Foodies Clan

Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook bring Israeli skewers, salatim, and, of course, that famed hummus to Kensington

How Ớt Tương Triều Phát became a Vietnamese icon, one chile pepper at a time

A jar of Ớt Tương Triều Phát, the iconic chile sauce, lives on nearly every table in Vietnam, especially in the country’s south. This hot sauce is not all brute force. It’s a delicate sauce, one that simmers rather than boils, equipped with a slow-burning heat that rumbles to a fervent coda on the back of the tongue. Vietnamese food, with its cilantro, galangal, and mint, requires a sauce with backbone that won’t railroad less bullish flavors. In this regard, Ớt Tương Triều Phát is an exercise in precision, subtlety, and restraint.

My own relationship with the famed hot stuff began in 2016, when I landed in Hội An, where the banh mi sandwich came to prominence in the 1950s. Seated at a banquet table during an interactive food tour, I spied a bounty of cylindrical bottles adorned with lemon yellow labels, black caps, green print, and images of two red chile peppers, front and center. The bottles extended as far as my eye could see. My tour guide, Neville Dean — who started his company the Original Taste of Hội An with his wife, Colleen, roughly a decade ago — told us to open the sauce. An assault of umami, heat, and a surprising earthiness followed. Suspended in a vibrant red oil, the chunky sauce emerges as if from a molten pile of peppers. It required my attention, but didn’t burn my face off in the process. Give it a stir as a last-minute emulsifier and spoon it on. I ate it, first, on tooth-shatteringly crispy Vietnamese spring rolls. Sublime.

Unlike the Thai Sriracha, with which Americans are now more than familiar, Ớt Tương Triều Phát is neither smooth nor particularly acidic. It more closely resembles a jam than a sauce in consistency, and that texture is part of its appeal. Made by the same family for generations, Hội An chile sauce has a firm hold in Vietnam, particularly in Hội An. The sauce is the provenance of Tran Van Can, otherwise known as “Ms. Van.” She follows a 150-year-old recipe passed down through her Chinese expatriate family. “My grandmother used to make chutney and satay… to give to relatives to eat,” Ms. Van says. “Many people asked to buy it, and she started to sell from there. She made chutneys from fresh chile peppers, carefully cooked to form a spicy, aromatic spice, which makes everyone remember and taste it forever.”

The inherited sauce involves elephant tusk chiles — Ms. Van refers to them as “ớt chìa vôi,” or “peppers with lime” — a large pot, and time; the process takes three days. Ms. Van watches her chiles vigilantly, stirring them into submission. “All chile sauce processing is done manually,” she says. “Is our chile [sauce] art? I think the raw material of the chile is also important.” In Southeast Asia, elephant tusk chiles are also known as elephant trunk, or cow horn, chiles, owing to their shape. Part of the capsicum annum species, these peppers originally hailed from India and Central and South America. After selecting her fresh chiles, Ms. Van removes the stalks and seeds, grinds the chiles, and stir-fries them. Batches are produced every two days and are all made entirely by hand.

“You wouldn’t eat them raw on their own,” says Siem Reap-based food and travel writer Lara Dunston of the peppers. “But cook them up and they’re medium-to-hot, depending on your tolerance. They’re a little sweet and fruity, but simmer them over a long period of time, as Ms. Van does, and the fruitiness and sweetness is more pronounced, as is the heat.”

Ms. Van uses chiles that are grown in the foothills in Đại Lộc and Điện Bàn — both areas close to Hội An. “When I directly saute a pan of [chiles], I personally carry out and control each stage,” she says. The sauce, she notes, is a closely guarded blend of “undamaged chile, garlic, sugar, salt, sesame, peanuts, and vegetable oil.” Like any good artisanal product, Ớt Tương Triều Phát is not uniform. The contents of some bottles are crimson, others cherry red. Depending on the time of year of the pepper harvest, the specific blend, and the preservation involved (Ms. Van often salts her peppers to preserve them, since the harvest season is finite), the color and roundness of flavor may vary. But the quality remains constant.

Chile sauce runs deep in Hội An. Tran T. Duc, chef and owner of the local Hội An restaurants Mango Mango and Mai Fish, makes his own version of Ms. Van’s chile sauce. “Ms. Van, and others, are making their own chile sauces with different measurements of core ingredients,” he says. “Some with more sugar or salt, to keep [the chile lasting] longer on shelves. We have our limit, as we make and use ours fresh weekly.” Ms. Van’s sauce, which exists in multiple permutations around Hội An, settles into the bones of this town “because it is made entirely with ingredients from the area,” Duc says. The sauce reflects Hội An’s “rich soil,” which amplifies the power of the ingredients.

