One of my very favorite bars, a tiny Brooklyn tiki bar called Shaka Shaka, serves some of its best drinks in vintage glass goblets that make each one feel more interesting than those at the much more expensive cocktail bars nearby. There’s something about these glowing, patterned glasses, in mismatched shapes and colors, that make an experience as simple as drinking some wine (or a very strong piña colada) feel much more personal.
I was recently taken by one such goblet, whose shape and general hands-on-hips attitude gave me the distinct impression it was judging me deeply. I love these sorts of beautiful-yet-silly pieces even more in an otherwise-plain dining room (say, mine) where they pop against the backdrop of Ikea plates and mechanics towels I use in place of napkins. Rather than stand out awkwardly, they make simple, budget-conscious place settings feel like the intentional backdrop for this, the main character, the goblet of your dreams.
I’m not the only one who’s embracing the opulence and over-the-top elegance of these sorts of pieces. Vintage (or vintage-esque) goblets are making a resurgence, with some glass-blowers and crystal-cutters taking inspiration from the old to create their own sparkling, new glasses. If, for instance, you’re in the market for some investment pieces (a term I use to describe things I can not afford and do not need, but want to buy anyways), this set of two hand-cut crystal stemmed glasses from Farfetch are selling for a modest $641, and look pretty sweet. These Serena Confalonieri glasses from Mociun are a slightly more, uh, reasonable $405 for two. And of the vintage (and still spectacularly expensive) variety, there are these particularly lovely hand-blown 1970s glass goblets from Rosemary Home.
I won’t be buying any of them because 1) I can’t rationalize spending almost $300 on a single glass, and 2) having such valuable glassware in my shared New York apartment doesn’t make a ton of sense. But an investment piece doesn’t have to be so expensive. For those of us who aren’t set up to spend $600 on cups right now, Etsy has a treasure trove of elegant patterned glass goblets in yellow, green, and whatever this color is, as well as options to build your own mismatched set. (You can thank me later for the rabbit hole you’re about to go down.)
As a person who’s always wished I had more just-because hobbies, I’m drawn to the idea of becoming the oh, he collects vintage goblets guy — there’s something quite special about getting one’s hands on a set of glasses that have been around for so long and were crafted with such care. But cabinet space doesn’t allow it so for now, I’ll have to settle for a set of six beautifully mismatched cups.
Jillian Melton was paid just $2.13 per hour — the lowest legal cash wage in the U.S. — during her six years at Seasons 52 Wine Bar and Grill in Memphis, Tennessee. The rest of her income came from tips, which could vary widely depending on the day of the week or the whim of the customer.
Melton also says she witnessed discrimination on the job — not only from customers but also from the store’s management. As a young, lighter-skinned Black woman of mixed heritage, Melton says she was often assigned by her managers to the busiest, most front-facing sections of the restaurant along with her white and young coworkers. But her older and darker-skinned Black coworkers were given emptier sections where tips would only slowly trickle in — a pattern of discrimination based on colorism, racism, and ageism that resulted in her bringing home vastly more tips.
“There would be nights where I made $300 to $400 and my coworker would go home with $60 or $80. And that was normal,” said Melton.
Even though Melton benefited financially from this practice, she spoke out about the inequity to the management. But she says they weren’t receptive. She doesn’t believe her managers were intentionally discriminating, but “their idea of professionalism was based off of colorism and ageism.”
Practices like this are part of a wider pattern of discriminatory wage practices across the restaurant industry, which leads to unequal pay based on race and gender, and increased sexual harassment, according to the advocacy group One Fair Wage. Last year, the group sued Darden Restaurants, the owner of Seasons 52, for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which protects workers from discrimination, including from practices that unintentionally result in a “disparate impact.”
Today, One Fair Wage, which represents over 200,000 service workers and 800 restaurant workers, is filing an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to a lawsuit that was dismissed last year. The group alleges that Darden pays the lowest legal cash wage in every state and lacks policies to redistribute tips between workers, facilitating a discriminatory system where the civil rights of people of color and women are violated.
“Intentionally or not, these policies conspire to create both a work environment that is rife with discrimination with sexual harassment,” said Jason Harrow, a constitutional lawyer at Gerstein Harrow representing One Fair Wage.
The case was previously dismissed by a U.S. District Judge who determined that One Fair Wage could not sue another person’s employer under Title VII. If this is the case, however, it would effectively render Darden immune from Title VII lawsuits, given that its employees are barred from participating in lawsuits in the company’s contracts. If the appeal is denied, “then Darden has written itself out of federal law, basically,” said Harrow.
Darden did not respond to a request from Civil Eats for comment by press time.
The lawsuit is part of One Fair Wage’s national fight to end what it calls the subminimum wage — the lower tier of federal and state minimum wages for tipped workers — and replace it with a full minimum wage and shared tips. Today, there are 43 states that allow tipped workers to be paid a fraction of the state’s minimum wage for other workers, including 15 states where workers can be paid the federal minimum, which is just $2.13 per hour plus tips.
As restaurants workers leave the industry in droves, One Fair Wage and the Restaurants Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, the other national group founded by advocate Saru Jayaraman, are hopeful that they may be turning a corner in the fight for fair wages among restaurant workers.
“People are calling this era ‘the end of low wage work,”’ said Jayaraman, who directs of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in addition to One Fair Wage. “People aren’t willing to work for these wages and people are overwhelmingly supportive of workers not willing to work for these wages. The is the future of the industry.”
In a recent survey by One Fair Wage, tipped workers commonly cite a decline in tips and uptick of harassment during the pandemic as their reason for quitting. The group has also tracked nearly 3,000 restaurants across the country that have raised wages to the full minimum wage and beyond, in response to worker pressure and shortages. Even major fast-food chains like Chipotle and McDonald’s now pay nearly double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 in some states.
But this momentum has been largely led by independent restaurants and some fast-food chains, while stopping short of publicly-traded, full-service restaurant chains, like Darden.
As the nation’s largest full-service restaurant company, Darden wields considerable influence over the industry while impacting the lives of its 175,000 staff. In addition to 52 locations of Seasons 52 across the U.S., the company owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, Bahama Breeze, The Capital Grille, Eddie V’s, and Yard House, for a total of 1,800 locations across the U.S. The company is also a leading member of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), the industry trade group that has gone on record multiple times opposing the $15 per hour minimum wage.
This makes it so “[Darden] is the natural first target,” said Jayaraman “[If a court] says it’s illegal for Darden to pay a subminimum wage, then it’s going to be illegal for everybody else.”
