making his shows, however proud he was of the many extraordinary things he’d been able to achieve. This secret was hidden in plain view; he talked about his misgivings openly, with many interviewers.
Some years back I read all of his books for this publication. A few days after it ran, Woolever forwarded me a note from Bourdain. It said: “Please let Maria Bustillos know that I thought her piece was the most insightful, careful and thorough thing ever written about me, and that however uncomfortable it made me, I’m flattered by her attention to detail.” This was profoundly touching and meaningful to me, obviously, but I’m mentioning it to clarify that what he’d praised was a portrait of himself as an intensely melancholic man with very deep, very old private regrets. On reflection, if I was able to conjure an accurate image, it’s because I started at the beginning of his story, before he had serious responsibilities outside himself and his own family, or a brand to maintain. Woolever takes a similar approach, in a far more expansive, more intimate way.
The cascade of admiration and love that came with fame, freighted with expectations, was dangerous for someone like Bourdain. Underneath the polished, friendly, elegant public persona, his aesthetic and moral standards, his hopes both for himself and for the world outside, remained as unreachable as they’d been at age 42. His was a disappointed heart almost from the first, and the multitudes he contained tore him apart, despite the truth, the childlike willingness, of his single-word Twitter bio: “Enthusiast.” Remembering him should take all the chaos and grief in his nature into account, as Woolever has, and not remain limited to an idealized view. As his own work so often suggested, the truth is the only worthwhile point of departure.
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Laurie Woolever and Anthony Bourdain at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York in December 2016.
Reading Laurie Woolever’s book made me want to know more about the author and her career, and about why and how gifted women may choose to withdraw behind their work — and behind the men they work for. In this interview, the voice that never appears in the book speaks candidly of her career and relationship with Anthony Bourdain.
The following interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Maria Bustillos: How old were you when you started working for Bourdain?
Laurie Woolever: I first met him in 2002 and did this project with him, editing and testing recipes for Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. So I was 28 years old. I worked on that project as a part-time thing for about a year and a half. When I became his assistant, it was 2009 and I was 35 years old.
So from the time you were 35, for nine years.
Until I was 44.
I had been Mario Batali’s assistant, and then I left because I felt like I was aging out of being an assistant, and I wanted to do more of my own work. I had worked as a freelance writer, I had worked as a catering cook and a private cook, and then I spent a number of years as a magazine editor. I was at Art Culinaire magazine and then I was at Wine Spectator, and that was the track I was on, to be an editor and writer.
And then I had a baby, and like so many other people, I found it really difficult to work full time, and schlep back and forth to Manhattan every day with bags of rotting breast milk and getting zero sleep. And so, out of a sense of desperation, really, I thought, well, let me just take a few years and work part time until I can get back on this editor track. It was just very lucky timing that Tony offered me the job. I had a moment’s hesitation, because I thought, this feels like a little bit of a step backward, but I’m going to do it because it’s Tony and I know it’s going to be great, even if I only do it for a couple of years, until my kid’s old enough to go to pre-K or whatever.
And then there was no reason to leave, because it was great. The nuts and bolts of making plane and restaurant reservations and doctor’s appointments, that was not thrilling, but also, it was; I was good at it, I was efficient and I kept Tony’s life together in a way that made him happy and grateful and he paid me well, and he wanted to keep that around, so he was really generous with finding opportunities for me to do more, beyond the assistant work.
So that started with line editing some of the books on his imprint, and then it was co-authoring a cookbook, and then it was co-authoring a travel guide, which we’d started work on when he died. He had almost limitless access to opportunities, and he made it clear that he wanted to keep me on, and that there would be a lot of really cool projects for me to do.
So it’s a symbiotic relationship, where you’re working for this really famous person who’s looking out for you, but also trying to protect his own comfort —somebody is really taking good care of me and I cannot give this up, somebody who knows me and knows my habits and what I need— so that there’s a sensation of entourage to it, and that is not pleasant for a woman who has any kind of ambition of her own, when you were on this path to be like, a Ruth Reichl kind of figure. Right? That’s where you were headed.