And what does one eat with Ớt Tương Triều Phát? Dunston swears by cao lau noodles, a Hội An dish made with rice noodles, pork, bean sprouts, and herbs. Duc puts chile sauce on cao lau and more. “We use it from [the beginning] of the meal as a chile and soy sauce mix and dip crispy rice cracker [in it]. We use chile

sauce in our salad dressing, as well as one of the ingredients in the seasoning of pork belly in our cao lau,” he says. “Cao lau is a local, special dish. Locals use this chile sauce as an extra condiment, as we can eat really spicy and we can add it to the dish we are eating.”

The delicate banh bao banh vac, or white rose dumpling, also a regional specialty, is, despite its careful appearance, also muscular enough to stand up to that powerful, sinus-clearing sauce, thanks, in part, to a garnish of crisped garlic. Ms. Van has her own preferences. “You can combine it directly with beef rolls, bread, chicken rice, curry, hotpot, beefsteak…” she says. “The taste of Triều Phát chile sauce, in my opinion, is spicy, but not pungent. Aromatic. A little salty. Enough to be used as a sauce, or to [be eaten] directly.”

Back in the United States, I reserved my own hot sauce — one measly bottle was all my luggage could accommodate — for special occasions. In the age of the Internet, it seemed impossible that there could be something I had tasted abroad that I couldn’t source back home, but, the truth was — and is — that Hội An’s magic sauce cannot be shipped. As my supply dwindled, I organized a fanatic search. My travel companion gifted me a small helping of her own coveted store for my wedding, but that went in short order. Eventually, I reached out to Neville over email. Could he send me a bottle? I’d happily pay for shipping.

The answer, sadly, was no.

“Just the saddest news,” Neville reported back, when I asked him if he could get me more sauce. “For some reason, the Vietnamese postal service won’t allow postage of this sauce (they inspect all packages sent and received). Also, being a small producer, Ms. Van has limited opportunity for export.” With no desire to change her modus operandi, Ms. Van was stuck doing what she and her family had always done: Producing a one-of-a-kind sauce for people in Vietnam, irrespective of global demand.

“Manufacturing in the United States is also our dream,” Ms. Van adds. “But for now, we are just a small, traditional family craft.” Ms. Van maintains autonomy over her chile sauce, and widening the operation would mean that she would not be overseeing every single batch. That’s a trade-off she seems unwilling to make. Then again, Ms. Van appeared, from my vantage point, to have all the local business she needed. At restaurant after restaurant, bottles of her sauce are I tucked into caddies, abandoned on wayward tables, still pulsing with life. For Neville Dean, my inability to secure even a single drop of that sauce once I landed back Stateside was just motivation to soldier on.

“Now you have a reason to return to this wonderful place,” he wrote.

Hannah Selinger is a freelance food, travel, and lifestyle writer based in East Hampton, New York. Terence Carter is an editorial and commercial photographer Based in South-East Asia and with a love of photographing people, places and plates of food.
Fact-checked by Claire Bryant

Why building electrification, and removing gas from new and retrofitted homes, has become a movement

One hundred restaurants have already closed, and one Burgerim franchisee is now homeless

Senator Dianne Feinstein has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate California-based restaurant franchise Burgerim, an originally Israeli burger chain serving sliders with a side of alleged deceit. According to a damning three-part investigation in Restaurant Business, Burgerim raced to sign up inexperienced franchise operators, selling as many as 1,200 franchise licenses to operators in 40 states over just four years. 200 Burgerim locations are currently open, though the “vast majority” are not profitable, according to Restaurant Business. One hundred have already closed, and many more may never open.

As Feinstein writes in her letter, “a number of franchisees report that they were the victim of false or misleading sales tactics, including offers by Burgerim to refund franchise fees, on which Burgerim has failed to follow through.” While promising fast profits and offering money-back guarantees, Burgerim instead delivered high upstart costs and a confusing menu that reportedly led to food waste and lost revenue.

And, bizarrely, franchisees tell Restaurant Business that Burgerim never even collected royalties from them. Instead, it was mostly interested in selling new licenses. “Either by design or by accident, Burgerim operated much like a pyramid scheme,” Restaurant Business concluded.

Feinstein’s letter to the FTC arrives six weeks after Restaurant Business’ explosive investigation. Burgerim’s CEO, Oren Loni, fled the country in November, which is usually a bad sign for business, and Burgerim appointed a chief restructuring officer who has flirted with filing for bankruptcy. That could be a disaster for existing locations, Feinstein observes. “Many of the locations that have opened are struggling, and all would face severe consequences if Burgerim files for bankruptcy.”