A System Rooted in Discrimination
Jayaraman sees the tipped wage system as “a direct legacy of slavery” that emerged after Emancipation in 1863. In her new book One Fair Wage, she writes about how the practice “spread rapidly as employers in the hospitality sector hired newly freed slaves as servers, porters, and hosts across the country.” When that happened, tips shifted from being a bonus to replacing the wages of freed Black workers.
One Fair Wage alleges that discrimination has been perpetuated through the “increased sexual harassment and disparate wages for workers across racial groups.” And it’s a claim that is supported by a growing body of academic research, worker surveys, and on-the-ground stories.
Often this discrimination comes from customers who can leverage the tipping system to claim power over restaurant workers. When working at Seasons 52, for example, Melton said that she put up with routine sexual or verbal harassment from customers, but like many tipped workers in her position, she didn’t feel she like she could push back because her tips — her livelihood — was dependent on their satisfaction.
“There have been plenty of times where I laughed off something extremely inappropriate and offensive because I really didn’t feel like there was anything I could do,” she told Civil Eats. “It leads to women putting up with sexual harassment, inappropriate comments, or an inappropriate hand on the back.”
Other Darden workers reported discriminatory experiences in another survey by One Fair Wage, which found that 20 percent of the nearly 200 workers who responded claim to be tipped less than their coworkers on the basis of race or gender.
Michael Lynn, a professor in food and beverage management in Cornell University, was the first to study the way racial bias influences tipping practices. Lynn found that tipping has the “adverse impact of paying Black servers less than white servers,” which led him to suggest in 2008 that the practice violates the Civil Rights Act.
Sexual harassment also plays an important role in the dynamic, say experts. A 2021 national report and survey by One Fair Wage and Social Science Research Solutions found that “tipped workers who receive a subminimum wage experience sexual harassment at a rate far higher than their non-tipped counterparts.”
Catharine A. MacKinnon, a professor at Michigan Law School and Harvard Law School and an author on the 2021 report, adds that this problem is an “underlying dynamic” in the restaurant industry. In an e-mail to Civil Eats, she described the tipping system as putting workers “at the sexual whim and mercy of whoever provides the tips, or provides the conditions that enhance or make tips possible.”
As a result, this facilitates a workplace where sexual harassment — which MacKinnon has devoted much of her career to studying, as the legal scholar who pioneered the legal claim to sexual harassment — is effectively a stipulation for receiving a wage.
“These are not only the preconditions for sexual harassment; they build sexual harassment into the structure of their employment,” MacKinnon added.
Former Olive Garden employee Carisa Shade says she experienced another a form of gender discrimination due to her pregnancy. Shade was working as a bartender at an Olive Garden in Arden, North Carolina when she was let go due to the widespread shutdowns in early March 2020. In May of that year, Shade she was asked to return to the company in June, when she was expecting a baby. She filed for a medical leave but was denied leave in a letter shared with Civil Eats. As she recovered from the birth, Shade’s manager told her that she had been fired.
“I’ve never seen someone get fired for having a baby,” said Shade, who has worked in restaurants for 20 years. “They were punishing me. They were mad at me [because] I wasn’t going to be there.”
Darden did not respond to a request for comment about any of the claims of discrimination in this article.
A New Wage Policy, with Negligible Impact
Darden hasn’t been entirely unresponsive to worker pressure — at least, in its public messaging and recruitment strategies.
The company recently announced its plan to move tipped workers to $12 per hour, a change effective this month, after moving to $10 per hour as of March 2021. The policy originally garnered national attention, referred to as a “sign of hope” by the Associated Press. However, this wage floor is inclusive of tips.
In a conference call with investors last March, Gene Lee, Darden’s former CEO, who stepped down this month to serve as a chairman on the company’s board, described the change this way: “If you’re a tipped employee and your tips and your wage doesn’t get you to $10, we’ll bring you to $10 an hour.”
Jayaraman sees this distinction as deceptive. “A lot of workers have told us they’ve gone to apply to some of these chains that are promising higher wages... [but] then when they find out it’s actually still the subminimum wage just with tips, they’re like, ‘Forget this industry,’” said Jayaraman.
“The amount of people this impacts is small,” Lee admitted on the conference call. Many of the company’s employees are already earning more than $12 an hour after tips, but they are rarely given full-time schedules, and as a result their median annual compensation is just $16,137. In contrast, Lee took home nearly $8.7 million in the 2020 fiscal year — or over 500 times more than the median Darden worker.
Even though the changes won’t raise the actual wages of many Darden workers, the company’s new CEO, Rick Cardenas, recently told investors that the policy is a way to draw in new employees. “The one thing we’ve got is an incredible employment proposition. When we make an offer, people accept it, and that’s a great thing,” he said, on a conference call in December.
Darden’s wage policy is similar to the existing legal requirement that employers bring tipped employees up to their state’s minimum wage when they don’t earn it in tips. This system often puts the burden on employees who have to request that their employer pay the difference and it is prone to violations, as detailed in a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
A Liability for Investors
If this appeal is successful, the process of discovery will allow One Fair Wage’s legal team to uncover private data about Darden’s employment practices. This could prove important to researchers like Michael Lynn, who says his studies into tipping and discrimination are limited by sample pools and publicly available data.
“It would be possible to get a pretty broad database to see whether or not Black servers, Hispanic servers, [and] Asian servers get lower tips than whites,” said Lynn. “In the research I’ve done, we found that’s the case.”
This data would also potentially build a stronger case for advocates working to expose Darden’s employment practices. Jayaraman also sees the lawsuit as a way to alert investors to the liabilities of investing in companies that continue to pay a fraction of the full minimum wage. “As long as you have this system, there’s going to be ongoing litigation,” she said, given its link to racial and sexual discrimination.
Some investors have been quick to acknowledge this liability, including a group of investors that have joined One Fair Wage and Adasina Social Capital in a campaign called “Investors for Livable Wages.” The group is pushing publicly traded companies to transition to paying their employees tips and the full minimum wage, which differs state to state. So far, there have been no publicly traded companies to make this transition, but even Darden has faced recent questions from investors about its wage policy.
“When I see a number like $12 an hour, when you compare it to other retailers or even some other segments in retail restaurants, it still seems low,” John Glass, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, told Darden executives, in the recent conference call. “Do you think the casual dining industry... is maybe underpaying relative to others in retail, and there’s the need just to continue to advance that?”
Darden’s Gene Lee was quick to disagree, asserting that the industry pays appropriate wages based on “supply and demand.”