I mean... in the best possible scenario, yes, but I also felt like maybe not, you know? There was a lot of competition. And I knew that I wasn’t necessarily cut out to play that game... I had gone on a number of interviews with some of the big food and lifestyle magazines, and in two instances I took myself out of the running because I felt like, I cannot fake it well enough to make it in this culture. Even if they deign to hire me to be an assistant editor at XYZ famous food magazine, I will be fucking miserable. I think in a way Tony kind of saved me from having to jam myself into that world that part of me really wanted. And I did, I wanted to earn that place in the glossy magazine world.
But part of me thought, I might not be good enough for this; I might just not be able to hack it. Like I don’t give a shit about clothes and all of the surface stuff that is really important at some of these publishing companies. It was going to be this whole other job for me to like, dress appropriately for work, and to get along, in certain ways... It’s not like I fight with people, but I have a limited tolerance for the bullshit that was standard in the mid-2000s, when things were still pretty buttoned-up and image-conscious and very white. Though I think magazines have changed quite a bit since I started working for Tony.
I will say, though, that there was a point, probably in the last year to 18 months, where I was starting to get a bit tired of the more mundane aspects of my job, and that coincided with Tony’s being a little more frenetic, and manic, especially when he was in New York; sometimes I would roll my eyes a little, like: Really? You want me to get you a taxi, but you’re in a hotel with a very fancy concierge. But okay, it’s my job. Yes of course, I will get you a taxi to dinner.
Maybe you were a source of comfort, and he was suffering, I think. I’m just making this up, now. But I think he was afraid, and things weren’t going well. And if he could call you to get a taxi, then he wouldn’t just be isolated in the luxury world all by himself with his girlfriend.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s probably true to an extent. I mean, I didn’t necessarily see it that way at the time.
You’re like, “Oh my god, go downstairs and get a taxi.”
It was my job, I’m happy to make sure he gets the taxi. But this was a change from how things had been; the slightly ridiculous requests were more frequent at the end. And I think you’re right — that’s a very kind reading of it that I think is probably correct. Also maybe a little bit of flexing, like, Hey baby, I’ll just get my assistant to do it.
The life of women. Oh boy. He was very charming — he could get anybody to do anything, I’m sure.
If he were a bore, if he were a jerk, I wouldn’t have stuck around for as long. But even when he asked me to do slightly ridiculous things, it was like well, it’s for Tony, of course I’ll do this. I would gladly go above and beyond.
I had oriented everything in my life around making sure that I was meeting his needs. My phone was never off, and I never wanted him to feel like if he reached out to me for something that I wasn’t always there, and listening. And sometimes that means that you’re not paying as much attention to your family as you should be, or your own sleep hygiene or your friends or whatever else it is.
He was the priority.
My career. Right? Because all of that mundane stuff, the restaurant reservations, etc., it’s not rocket science but it does take time and energy.
Everybody liked the idea of Bourdain being this happy, fearless, perfect person. But you went through a lot of time with him where you knew that that wasn’t the case.
To an extent. I knew that there was a shyness, and an awkwardness, and a restlessness, and certainly in the last two years, that there was some level of tumult in his personal life. But I don’t know that I truly understood how serious it was until after his death. We did have conversations at times, not often, about anxiety and depression and loneliness. But I was as surprised as anyone else when I got that phone call, letting me know that he had taken his own life. I hadn’t seen that in the realm of possibility.
There was part of me that really wanted to believe the best version of things that were going on with him, like when he was madly in love and ridiculously happy, at certain points, for example... I wanted to think that that was the entire story, even though I knew in my gut that things might not be great. I want to stop short of diagnosing him posthumously. But he was, I think, a master of managing his own image; it seems very clear to me now that Tony approached everything in his life that he loved — work, romance, jiujitsu, film, literature, his substances of choice — like an addict.