Burgerim also faces 90 lawsuits, including one filed by Jonathan Cheban, an influencer and Kardashian hanger-on known as Foodgod, according to PageSix. Cheban once served as Burgerim’s spokesperson and gushed on Instagram about the chain’s burgers — but his lawyers now demand unspecified sums for non-payment and a cease-and-desist on using his likeness.

Other, more sympathetic Burgerim victims include franchise operators like Jeffrey Russell in Glendale, California. Russell, who had been laid off from a job at Tesla, sought a fresh start with Burgerim, and eventually sold his house to keep his location afloat, he tells Restaurant Business. Now, he’s homeless. More than 100 franchise operators took out small business administration loans, which require them to personally guarantee any debt.

But even as corporate reportedly ignores emails from desperate current franchise operators, Burgerim will happily sell more franchise agreements, Restaurant Business reports. Except in Maryland, that is: In January, the state became the first to suspend Burgerim’s franchise registration, though it likely won’t be the last

• Sen. Feinstein Asks FTC to Investigate Burgerim [Restaurant Business]
• The Burgerim Disaster [Restaurant Business]

From smoky Baja quail at a roadside stand to oysters with bone marrow among the vineyards, here’s where to eat in Baja wine country

In the early 2000s, Mexico’s wine country was a charming destination for huevos rancheros, the odd Moroccan-Mexican restaurant, Molokan museums, a couple of nice bed and breakfasts, and a handful of boutique wineries. The Wednesday farmers market at Rancho El Mogor featured a half-dozen baskets of produce and a gentleman selling pizzas he cooked in a clay oven. In summer, especially during the annual Vendimias wine harvest festival, chefs brought out the campestres (country grills), used to continue open-flame cooking traditions forged in Northern Mexico in the aboriginal fires of the Kumiai.

Romantics like chef Jair Téllez (of Laja) and oenologist Hugo d’Acosta (of wineries like Casa de Piedra, Paralelo, and La Escuelita) conceived of something more for the region: garden-to-table, wine-driven, world-renowned kitchens. Meanwhile, architects Alejandro D’Acosta and Claudia Turrent dreamed up distinctive, modern, recycled design for wineries like Casa de Piedra, Vena Cava, Bruma, and Paralelo.

Today the area is home to well over 100 wineries and has become a favorite travel destination for people on both sides of the border. The wine, along with Baja seafood and produce, has also attracted the best chefs in Mexico, who cook on Santa Maria grills, in cajas chinas, and in wood-fired clay ovens. Local traditions like grilled quail, roasted pig, oven-roasted lamb, fresh-shucked oysters, and the ubiquitous fish of the day provide plenty of material for Valle de Guadalupe chefs, while the luxury seafood industry and restaurant gardens offer a wealth of ingredients. Those wineries are producing world-class wines to pair with sea urchin, abalone, Pismo clams, yellowtail, and geoduck, and everyone cooks with their own olive oil.

Two decades after Valle de Guadalupe’s transformation began, here are the valley’s essential places to eat.

Prices per person, excluding alcohol:

$ = Less than 200 pesos (Less than $10 USD)

$$ = 200 - 700 pesos ($10 - $35 USD)

$$$ = 700 - 1,500 pesos ($35 - $75 USD)

$$$$ = More than 1,500 pesos ($75 USD and up)

Bill Esparza is a James Beard award-winning freelance food and travel writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Roads & Kingdoms, Food & Wine, Los Angeles Magazine, CNN Parts Unknown, and GQ Mexico. He is a regular contributor to Eater and Eater LA.

Plus, Coors Light will give you money to adopt a dog, and more news to start your day

Of the 3,435 restaurants in the Michelin France’s 2020 guide, about 50 made the cut

Despite the protests of an increasing number of chefs, earning a star from Michelin is still a goal for many restaurants. But this year, the guide introduced a different designation—the sustainability clover, which highlights chefs and restaurants “who have taken responsibility by preserving resources and embracing biodiversity, reducing food waste and reducing the consumption of non-renewable energy.” It’s a lil clover and it’s adorable.

Food & Wine reports that over 50 restaurants were awarded the designation in the most recent Michelin guide to France, and while the company cites things like permaculture gardens and a “bio-waste recycling program,” it’s unclear what the criteria is to be awarded a clover. “The ideas, methods and know-how developed by these chefs will thus help raise awareness of an entire sector to its customers and the general population,” said Gwendal Poullennec, international director of Michelin Guides. However, Michelin, a tire company, could probably do more by not encouraging diners to drive around so much.