However, Jayaraman is holding out hope that One Fair Wage and the broader worker-led restaurant fight will be able to shift this equation, so that the “supply” of workers at a given restaurant depends on its labor practices.
“My hope is that the combined pressure of the staffing crisis, the lawsuit, and the liability of the subminimum wage — the combination of all of those factors — encourages these dinosaurs to see the light,” said Jayaraman. “First Darden, and then others.”
11 chocolate shops where you can find the best Valentine’s Day gift there is
I am an avowed supporter of Valentine’s Day — not because I have a particularly rosy-eyed view of love and friendships, although I am also pro those things. It is 95 percent because of the candy, specifically chocolate.
I enjoy eating chocolate all year round, but on Valentine’s Day, it deservedly takes pride of place, conversation hearts and flower arrangements notwithstanding. And Valentine’s Day, unlike the other festive occasions where chocolate is a mere background player, is the time to request and give really fancy chocolate, the kind of chocolate that immediately telegraphs luxury and decadence. There’s nothing that fits that bill quite like bonbons.
Stick With Me Sweets
A 24-piece box from Stick With Me Sweets.
This is the place that convinced me there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sitting around and eating bonbons all day. In fact, it’s a delightful thing to do. At the New York City shop, Susanna Yoon manages to pack all the flavors of other elaborate desserts — like calamansi meringue pie or black forest cake — into a beautiful package. You can’t select individual flavors when you order to ship online, but trust, they won’t disappoint.
Vesta Chocolate
Vesta’s Valentine’s LOVE Jewel bonbons.
New Jersey-based Vesta Chocolate is a bean-to-bonbon chocolate factory, meaning chocolatiers Roger Rodriguez and Julia Choi Rodriguez start the chocolate-making process with whole cacao beans which they then process to form the basis of confections ranging from hot chocolate to bars to bonbons. Those bonbons are available to ship in boxes of six or 12 surprise flavors, but all of them are gluten- and nut-free.
In Miami, bean-to-bonbon Exquisito Chocolates prides itself on ethical sourcing. You can see exactly how chocolate maker Carolina Quijano turns cacao into chocolate on this episode of Eater’s “Handmade.” And for Valentine’s Day, you can pre-order boxes of three or 32 bonbons in classic heart-shaped boxes.
Eater SF called Topotgato San Francisco’s “most audacious online chocolate shop.” The hand-painted confections from pastry chef Simon Brown and designer Beau Monroe contain flavor combinations like pistachio marzipan with hibiscus jelly and pear jam with chamomile tea and a white wine ganache. Topogato also sells artwork by Monroe; this “rosebud” print would make a sweet addition to a Valentine’s Day gift of chocolates.
Elle Lei makes bonbons in small batches out of Chicago; they sell out fast. Sugoi partnered with fellow Chicago small business Aya Pastry on festive Halloween bonbons and is doing the same for Valentine’s Day. That collaboration is available for local pickup and delivery, but stay tuned for more options available directly from Sugoi, and in the meantime, peruse the usual offerings in flavors like beer pretzel, Chicago corn, and cotton candy pop rock, all decorated with bright pops of color.
Houston-based Cacao and Cardamom recognizes the jewel-like appeal of the bonbon, which here come in a variety of shapes, packaged in gold-lined boxes. As the shop’s name implies, spices take a starring role in chocolatier Annie Rupani’s flavors: there’s strawberry szechuan peppercorn, garam masala pistachio, five spice praline, and cardamom rose, just to name a few.
Kate Weiser
Kate Weiser’s 24-piece heart collection.
The Valentine’s Day offerings at Dallas-based chocolatier Kate Weiser combine my desire for quality, fancy chocolate with the gaudy Valentine’s Day imagery I unironically love. Just look at those pink hearts!
In Tucson, Monsoon Chocolate puts together boxes of bonbons that showcase a variety of aesthetic styles with flavors that reflect the southwestern setting, such as chiltepÃn pepper, prickly pear caramel, and Sonoran sea salt dark chocolate. Like Exquisito Chocolate and Vesta Chocolate, Monsoon is a bean-to-bar operation.
Atlanta-based Jardà Chocolates is particularly well suited to the fruit lover. For Valentine’s Day, pastry chef Jocelyn Gragg is putting together a four-piece set of bonbons; flavors include liquid cherry cordial, piña colada, passionfruit and vanilla marshmallow, and a heart-shaped blood orange caramel.
At And Sons in Los Angeles, second-generation chocolate makers carry on the family tradition with elegant bonbons and other chocolate confections. If you’re looking to give chocolate hearts for Valentine’s Day, look no further. In fact, And Sons makes a giant heart-shaped bonbon (giant, at three inches) filled with cinnamon hazelnut gianduja, salted vanilla caramel, and hazelnut praline, along with smaller heart-shaped bonbons.
Bon Bon Bon’s bonbons might not have the typical domed shape, but the flavors take full advantage of the anything-goes spirit of the bonbon. The Detroit shop’s Valentine’s Day collection is especially, um, spirited, including flavors with names like cherry pop (candied Luxardo cherry confiture, toasted poppy seed ganache, and dried Michigan cherries), family jewels (banana ganache, hazelnut praline ganache, hazelnut croquant, and pearl sugar), and S&M (strawberry and mascarpone). And while the Valentine’s Day pre-orders are sold out, mystery boxes-o-bons are available and likely just as fun.
Thanks for Preordering! Your Cookbook Is at the Bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
January 27, 2022
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Going, going, gone. | Shutterstock/Eater
Mason Hereford’s “Turkey and the Wolf” and Melissa Clark’s “Dinner in One” were the casualties of a shipping container collapse
Y’all remember when the Ever Given container ship got stuck and blocked the entire Suez Canal? Well, I come bearing more shipping container-related bad news, at least for anyone looking forward to some of this spring’s most anticipated cookbooks. Good news first, though: No one seems to have been injured when on January 7 a very large boat going by the name of Madrid Bridge hit heavy winds and lost 65 shipping containers in the mid-Atlantic. Okay, now for the bad: It seems all copies of New Orleans-based chef Mason Hereford’s Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans and New York Times food writer Melissa Clark’s Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals are now sitting in shipping containers at the bottom of the ocean.
Clark and Hereford have taken the highly unfortunate news in stride, both posting memes on Instagram of their books at the bottom of the ocean. After two straight years of truly terrible and shockingly awful pandemic, climate, and general world news, it appears both authors were at least somewhat prepared for what I can only imagine were the extremely awkward calls in which they were told their books had not been delivered to the port of New York, and were instead soaking up sea water.