I think everyone fell for his mythology, to some degree... I don’t even want to call it an image, or anything like that. More that he was a person who was living life as if he were a child playing, with this sort of purity of intent, like —I get to do all the fun things, and so I’m going to do all the fun things— and everything is balls to the wall, everything.
He made so many throwaway suicide references that it became a shtick, sort of a shorthand for his frequent hyperbolic reactions to things. I never believed that getting a mediocre hamburger in an airport restaurant was going to make him feel suicidal. It was just an easy joke.
I don’t believe that his suicide was a premeditated act. I believe that it was a spasm of grief and a terrible, spontaneous decision.
The book is an account not just of Bourdain’s life, but the lives of the dozens of people who made up the culture around him; the ship thatBourdainwrote about inTreme,in the speech he wrote for Emeril Lagasse. You’re like the [Samuel Johnson biographer James] Boswell of this kaleidoscopic document.
But before we talk about that, I have to ask you the obvious, terrible hard question. In the three years since his death we’ve seen no explicit confrontation, until now, of the fact that so many of this man’s colleagues and friends appear to blame [Argento] for his death.
Well, if someone goes into reading this book with the idea that [Argento] was responsible, and then reads the book, my hope is that they’ll have a more nuanced understanding of how and why Tony alone chose to end his own life. Some people have insinuated that it was her specific actions that led to his suicide; my conclusion is that it’s more complicated than that. People get humiliated, and people suffer breakups or romantic disappointment all the time, and they don’t kill themselves.
I mean, if you want to talk about the fact that she’s not interviewed in the book, which she isn’t—
I do. Yeah. You knew her, I thought?
I did know her; I only met her in person once. We had a cordial, professional relationship, because there were times when I was arranging for her to travel to the States or for Tony to go to her.
She is a public figure, someone who attracts a great deal of interest and attention, especially in Italy, where she lives; she gave a number of interviews shortly after Tony’s death and in the years since, and she’s written an autobiography. She has had plenty of opportunity to tell her story, and she’s taken that opportunity to give her version of events.
He ascribed characteristics and power and gave so much of himself over to this person who wasn’t going to look after it, clearly.
Tony had a way of idealizing lots of people. I mean, this wasn’t the first time that we heard him being absolutely hyperbolic about whoever he was into. At one point it was Ottavia. And even the way he managed to graduate high school a year early, so that he could follow his high school girlfriend to college; he was a deeply romantic man, and I think that having a romantic partner was maybe the most important thing to him.
What did you think of the recent film,Roadrunner?
I loved it. I’m not impartial; I was a consulting producer on it... but the first time I saw it, it broke my heart open. It was really beautiful and touching and also just devastating to see footage I’d never seen before of him in France days before he died, and in Florence about two or three weeks before, and being so happy and so engaged in the process of making television; it is very painful to know how quickly things changed for him.
And everybody who knew him is saying, I should’ve paid more attention, I should’ve done this and that.
It’s maddening, because the truth is that there’s nothing we can do. We did what we thought was best in the moment. For me, in my position with Tony, I think one of the things that was always valuable to him was that I didn’t ask a lot of him. He didn’t want advice or help unless he asked for it, and that wasn’t just on a personal level, but in everything. He didn’t want extra fussing.
I did what I thought was the right thing to do when the paparazzi thing broke shortly before his death. I heard about it because one of the tabloids came to me and said, we intend to run a story about this, after it had already broken in the European press. So I, doing my job, reached out to him and said, “These guys have stated their intentions, they’re giving you a chance to comment, how do you want to play this?”
And then we had a short conversation where I just said, “Are you okay? I hope you’re okay.” Just... trying to acknowledge that this was painful but without fussing over him, because I knew instinctively that he didn’t want that from me, or anyone as it turned out. He really didn’t want people going, “Oh my God, are you okay? This is so terrible. What can I do?” He was very short with anybody who offered comfort to him.