And in other news...

• Trickling Springs Creamery of Pennsylvania is accused of running the state’s largest Ponzi scheme, and targeting members of the Amish and Mennonite communities. [Vice]
• A new sugar substitute made from discarded apples and pears could be better for the planet. [Fast Company]
• “Citrus greening” is a disease that’s been devastating Florida’s citrus farms, but dogs may be the key to detecting it. Good boys. [Modern Farmer]
• Speaking of dogs, Coors Light will give $100 each to 1,000 people who adopt dogs for Valentine’s Day. [CNN]
• Ok Brexit is bad but the UK does have this Pizza Hut x KFC popcorn chicken pizza collab. [Delish]
• Hedge funds are taking up more “sustainable” investments like avocados, proving that the solution to destructive capitalist greed is...making sustainability profitable. Or something. [Bloomberg]
• According to some psychologists, people hate vegans because they know eating meat is wrong but they don’t want to admit it. [BBC]
• Wendy’s is launching a nationwide breakfast next month. [NRN]
• An appreciation of the arts is so important

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Nick Bovis, owner of well-liked dives Gold Dust and Lefty O’Douls, faces 20 years in jail for multiple failed plots

The late basketball legend was a regular at El Camino Real in Fullerton

It’s the superior way to slice a pie

Most wheel-shaped pizza cutters have a fundamental design flaw. Because of this, they’re flimsy, they’re impractical, and above all, they’re an inefficient use of force. I can’t count the times I’ve rolled one over a pie only to find that it barely made a dent in the crust.

Think about the way you use a traditional pizza wheel (not the ones with blade covers that look like this): Your arm is extended, and you’re grasping the wheel’s handle. To make a cut, you have to push down at an angle while sliding the wheel forward. I won’t pretend to have a PhD in physics — I’m just a girl, standing in front of a pizza wheel, wondering why it’s so bad at its job — but from a physics perspective, there are so many problems here. Luckily, the answer can be found at approximately a 9th grade science level. And while wheel-shaped cutters with handles are an affront to logic, there’s another style that gets it right: the rocking pizza cutter.

Imagine this: Your pizza crust is thick, and you’re struggling to cut through it with a pizza wheel. Intuitively, you lift the handle up so that it forms a steeper angle relative to the blade, and you can press down directly to make the cut. A steeper angle equals greater downwards force. If you were struggling to move the wheel forward, however, you’d aim for a shallower angle, dropping the handle down and setting it up like a pool player holding a cue. The problem is that the conventional pizza wheel asks us to cut downwards and forwards at the same time by holding the handle at about 45 degrees. This effectively halves your force, splitting it between the two directions. Instead of accomplishing both cuts, you accomplish neither.

Now, consider rocking pizza cutter, a simple tool consisting of one long curved blade with handles, either running the length of the blade or rising up at 90 degree angles on either side. To cut your pizza you just grab the handles and push straight down. All of the force you’re applying will travel straight into the pizza where it belongs. Instead of rolling a wheel forward to cut across the width of the pizza, you simply rock the blade to one side while continuing to apply downwards pressure. With a single firm push, the pizza cutter will easily snap through the crust, whether it’s a bubbly Neapolitan slice or a thick and chewy Sicilian pie. Plus, rocking pizza cutters are sturdy. Unlike pizza wheels, there are no moving parts, so a rocking pizza cutter will never break. For added flair, they come in aesthetics ranging from handsome with walnut handles to medieval weapon.

If you have a pizza wheel and you love it, I’m happy for you. If, however, you have a wheel that essentially cuts a dotted line through all of your pizzas, a rocking pizza cutter is the clear solution.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.

A Florida company has made dining a bit more dystopian

It’s expected to close after liquidation

With KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken, fake meat finally tackles the fast-food chicken nugget — and we’re totally on board

The fast-food chicken nugget, a paragon of processed food, is finally poised to transcend its animal origins: Almost a year after Burger King rolled out its plant-based Impossible Whopper, Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes the first major fast-food chain to introduce a plant-based chicken product to its stores. Beyond Fried Chicken, a collaboration between Beyond Meat and KFC, is described as something between a traditional chicken nugget and a KFC “boneless wing,” but made from plants — reportedly soy and wheat — and it’s now available at 100 KFC locations in Charlotte, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee, with a national rollout likely to follow. Early reviews of the spiced and sauced nuggets (they come in options like honey barbecue, buffalo, and Nashville hot) are solid: “It tastes like a doggone piece of chicken,” writes Fast Company’s Mark Wilson — the “meat” even gently flakes and shreds. Huge crowds that gathered for Beyond Fried Chicken tests this summer tended to agree: The nuggets are good.