On his restaurant’s Instagram page, Hereford described the fate of his cookbook as “perhaps the most hilariously 2022 thing to happen yet this year.” And on hers, Clark announced that “In keeping with the zeitgeist of 2022, I regret to inform you all that my new cookbook, Dinner in One, may have sunk to the bottom of the ocean.”
Despite the boatload of bad news, both authors are pushing ahead with their cookbook launches — only slightly delayed. Hereford’s book was originally going to be released in February, and will now reach readers June 21, 2022, and Clark’s, set to release in March before the water-induced fiasco, will come in early September. In the meantime, hold tight to your favorite cookbooks, and send some good thoughts to shipping containers everywhere.
For His Third Act, a Japanese Sushi Master Brings His Famous Omakase to NYC
January 27, 2022
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Chef Tadashi Yoshida’s chases his version of the American dream by opening Yoshino in New York City
Tadashi Yoshida is considered one of the best sushi masters in Japan. After the success of his restaurant Sushi No Yoshino in Nagoya, he decided to try and make his mark in the United States. “I thought, why not bring myself to the center stage of the world, New York City?” And so, he opened Yoshino in NoHo last September, with an impressive 20-course omakase-style sushi experience.
Yoshino joins a bevy of luxe sushi restaurants in NYC, but what makes Yoshida’s restaurant stand out is his dedication to rare ingredients, unique cooking techniques, and masterful skill level. He learned many of his techniques growing up at his father’s sushi counter Sushi No Yoshino in the Gifu prefecture in Japan. He then fine-tuned even more cooking skills working in a French restaurant in Yokahama before taking over his father’s spot and bringing it to Nagoya.
His signature dish, Yakisaba sushi, utilizes a handheld charcoal grill to char a piece of mackerel, which is then draped over shiso and pickled ginger atop a bed of rice. “I’ve been making it every day for 4 or 5 years,” he says. “The sound of fish cooking, there is nothing like it.”
Yoshida’s unique karasumi mochi was inspired by something he once ate in Kyoto, and he makes it by curing bora fish sacs in salt and sake for about four weeks. He then makes fresh mochi, wraps it around the finished karasumi, and grills it over charcoal. The result is a puffy, charred, and savory mochi bite filled with the cheese-like texture of the aged kurasami. “It’s that fine balance between the soft karasumi and the mochi texture that I visualize when I make it.”
Yoshida points out, “Here at NY Yoshino, 80 percent of the fish we use is from Japan.” He adds that when he closed his restaurant in Nagoya to come to NYC, many of his favorite fish vendors were supportive of his decision: “Because their fish now can be enjoyed by people in New York. So they wanted to ride along with me on my pursuit of the American dream.”
He adds, “...Moving from Nagoya to Yoshino NY is my third act. Life is about challenging oneself to the end, because I want to keep evolving.” As for what comes next, Yoshida embraces the uncertainty: “Not knowing what act four is going to be is the American dream. So I am always feeling excited everyday anticipating what could be next.”
Check out the full video to see more of Yoshida’s dishes and more of what it took to open Yoshino.
This Togarashi-Hot Honey Fried Chicken Recipe Is a Win for Your Super Bowl Party
January 27, 2022
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A dusting of the Japanese spice mix creates the perfect balance of heat and sweet
In 2011, I was a 24-year-old Capitol Hill staffer living in Washington, D.C. Back then, D.C. hummed with a vibrancy and idealism that felt both quixotic and ambitious. It was due in large part to then-President Barack Obama, who was still in his first term in office. This new burst of energy could be felt around town, inspiring everything from neighborhood revitalization (or gentrification) and new restaurant and bar concepts. I couldn’t help but feel inspired as well.
For my birthday that year, my girlfriends got together and bought me a seat in a cooking class hosted by Erik Bruner-Yang, an up-and-coming chef who planned to open a new restaurant called Toki Underground later that year. During the class, we focused on the art of forming and frying delicate pork gyoza. Chef Bruner-Yang also taught us how to make the thick, meaty tonkotsu ramen broth he would offer at his restaurant.
That ramen is, to this day, the best I’ve ever had. Made with an opaque and unapologetically porky broth, it was finished with a hearty dusting of togarashi, a Japanese seasoning composed of an assortment of dried chiles, sesame seeds, ginger, and seaweed. The togarashi added an element of flavor I hadn’t come across before, with a heat that was deep without being overpowering or too spicy.
I carried my love of togarashi with me when I left D.C. for Atlanta, where I exchanged a career in politics for one in food. In the almost five years that I’ve called this city home, I’ve learned how obsessed ATLians are with chicken wings. Whether they’re made with lemon pepper, spicy barbecue, or sweet teriyaki — and in some cases a combination of two or more flavors — they make up a massive part of the culture in the Peach City. Few things taste better than the combination of sweet and savory, and no dish accomplishes that better than glazed fried chicken wings. And so, inspired by my time in D.C. and my current hometown, I created this recipe for togarashi-hot honey wings.
Here, the crunchy, savory fried chicken is coated with gooey honey, and togarashi is used to finish it, just like it was in that bowl of ramen. Sprinkled over the chicken, it clings to the sticky crust and adds a piquant flavor that keeps me coming back for wing after wing. A great party dish all year round, it’s sure to be a hit at any Super Bowl gathering.
Togarashi-Hot Honey Fried Chicken Wings
Makes 8-12 wings
Ingredients:
2-3 quarts peanut oil
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
2 ½-3 pounds chicken wings (or about 8-12 pieces)
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup Red Clay Hot Honey
1 tablespoon togarashi
Optional Maldon salt, for garnish
Instructions:
Step 1: Pour the peanut oil in a large cast-iron skillet (or a 3-quart chicken fryer or Dutch Oven) and heat over medium heat until the oil is hot (350-375 degrees), for about 15 minutes.
Step 2: Combine the salt, garlic powder, onion powder, and smoked paprika in a small bowl. Pat dry the chicken wings, place them in a large bowl, and season with the spice mixture. Toss the chicken until seasoned throughout.
Step 3: Pour the flour in a large plastic bag and add the chicken wings. Shake the bag to dredge the wings. You can work in batches to ensure even coating.
Step 4: Shake off the excess flour and add the chicken wings to the oil. Fry until golden brown, about 10 minutes. A good indicator that they’re ready is when they float in the oil. Be sure not to crowd the wings or they won’t cook correctly.
Step 5: Once the wings are cooked, place them on a paper towel-lined sheet pan to blot out the excess oil.