I feel like I’ve been in his shoes in this kind of situation, where you know someone’s bad for you, but you’re just not ready yet to give up on it because you know how good it feels when it’s good, and the idea of giving it up in order to save yourself just isn’t conceivable. I think that’s where he was at.
In studying his work, the trajectory ofmy reading went through the crime novels first, and I came to realize that he’d written his parents into the crime novels. And so I went and looked at his dad’s obituary, and realized only then that his parents had split up. For a person of such candor to have somewhat concealed that his parents had split was surprising. Or that his relationship with his late mother was troubled — this, too, is evident from the crime novels.
Interestingly, she’s quoted in your book. (“A difficult teenager,” she said. Also, “a fabulous vocabulary.”)
I never met her in person.
Oh, really?
Yeah. That’s a function I think of the alienation that Tony was experiencing from her for most of my time working for him. When I first started, I remember arranging dinners occasionally for him and his mom. And then at some point, that stopped. And we didn’t talk about it. I didn’t ask about it. I figured if he wanted to have dinner with her, he would ask me to make a reservation.
There would be the very occasional, just very cryptic comment about how they weren’t close, or that I didn’t need to worry about asking her for this or that. It was clear that there had been a schism there, and it was definitely not something that I would ask about, because it was a source of some tension. So I just left it alone.
The one time I talked with him in person, Bourdain did not mention his parents or his brother; they seemed compartmentalized, separate from the rest of his life. He showed me his trepanning tools, and did not mention that they had been a gift from his brother Christopher.
Christopher gave such great interviews for this book, revealing a lot of things that I just never knew about Tony’s family.
As to why Tony would be so secretive — not secretive, that isn’t quite the right word. His family was not part of his public narrative, I think.
In the book, one of his kitchen colleagues from the ’80s says that Tony was always playing with his image and how he looked. Even when he started to dabble in heroin, before it got to be a more serious habit, it was in this very self-conscious way. The image of the heroin addict really was appealing to him.
He had a literary affinity with it.
His idols were in some ways a cliche. Hunter Thompson and William S. Burroughs... the standard starter pack of disaffected male writers who behaved badly and then made great art out of it. His very straitlaced family didn’t really fit into that narrative. Especially his mother, who had had very specific expectations for him as a bright, promising person who failed to live up to what she saw as his promise.
I really love the singer Neko Case, and there’s this line, “The most tender place in my heart is for a stranger.” And it just floored me when I first heard it, and then the follow-up line is, “I know it’s unkind, but my own blood is much too dangerous.”
That was something that Tony subscribed to, I think, this idea that you make these chosen families and chosen tribes out of kitchen colleagues or television colleagues, and they’re your family that aren’t quite as threatening to you, because they didn’t know you when you were a 5-year-old, a 12-year-old. They don’t know all your secrets or vulnerabilities.
So what is next for you, Laurie Woolever?
I’m co-authoring a book about bread with the baker Richard Hart, who was for a long time the head baker at Tartine. And now he has his own place in Copenhagen called Hart Bageri, which is under the umbrella of the Noma world. He’s great. He’s just a brilliant, gentle, funny, really gifted baker, and he’s got a lot to say about making bread. I am also starting to do a lot of public speaking, which is terrifying to me in some ways. I mean, it is not something I ever saw myself doing, but for now, I am very happy to talk about this book, and about World Travel. The other piece of it is that a few people have asked me to get involved with these other projects, possibly involving scripted television, possibly an interview-format show; for now those are in early stages.
So going almost on the same trajectory that you would’ve been if he were alive, it seems.
Tony really loved to see people grow and thrive, and if somebody was ready to leave a position, he wasn’t the kind of guy to make it impossible; he would never be jealous or resentful if somebody outgrew their role. But as I said in the introduction to the biography, I would gladly do all of that work again. I mean, as much as it was sometimes mundane or tedious, I would, in a heartbeat, continue to make his hotel reservations till the end of time, in a world where he’s still around.
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Sophia Pappas
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