If chains like Burger King and White Castle have shown success in replacing highly processed meat products with plant-based alternatives, then a fake-meat chicken nugget could be a gold mine for fast-food brands. The Impossible Whopper was credited with increasing Burger King’s quarterly sales by 10 percent, though they’ve since slowed; Meanwhile, chicken — the real thing — has taken center stage in the American diet, outselling beef and continuing to show growth.

Now could be the perfect time for a great-tasting fake-meat nugget: Plant-based foods are hot, chicken is huge, and nuggets themselves are already the most highly processed meat product on the typical fast-food menu. Way more than a chicken breast or even a chicken tender, that makes the nugget an ideal candidate for plant-based meat replacement.

Eater NY chief critic Ryan Sutton once praised the fast-food chicken nugget as “a masterpiece of molecular gastronomy,” which is a generous way to say that it’s a product whose deliciousness is scientifically engineered, not naturally occurring. An often cited 2003 Federal District Court ruling claimed that “chicken McNuggets, rather than being merely chicken fried in a pan, are a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.” But that’s their beauty, not their fault. The McNugget contains more than 20 ingredients, some of them unpronounceable, which would make for a fun Gourmet Makes episode, not an easy weeknight meal at home. That’s the point. As Sutton put it, the nugget is charcuterie, not steak: It’s a delicacy all its own, one based on — but now nearly independent of — chicken. Leave it to the professionals.

It will surprise no one to learn that chicken nuggets got their start in a lab. Robert C. Baker, a Cornell University poultry sciences professor, invented them 1963 while looking to establish new outlets for a glut of factory-farmed chickens in the post-war years. Baker and his team developed a recipe for partly dehydrated raw chicken meat, grains, and powdered milk covered with egg batter and cornflake crumbs. Their samples in supermarket freezers sold out fast, and the team described their work in a well-circulated food-science article distributed to hundreds of companies.

But it was McDonald’s that brought the nugget mainstream — and like today’s plant-based burgers, nuggets were partly a response to concerns about beef overconsumption. In 1977, the first federal dietary guidelines discouraged red meat and fat consumption, dealing a blow to McDonald’s burger sales. The company sought new items to augment its menu, introducing “McNuggets” in 1981 to runaway success: Think of a fervor on par with the Popeye’s fried chicken sandwich craze last summer. McDonald’s is still a nugget king, though it’s repeatedly changed its recipe over the years, sometimes attempting to dispel rumors about unsavory ingredients. It’s a golden-fried piece of perfection ideal for dipping in a sweet or slightly vinegar-y sauce — though some prefer Wendy’s offering in the category.

KFC has McNugget-sized goals for its Beyond Fried Chicken rollout. And if plant-based burgers at fast-food restaurants are any indication, the product might well succeed. In 2018, Sutton wrote of the new Impossible slider at White Castle that the patty’s “indistinctness” was actually its advantage. “The genius (or insidiousness) of the Impossible Food folks is not that they’ve created something that tastes like beef — they haven’t — it’s that they’ve taken discrete ingredients from the natural environment and transformed them to mimic the artificial awesomeness (or awfulness) of American processed food,” Sutton wrote.

If it’s true that the more processed the meat product, the easier to replace it with a plant-based alternative, then nuggets might be the motherload. The unique flavor of beef — whose bloody richness Impossible Foods seeks to replicate with a yeast-derived version of the molecule heme — has been a challenge to replicate. But everything, as the old joke goes, tastes like chicken. That’s no coincidence or quirk of human taste buds, a famous Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology paper from 1998 argues. Animals from rabbits to snakes and kangaroos might “taste like chicken” because they share a common dinosaur ancestor. ”The emphasis on chicken in the statement ‘tastes like chicken’ is misleading,” author Joe Staton writes. “The common ancestor of most tetrapods would have tasted similarly, if we had only been there to cook and eat it.” Who knew that dino nuggets were so historically accurate?

In the next 10 years, the alternative meat industry could be worth $140 billion. We won’t just see chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and hamburgers replaced with plant-based alternatives: Impossible and Beyond want to replicate full cuts of steak and poultry. Replacing chicken with plant-based alternatives could be highly lucrative — but what, exactly, is the point?