Step 6: In another large bowl, add the hot honey and ¼ cup of slightly cooled oil from frying the chicken. Still until well combined.
Step 7: Working in batches, toss the wings in the hot honey and oil mixture, making sure that each piece is well coated.
Step 8: Serve the wings on a large plate and sprinkle with togarashi. If more salt is desired, top them with a bit of flaky Maldon salt.
Ryan Shepardis an Atlanta-based food and spirits writer. She loves Mexican food, bourbon and New Orleans. Louiie Victais a chef, recipe developer, food photographer, and stylist living in Las Vegas. Recipe tested by Louiie Victa
Like the average person who grew up in the hellscape of American capitalism, I am not immune to a gimmick. And that’s exactly why I found myself intrigued by the idea of Oscar Mayer’s new bologna-themed, moisturizing face masks, intended to tap into the nostalgia of those times that you acted like a total freak and put lunch meat on your face to amuse your friends.
I was not the only person enticed by the lure of lunchmeat-themed skincare products — the masks sold out in a matter of hours on Amazon, according to CNN Business, becoming one of the top-selling new items in the beauty category. There was something uniquely compelling about the sheer absurdity of Oscar Mayer making a foray into the skincare market. I imagined marketing executives sitting around in an hours-long meeting trying to figure out ways to make the brand seem relevant on social media, and out of sheer boredom one of them put a slice of bologna on their face and a stunt was born.
Though I did not snag one in the initial retail launch, I was able to obtain a bologna face mask from a publicist for Kraft Heinz, the multinational food conglomerate that owns Oscar Mayer, and set out to sate my morbid curiosity about whether or not a company that purveys processed meats could actually make a decent skincare product. More than that, I wondered if it would inspire those feelings of bologna-faced lunchroom nostalgia, or simply provide a brief, if silly, distraction from the mundanity of being stuck inside my apartment during yet another COVID wave.
To be sure, this product’s branding is spot-on. The packaging looks just like a package of Oscar Mayer deli meat, the key exception being a message printed in large red text on the back that reads “DO NOT EAT BOLOGNA MASKS.” The mask itself looks like many other sheet masks of its type, made by Korean company Seoul Mamas, which produces similar products for top tier brands like Neiman Marcus and Ritz-Carlton Spas. The mask itself is constructed from a bizarrely slick “hydrogel” that’s infused with ingredients like witch hazel, a common astringent toner, hydrolyzed collagen, and whatever the fuck polymethylsilsequioxane is, among other ingredients.
When I removed it from the package, the first thing I noticed was the smell. I admit that I was slightly disappointed that Oscar Mayer hadn’t really leaned in and made the mask smell like actual bologna, though in hindsight I imagine no one would want to try it if it reeked of an old sandwich. Instead, the scent was lightly floral and pleasant, something you might expect in a typical skincare product not inspired by a paste of ground-up pork parts.
The mask’s light pink color, on the other hand, was much more evocative of my elementary school lunch box. It’s pinker than real bologna, but still looks unsettlingly like the flesh of something that was once alive, especially when applied to my actual face. Following the instructions on the packaging, I painstakingly peeled away the protective backing and applied the mask — split into two pieces, one for the top of my face and another for the bottom — for what I assumed would be 20 minutes, as recommended.
I stepped away from my laptop, put some lo-fi beats on YouTube, and tried to find a moment of midday zen, and immediately felt like a complete idiot. Once applied, the mask made my face look like it was dripping in peeling flesh, and the alcohols and fragrances in the mask started to sting after only a few minutes. Despite feeling perpetually cool to the touch on its own, the mask warmed as it lingered on my face, and I found myself a bit queasy. Somehow, it was worse than all those times I’d slapped a slice of deli turkey on my face in the elementary school lunchroom, and there are few sensations more revolting than the feeling of lukewarm lunch meat on your skin.
Over the past several years, the Brands have scraped desperately for relevance, and merch has been a big part of that. Popeyes and Taco Bell are making bikinis now, even Cheez-Its have their own web store where fans can buy hoodies, blankets, and socks decorated with the logo of their favorite snack. That makes sense, people love to show off where their loyalties lie. But there’s something that feels uniquely bleak about the idea of purchasing a bologna-shaped face mask for the sole purpose of making Content. At least once the trends die down, you can still wear socks.
After only about 10 minutes, when the stinging sensation had really started to rev up — I pulled the mask away from my face and discarded it on its own foil packaging. Instead of delighting in the irreverence, I felt like a dork. Why did I try to find some kind of self-care moment in a brand’s goofy gimmick, and why was I so quick to buy into the idea of skincare products from a company that knows jack shit about them? I went looking for a lunch meat brand to solve my pandemic boredom, and I just ended up slightly more depressed.
This Recipe for Eggplant, Bologna, and Mushroom Burnt Toast Shows The Beauty of a Good Char
January 26, 2022
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To make Chef Edward Lee’s take on the classic bologna sandwich, burning is a must.
One of the first things you learn when you begin to cook is that burnt equals bad. The sight of a blackened slice of toast, too-crispy chicken, or bitter sugar is never a good thing if it happens by accident — and it can happen by accident in a split second. But what if you burned your ingredients on purpose? “There are so many [burnt] things in this world that we love: really charred grilled meats; bourbon, which uses burnt charred barrels,” chef Edward Lee says. “To me, the flavor of burnt is not necessarily a negative thing.”
Take, for example, Lee’s recipe for eggplant, bologna, and mushroom burnt toast, a dish he teaches in his class for YesChef, a subscription-based streaming platform offering cinematic cooking classes taught by world-renowned chefs. No individual ingredient of the recipe is fully scorched, per se, but each is cooked until a “charred note” comes out. Roast a head of garlic until soft to make a garlic mayo; sear Japanese eggplants and slices of bologna in pecan oil to bring out some caramelization; and throw chanterelle mushrooms into the same pan to pick up all those flavorful juices. Think the eggplants are ready to come off the heat? Push them just a little further. You want that sweet char to come through.