Impossible Foods’ goal in replacing beef is explicitly to eliminate human reliance on cows. More precisely, it’s an effort to ameliorate climate change, since livestock is responsible for between 14.5 and 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. With those parameters, replacing beef is much more important than replacing chickens: According to a 2013 article in Nature, beef produces eight times as much greenhouse gases as chicken does.

But from the perspective of animal cruelty, the consequences of replacing fast-food chicken with plant-based products could be huge. PETA, for example, considers KFC a particularly egregious offender, referring to the chain as “Kentucky Fried Cruelty.” They’ve openly celebrated KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken experiment. “We’re hopeful that KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken test marks a new era for the company and that when it sees how much consumers value animals’ lives, it will work to make changes in its supply chain as well,” PETA representatives write.

The target for KFC’s new product, however, isn’t just PETA members: It’s the “flexitarian” category,” that ambivalent class of carnivore seeking an occasional alternative from meat, if it tastes just as good. The goal for KFC, then, is to seamlessly replace meat where it can. It could be some time before a bucket of whole plant-based chicken pieces can convince carnivores, but the day of a credible plant-based nugget could already be here. It was never really so far away.

• KFC is now selling vegan chicken nuggets in 2 major cities [Vox]

Plus, natural foods grocery chain Earth Fare is shuttering, and more news to start your day

Dunkaroos, like the ’90s, are back

AriZona iced tea is an aesthetic, teens unironically love Friends, scrunchies are back in — and continuing the wave of ’90s nostalgia, Dunkaroos are making a comeback.

The beloved childhood snack, consisting of cookies and a small bit of frosting for dunking, was first introduced in 1992 and was discontinued in the U.S. in 2012. For years, it was only available in Canada; General Mills even ran a “Smugglaroos” campaign encouraging Canadians to bring the snack across the border for Americans. But come summer 2020, there will be no more smuggling necessary, as the most popular flavor — vanilla cookies accompanied by vanilla frosting with sprinkles — returns to grocery store aisles stateside.

Fans, including celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Tyler, the Creator, have been asking for the return of Dunkaroos for years — a plea that the snack brand has smartly used in its marketing, resurfacing those requests alongside blatant ’90s nostalgia pandering on its newly created Twitter and Instagram accounts.

“We know there’s a lot of love for Dunkaroos, and fans everywhere have been asking for it,” said Jeff Caswell, president of snacks at General Mills, in a press release. “We’re excited to help ’90s kids relive all the best parts of childhood.”

And in other news…

• Organic and natural foods grocery chain Earth Fare is closing all 50 of its locations. [Canton Rep]
• A survey conducted by the New York City Hospitality Alliance found that 62 percent of area restaurants were charged for answering calls through Grubhub phone numbers even when orders weren’t placed, and 91 percent of survey respondents say they have yet to receive the refunds for the bogus phone fees that Grubhub promised. [NY Post]
• How Iowa’s oldest Chinese restaurant became a fusion pizza place. [BuzzFeed News]
• Inside the world of nudist cooking: “It’s better naked. They feel less inhibited, more creative.” [NYT]
• Olive Garden’s Valentine’s Day special includes a bouqueting of breadsticks, which I’d take over roses any day. [Insider]
• Also joining in the V-Day festivities is Domino’s Australia, which is giving away a pizza-shaped engagement ring:

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Ziyad Rye founder Marquas Ashworth fuses his love of hip-hop with a 100-year-old whiskey recipe

One hundred years ago, Prohibition-era bootleggers moved silently through the underbelly of Des Moines, Iowa, operating in clandestine jazz speakeasies and crafting whiskey in the dark in makeshift barns. That mixture of music and spirits introduced Des Moines residents to the cultural influences of jazz while building the foundation of the city’s complicated economic history. For present-day entrepreneur Marquas Ashworth, this historical mixture of music, alcohol, and development also proved inspirational.

“I remember hearing the stories about how Al Capone and the mob basically ran the Midwest, how they built the plaza in Kansas City, how a lot of them retired there,” says Ashworth, a Kansas City native and the founder of the three-year-old Ziyad Rye brand. “I heard these stories growing up, about the moonshine, the gambling, the speakeasies, knocking three times and all that. My grandma probably drank some white rye at a speakeasy back in the day.”

Following college at Iowa State, where he majored in marketing and sociology, Ashworth launched his record label, Media Fresh Records. But as he was promoting a mixtape, a trip through Iowa introduced him to another business opportunity. “I met this lady at the bar and got to talking with her,” he remembers. “She took me to her family’s bootlegging operation, which was basically in a freighter in the middle of a field. She explained the history of the counties of Iowa, about Al Capone, about the trains from Chicago through Iowa to Des Moines. And the whiskey was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. But because of their family’s history, they couldn’t get a license to make the whiskey. I had made some money off of my mixtape, so I outright bought the recipe from her and filed for the rights to it.”

To the casual observer, Ziyad might look like just another craft spirit influenced by the glamour of Prohibition. But it’s more than that: Ziyad is named after a formerly enslaved North African man turned military general — it’s a fitting name that’s both a nod to Des Moines’ strong history of African-American entrepreneurship as well as a brand that embodies the spirit of cultural rebellion and revolution. Ashworth’s recipe is almost identical to the one used by Iowa bootleggers in the 1920s and is manufactured in the original copper stills that were custom-built for the recipe’s clandestine production. And, in a tie to Ashworth’s love of music, each bottle’s label comes with a download tag for either a new song, an exclusive video, tickets to an upcoming concert or event, or even a private tasting.

“Ziyad Rye is fueled by the culture, especially hip hop culture,” Ashworth says. “Not only does this signal a new chapter for independent artists, but for the local economy itself. My goal is to put Des Moines on the map.”

At the start of Iowa’s statewide Prohibition in 1916 — four years before alcohol became illegal nationwide — many Iowans realized that they were in a particularly advantageous position, in that they had a surplus of the ingredients needed to make whiskey: corn and rye. And Iowa’s vast, dense topography allowed for manufacturing to be easily hidden from authorities.

“They never had permanent facilities. Operations would go from barn to barn, from cave to cave,” notes Ashworth, showing off a map of Polk County, where Des Moines sits, and pointing to some of the places where alcohol was allegedly manufactured during the height of Prohibition. Since smoke often gave away the locations of illegal sills, bootleggers regularly moved locations.

Des Moines also had the geographic advantage of a central location with easy shipping routes to Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. “Shipping was done in caskets, gas tanks, with farm equipment,” says Ashworth as he inspects a bottle of his brand’s white rye. “It’s actually why the white rye sold so well. It was easy to pass off as water when sneaking it around.”

For Ashworth, reviving the 100-year-old recipe was not as easy as acquiring it had been. The rye used in Ziyad’s white rye comes from the same fields that it was grown in almost 100 years ago. But Ashworth found himself faced with the daunting task of not just replicating the original recipe, but doing so with modern-day equipment, processes, and ingredients. “Getting your batch right and getting your techniques right — that’s the hardest part,” he explains. “You have to have a good product going into the barrel before anything: Trying to replicate the yeast from the 1920s in 2015 was hard. We finally got to the point where we were ready to release the white rye in 2017.”

While whiskey distilling and hip-hop don’t normally go hand in hand, Ashworth has found a way to capitalize on the combination of the two. “One drives the other,” he says. “They both allow me to circumnavigate the traditional market that someone would have to go through to be successful in either market. Whiskey allows me to put my music in places that it typically isn’t — like grocery stores. My music is in every grocery store in the state. The visibility is different. And it allows me to market the whiskey in a way that none of these other distilleries can. I don’t have to worry as much about making as much money from music because the whiskey is the financial backbone. They support each other. When we distribute our liquor, we’re using technology to distribute our local culture by promoting local artists.”

The artists Ashworth features are mostly local, but his efforts have been drawing in national artists as well: He’s brought major entertainers such as DJ Green Lantern, Darner, Aeon Grey, Mike Hurst (King Louie, Boosie), Sonic Militia, and more to the area.

As for the immediate future, Ashworth has created a limited batch of Ziyad brown rye whiskey. The brown rye, which will be available in about a month, is aged for two years in charred oak barrels and compliments his new album release Burn the Boats. Much like his music, Ashworth describes the whiskey as “deep, smooth, and epic.” Later in 2020, Ashworth will open Ziyad’s new distillery in downtown Des Moines, renovating a historical building that served as Des Moines’ first city hall.

“It’s multilevel, 600-person capacity with a courtyard. The basement will be where our record label is and where we’ll have our recording studio and be able to do audio and video work,” say Ashworth, who notes that his first passion will always be music: “Music and lyrics keep in mind the struggles of everyday people, and call for action and change.”

Zoe Zorka is originally from Detroit, Michigan/Windsor, Ontario and currently resides in Salt Lake City. She has written for CNN, Newsweek, NBC News, The Source Magazine, Elite Daily, and more.