“Probably the worst mistake you can make in the kitchen is to burn something, right?” Lee says. But with this upscale bologna sandwich, it’s a must. That “burnt” flavor is what adds complexity to the dish, lending more adult flavors to a favorite dish from Lee’s childhood. — Dayna Evans
Eggplant, Bologna, and Mushroom Burnt Toast
Serves 2
Ingredients:
For the roasted garlic mayonnaise:
1 garlic head
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pinch salt
1 ½ cups mayonnaise, such as Duke’s Mayonnaise
1 pinch ground black pepper
For the seared bologna, eggplant, and mushrooms:
1 Japanese eggplant
4 tablespoons pecan oil
Kosher salt to taste
2 thick slices of bologna per sandwich
½ tablespoon unsalted butter
3 ounces chanterelle mushrooms or oyster mushrooms
Black pepper
Sherry vinegar
For plating:
½ tablespoon unsalted butter
2 slices brioche bread
1 tablespoon roasted garlic mayonnaise
1 pinch flake salt
1 teaspoon pecan oil
Fresh parsley to garnish
Instructions:
For the roasted garlic mayonnaise:
Step 1: Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
Step 2: Place a halved garlic head on a baking tray lined with aluminum foil and drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Reassemble the garlic head before loosely wrapping it with foil.
Step 3: Place in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes until soft and golden brown.
Step 4: Remove the garlic cloves from their skins and add to a medium-size bowl and mash into a paste. Add mayonnaise and ground black pepper, and mix further.
For the seared bologna, eggplant, and mushrooms:
Step 1: Slice the eggplant lengthwise in half and score the cut side. Drizzle with 2 tablespoons of pecan oil. Once it is absorbed, sprinkle with salt.
Step 2: Place a skillet on medium-high heat, add 2 tablespoons of pecan oil and let it heat through. Transfer the eggplant to the skillet with the cut side facing down, gently press with a wooden spoon, and let it cook through and char for 10 to 12 minutes.
Step 3: Once nicely charred and softened, flip the eggplant and cook the skin side for another 4 to 5 minutes.
Step 4: While the eggplant is cooking, add both slices of bologna to the same skillet and cook until charred and golden on both sides, about 2 minutes for each side. Use an earthenware coaster or another tool to press down on the bologna to keep it from curling. Remove the eggplant and bologna from the pan and set them aside.
Step 5: Add ½ tablespoon butter to the hot pan. While it is still foaming, add the chanterelle mushrooms and a sprinkle of salt.
Step 6: Cook for 1 to 2 minutes until the mushrooms have picked up all of the charred flavors from the pan.
Step 7: Add the salt, black pepper, and sherry vinegar, then remove from the pan and serve.
For plating:
Step 1: Add ½ tablespoon butter to the same hot pan over medium-high heat. Top with a thick slice of brioche bread, and let it char and cook through for 1 to 2 minutes, or until golden brown. Optional: While the toast is still in the pan, slather 1 tablespoon garlic mayonnaise on the bread’s face-up side, then flip and let the bread char through for another 1 to 2 minutes, or until golden brown.
Step 2: Transfer the toast to a decorative plate.
Step 3: Spread an additional 1 tablespoon garlic mayonnaise on the other side of brioche and top with a slice of charred bologna.
Step 4: Slice the charred eggplant crosswise in half-inch slices.
Step 5: Top the bologna with eggplant pieces and chanterelle mushrooms. Garnish with fresh parsley leaves, a drizzle of pecan oil, and a pinch of flakey salt. Repeat Steps 1-5 with the second piece of bread.
The seltzer boom has looped back around to good old-fashioned alcopops
Coca-Cola announced today that it’s launching, in partnership with Molson Coors, Simply Spiked Lemonade, which by definition, is not simply lemonade. And while it’s hopping on the hard seltzer trend, it’s also definitively not a hard seltzer. “This is a completely different proposition,” the VP of innovation for Molson Coords told Food Business News. Instead, Michelle St. Jacques, chief marketing officer, Molson Coors, said in a statement that the company is here to “disrupt the full-flavor alcohol segment.” With hard lemonade.
Simply Spiked Lemonade, a 5 percent ABV hard lemonade that comes in four flavors, will join Coke’s Fresca Mixed on the shelves, as well as competitors Hard Mtn Dew, Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda, White Claw hard seltzer iced tea, Twisted tea, and a bevy of canned cocktail brands all positioning themselves to be as easy to bring to a party as a six-pack of beer. Meanwhile, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, king of kings, is looking out at the lone and level sands of his creation. The dream of the early 2000s (and every other trend wave) is alive and we’ve officially looped back around to drinking alcopops.
This is not inherently a bad thing. In the many states where anything harder than beer can’t be purchased at a grocery store, the spread of hard seltzers, lemonades, teas, ciders, and other non-beer drinks has been a boon to those of us who don’t drink beer but who don’t want to make an extra trip. There are more options than making do with a sickly sweet Woodchuck, and that’s great.
But also, we’re at the pinnacle of the unmitigated spread of each brand’s IP into every possible iteration of a product, as they rely on brand recognition to flip the switch in a consumer’s head to think “I like their other stuff so I’ll like this too.” Frito-Lay has Flamin’ Hotted every single snack it has. Spindrift is making spiked seltzers, and Truly Hard Seltzer is making fruit punch. I drank a Coca-Cola mocha coffee soda the other day and my body could not compute what was happening. What does the phrase Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda even mean, especially considering Bud Light Seltzer is already a thing? Maybe it doesn’t matter, because “Bud Light Seltzer,” like Simply Lemonade, is a known quantity. But also who cares?
Eventually this is what supply and demand always curdles into, brands insisting they’re creating something new when they’re just making more and more nearly identical things trying to capture a slice of a rapidly saturating market, an endless supply of products no one really asked for, churned out at a clip that will most likely result in surplus and the destruction of things no one bought. But for now, the result is a different hard lemonade than one you’ve already tasted. Look upon these coolers and despair.
Here’s What This Year’s New Valentine’s Day Conversation Hearts Should Actually Say
January 25, 2022
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Bleak messages for bleak times
This week, the company that sells those weird chalky candies that only pop up around Valentine’s Day introduced its new line-up of conversation hearts slogans, and y’all, they are bleak.
Per the announcement from Spangler Candy, this year’s Sweethearts Candies are emblazoned with 16 different slogans, ranging from the usual suspects like “BE MINE” to a series of “uplifting new sayings” for these troubled times, including “CHIN UP,” and “PUSH THRU.” If that weren’t depressing enough, the company is also promoting these new slogans with a Facebook giveaway that encourages people to “nominate someone who could use a boost or has supported you over the years — a coach, teacher, mentor, sibling, or parent.” The prize? A single box of Sweethearts Candies, which might actually be worse than receiving no prize at all.
Here at Eater, we believe that we deserve better from Sweethearts. If conversation hearts can’t taste good, at least they can have messages that are actually relevant to the pandemic-era human condition. Without further ado, here’s a list of 16 slogans that are decidedly more appropriate for these times, but just as dispiriting as “PUSH THRU” or “FEAR LESS.”
U VAXD?
1/1/21? WHERE WERE U?
ON A SCALE OF N95, UR 100
UGH, FINE
MASK 4 MASK
LET’S GO VIRAL
WOULD SWAB 4 U
DEWORM MY HEART
U BOOST ME
SHOW ME UR CHIN
APOCALYPSE AND CHILL?
I GUESS
LET’S PUT OUR ANTI...BODIES TOGETHER
ROSES ARE RED, I HAVE EXISTENTIAL DREAD
UR LOVE IS CONTAGIOUS (NO REALLY, I TESTED POSITIVE)
Every home cook has ingredients and dishes they avoid out of fear, or tools they’re afraid to use. What does it take to get over it?
A few months ago, I was invited by some friends to join a cookbook club. Similar to a book club, a cookbook club gets together once a month to tackle one specific book — everyone picks one part of the meal (mains, appetizers, desserts, and so on) and a recipe from within that category they’d like to cook, then we all get together to make dinner. It’s extremely fun. But it’s been three months of cookbook club and I’ve never once elected to cook a main dish for fear that might mean I’d have to cook chicken. Or steak. Or pork. I have always been terrified of making anything where meat is the star, so I default to what I know best: dessert. (For everything in life, I try to just make dessert.)
It is not unusual for even the most accomplished chefs to have dishes, or even entire categories of dishes, that they’re afraid of cooking. In fact, having fears in the kitchen seems to be a great unifier among most cooks, professional and domestic. “I’m really just afraid of making something that’s inedible or unappetizing, like a really tough steak, or a dry piece of chicken,” says Stephanie Spector, who works in the food industry. “I’m afraid of using the wrong parts of an animal, like not knowing that you have to remove a part of a turkey before cooking it and accidentally leaving it in and making everyone sick.” Spector followed up: “I don’t even know if that’s a thing.”
Spector is a pescatarian, so part of her fear comes from the fact that if she’s making a roast chicken, she can’t taste-test what she’s cooking. “It’s how I learn,” she says. “I can’t do that with meat, so I’m afraid I’ll never get better at cooking it.” Years of vegetarianism translated into decades of fear for me, too: What did I know about how a chicken was supposed to look or how a pot roast would perform in the oven? It has always been better to just ignore that genre of food entirely than risk killing anyone. (That fear also applies to the fish-fearful: “I do not want to die by scallop,” one friend says.)
It’s comforting to know that many of our kitchen fears are the same, related to certain ingredients and how to cook them without killing ourselves or others. Meat, pie dough, seafood, and rice all top the list of foods that home cooks that we spoke to are afraid to mess up. A friend who worked in a “failing restaurant” at age 15 was scarred by the experience of dealing with a lot of spoiled fish, so it took a while for him to trust his ability to tell if the fish is good or “if it’s actually the fish it claims to be.”
But those cooking fears stem from other places, too — whether it’s the fear of wasting food or time or not meeting the expectations or standards of dinner party guests. And if we’re all afraid of something in the kitchen, is there a way to free ourselves? Can we see our fears as irrational or unnecessary and overcome them for the sake of a good meal? Or are we doomed to always let these culinary fears get the best of us?
Cooking meat without dying, making rice with scorching, and poaching eggs properly may top the list of ingredient fears we have, but many of us all also fear the tools we use to cook them. Hillary Dixler Canavan, Eater’s restaurant editor, has a terrible fear of her broiler. “I have this phobia about burning the top of my hand — it happened to a friend of mine when we were making nachos in middle school and it really scarred me,” Canavan says. “Her skin looked like a piece of cooked chicken.” These kinds of haunting memories linger for a long time, and now Canavan says that when she cooks she will “internally discard” a recipe when a broiler is called for. Even extremely cautious home cooks are thrown off by the mandoline, a sloped slicing tool that is used to sliver all manner of vegetables. Asked whether she’d hurt herself using a mandoline, Diana Lu — a writer for Eater Philly — says, “Oh god yes. It’s usually because I’m trying to talk to a cooking companion.” Being distracted while shaving has resulted in many injuries, and “each time I put it away for a few years.”
Cooking fears are often rooted in wanting something that you spent all this time cooking to actually be good, which is why most home cooks also have extremely high standards, even if they’re only cooking for themselves or their close friends and family. “I will not serve food that I don’t think is very good to other people,” Rachel P. Kreiter, Eater’s senior copy editor, says. Kreiter struggles making yeasted breads and can’t figure out how to overcome that fear of them being bad. “Since the most natural opportunity to make a large-format thing is for other people, and since I abhor food waste, I won’t be satisfied until I produce something that other people, objectively, will think is good.”
But there are few things more obnoxious to home cooks than going through the process of making something, doing it poorly, then having to throw it out. Several friends I spoke with refuse to poach eggs on principle — there are a dozen egg preparations that are more enticing than the idea of fully wasting eggs in a pot of hot water. Henrike Theda Klug, a cook and food professional in Paris, says that deep-frying anything is the scariest thing she can imagine in the kitchen. In addition to fearing the boiling-hot oil, she says, “I’m nervous about under-frying the food and it getting soggy and oil-logged, or burning it, and I hate wasting food.”
It is possible to overcome fears of a culinary tool or ingredient, though. Try writer Maggie Lange’s approach: Lange says that her sister hyped up how terrifying the mandoline is for so long that Lange believed it was much harder and scarier to use than it was. “I’d pictured a mandoline as a rusty guillotine with a manic blade,” she says. “And then it was plastic and didn’t need a government-approved license to buy it so I was like, ‘Oh okay, it’s actually not the most dangerous weapon in America.’”
Even with lingering fears around foods we avoid cooking and tools we choose to ignore, we remain ever hopeful: A friend who always messes up her rice (“It’s my Achilles heel”) is considering getting a rice cooker. Canavan is thinking about investing in a really nice toaster oven. And Spector thinks it’s possible that she’ll eventually overcome her fear of cooking meat. “I think the best way for me is just to keep practicing and take every opportunity I can to cook meat for people who will eat it,” she says. If she does it enough, she may start to become comfortable with it. And maybe, just maybe, “I’ll even come to enjoy it.”
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on Playing a Steely, Volatile Chef in ‘A Taste of Hunger’
January 24, 2022
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In the Danish film directed by Christoffer Boe, “Game of Thrones” star Coster-Waldau trades King’s Landing for an equally high-stakes setting: a restaurant kitchen
There’s no shortage of movies that explore fire and passion required from ambitious restaurateurs. From Chef to Big Night, and even Burnt or Ratatouille, the passionate, high-stress pursuit of opening and working in restaurants is easy fodder for dramatic tension. But in A Taste of Hunger, the latest film from director Christoffer Boe, the restaurant merely serves as a setting for a crumbling marriage.
The film stars Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Carsten, a perfection-obsessed chef at the helm of Malus, a top-tier Copenhagen restaurant in hot pursuit of its first Michelin star. Carsten lives next door to Malus, which he runs with his wife Maggie (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal). Everything seems pretty perfect until Carsten discovers an anonymous letter, written originally to him but found by Maggie before he saw it, telling him that she’s in love with another man.
Eater spoke with Boe and Coster-Waldau about what makes a restaurant the perfect backdrop for relationship drama, how to bring nuance to age-old narratives about volatile chefs, and why the humble hot dog — which features heavily in A Taste for Hunger —is the perfect food for bringing people together.
Eater: First things first, for theGame of Thronesfans: Would [your character] Jaime Lannister have been a good cook?
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau: It’s funny you ask. There was a scene that, for some reason, was cut from the final show, where Jaime is creating this lasagna for his sister Cersei and Brienne of Tarth. He was trying to convince them into some kind of open marriage thing, so he thought it would be a good idea to bring them together and talk about this while he cooked this lasagna. I thought it was a beautiful scene, but the creators thought it was too complicated, all the layers of that storyline.
Must’ve been tricky to film that scene with just one hand.
NCW: Very tricky. But he actually uses his golden hand to rinse the water away from the pasta. He would dump the pasta in his hand, put a bit a meat on top, and feed them.
As you prepared to portray Carsten inA Taste of Hunger, which chefs did you look to as inspiration?
NCW: I spent some time in Copenhagen with Rasmus Kofoed, who runs a restaurant called Geranium. He’s just an incredible chef — he won the Bocuse d’Or in 2011, he’s been a coach for other countries. He was very gracious, and he spent a lot of time helping me understand not only the food, but the kind of passion and focus and work ethic that goes into creating something like what he’s created, and what my character wants to create in the movie.
When I was there, the restaurant was serving lunch, and he asked if I wanted to go into the kitchen. I laughed and said “Great idea, what could possibly go wrong there? But okay.” He put me in charge of cutting out these little tiny flowers that were decoration, but it was pretty cool because I got to hang out with all these other chefs and just talk to them. He definitely made sure that I couldn’t destroy anything. Copenhagen is just very lucky. We have a lot of incredible chefs, and this whole world of eating has just changed so drastically now. Chefs are superstars now, and what they do is art. It has a whole different type of weight.
Christoffer Boe: As I was writing the script, I went and visited a lot of restaurants and talked with different chefs. When we were in pre-production, I took the actors to different restaurants and had them experience these rooms, talking to the chefs and the waiters so that they could understand the whole deal of how to make a restaurant happen. Just about when we started shooting, Rasmus Monk opened up Alchemist, which became very famous, and he runs that with his wife. I took inspiration from how they do this business together, basically together 18 hours a day, and have been doing that for seven years.
Do you consider yourself people who are “into food,” the type who would go to a restaurant like Malus?
NCW: I like food, but it’s not like I have to go to an amazing restaurant all the time. I like a food truck as much as a fancy restaurant, but I do go now and then. I like to give friends or my wife that experience. For a couple years, while I was filming Game of Thrones, we had a bet every year where the loser had to take the others to the best restaurant in the world, which was incredible. But that’s a once-a-year type thing.
Is there something specific that makes the physical act of cooking work differently on screen than, say, sword-fighting when you’re playing Jaime Lannister?
NCW: Cooking is a form of communication. Obviously we need nourishment, but it’s more than that. As an actor, it was really interesting for me because the best chefs in the world are able to turn their food into an extension of their personalities and are able to convey that to the customers.
In media and in culture more broadly, there are a number of tropes associated with chefs — they’re volatile and sometimes abusive. How did you seek to portray a chef in a different way than in other films?
NCW: He does have a temper, because there’s a lot of pressure involved in these things. This couple has put their whole life savings into this restaurant to fulfill this dream. That’s stressful. It was interesting because all the extras that you see in the movie are people who work in the restaurant business, people who had spent a lot of time in kitchens, and they could tell me if what I was doing felt natural.
There’s a scene where Carsten loses his shit, and fires a sous chef. It’s very tense, and I asked the extras if this was normal, and they all said “we’ve been there.” Every one of them had stories about people throwing stuff at them or yelling. So it is kind of a cliche when you hear about a chef having a bad temper, but these kitchens are tense. These experiences aren’t great, but they are real. From their perspective, the good guys are the ones who come back after they blow up to make it right.
Christoffer, is that why you chose a restaurant to serve as the setting for this story that’s centered on a crumbling marriage?
CB: Restaurants themselves are just very filmic, inherently. You can see that by opening Netflix and seeing how many food shows are out there. It’s very aesthetically pleasing, and these places are very reflective of the humans and cultures and ideas that are put into them. The industry is full of people who are cut-throat and ambitious, who want to have these Michelin stars.
The movie itself is very sexy. Was it natural to weave that sensuality into this story about an intense environment like a restaurant?
CB: There are few constants and basic elements of life, and love and sex and food are most of them. For many thousands of years, our basic endeavor has been to provide food for ourselves and in doing that, we share it with each other and connect with other people. In that sense, there is something very intimate about food. One of the first things anthropologists do when they’re studying different cultures is look at how those people share food, how they cook. It really is a way into the human heart, and in more ways than just romance. We need to have food, and it could be so basic, so cheap, that you could just eat and never think about it, but people put so much passion and work into it and turn it into art.
Even though it is about a modernist restaurant, the central dish inA Taste of Hungeris a classic Danish hot dog. It brings Maggie and Carsten together more than once. Why a hot dog?
CB: In Denmark, we pride ourselves on having a very sophisticated hot dog, but it’s still a very simple, fast food. It’s something that most people are familiar with, and when you talk to chefs, they’ll tell you that the hot dog is the perfect umami dish. It’s got all the things you desire in food — the familiarity, the warmth, the different flavors blending together. Even though they are seeking to achieve this incredibly pristine food, what saves them in the end is a cheap hot dog.
A Taste of Hunger is set for release in theaters and on-demand on January 28.
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Stick With Me Sweets
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Vesta Chocolate
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Cacao & Cardamom
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Kate Weiser
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And Sons
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