This week, Marcus dives head-first into the red-sauce Italian-American delights of South Philly

On the fourth episode of No Passport Required Season 2, host Marcus Samuelsson heads to Philadelphia, where he meets friends new and old and learns more about the city’s Italian food scene. From the Di Bruno Brothers shop in the century-old Italian Market to the chefs who are now bringing more regional cooking to the U.S. and to showcase their hometown flavors, this episode has everything from pizza to cannolis, with plenty of red sauce, burrata, and handmade pasta in between.

Additional episodes: Each hour-long episode focuses on a different immigrant community in a new city: In addition to Philadelphia, the series travels to Seattle, where Marcus cooks with a Filipino community eager to preserve its food traditions while using key ingredients like ube and vinegar to create new ones; Los Angeles, home to the largest Armenian community outside of Armenia; and Houston, home to one of the highest numbers of West African expatriates of any U.S. city. Other episodes focus on the Chinese-American community in Las Vegas (February 10), which has grown tremendously over the last 20 years, and Boston (February 17), where Marcus explores Portuguese-speaking cultures and cuisines from three different locales: Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal. The episodes air weekly on PBS, and all are now available for streaming.

Missed Season 1? Stream full episodes from the entire first season now, or check out recaps and more intel on No Passport Required here.

Online and on social: Tag @eater, @pbs, and #NoPassRequiredPBS if you share clips, pictures, or quotes from the show. Check back on Eater Philly tomorrow to see a map of the restaurants featured in the episode, and head to PBS to learn more about the show, find character bios, and get recipes to cook at home.

No Passport Required is produced for PBS by Eater and Vox Media Studios, part of Vox Media. Stream full episodes on Eater and PBS, or check local listings. Get more information on the show at pbs.org/nopassrequired.

Called the “Tongue Kiss,” the dish has diners eating off a “disconcertingly realistic tongue”

On Monday, the already unappetizing Michelin Guide UK’s Twitter account felt it prudent to scar the internet’s eyeballs with a heinous photo. The image in question is a dish from Alchemist, a fine-dining Copenhagen restaurant that reopened last summer to the awe, amusement, and incredulity of food media.

The restaurant lead by chef Rasmus Munk, seems hellbent on making a statement, though what kind of statement isn’t exactly clear. It’s aesthetic seems to be maximalism applied to a tasting menu that consists of “up to 50 impressions” (AKA dishes) for around $370 plus a minimum $222 wine pairing. According to the website, the meal lasts between three and five hours.

It is, to put it mildly, over the top and the dishes are extreme. In an Esquire article last October, Jeff Gordinier pondered whether Alchemist represented a “decline-of-the-Roman-Empire” pinnacle of decadence in restaurants. The piece described some pretty bizarre items, like “Think Outside the Box,” a cherry juice-tinted lamb brain sliced tableside. Another dish titled “Food for Thought” had customers eat foie gras out of a dish in the shape of a human cranium. The meal sounded more like a $15 million psychological experiment designed by a high school student to dupe wealthy people out of their money with food puns or a joke from an Ali Wong movie, rather than something from a real restaurant.

But back to the Michelin Guide, an organization known for celebrating decadence and pricey European tasting menus. In a Tweet today, the guide introduced followers to Alchemist’s “50 course dinner of ground-breakingly creative dishes that stimulate the senses” with a picture of “Tongue Kiss.” As Michelin’s social media manager puts it, the dish invites “you to lick the topping off of a disconcertingly realistic tongue.”

“Tongue Kiss” raises a lot of questions, though maybe not the ones that Alchemist is going for. For one thing: What exactly is this made of? It looks like a popsicle frozen onto a spoon. Food vlogger Mark Wiens shed some light on this makeout session in November, describing the dish as a huge silicone tongue with a beetroot “tongue texture on the bottom.” Another question: Has anyone at the Alchemist ever French kissed — like really played tongue hockey with another human being? Because licking food out of another person’s mouth or sucking on their tongue until you gag isn’t exactly how that gesture works, at least once you get the hang of it.

Likewise, the state of this tongue raises some serious concerns about the oral health of the organ’s owner. Why are there little black specks everywhere? I understand spinach gets stuck in teeth from time to time, but why are there flowers sprouting up in this mouth? Someone get this tongue some mouthwash, stat!

Seriously, who would make out with this tongue?

Dandelion Chocolate’s Annie Kamin finds comfort in her surprisingly spacious SF kitchen

This is Right at Home, a series in which Eater explores the home kitchens and cooking habits of fascinating food people. Here now, we go inside Annie Kamin’s San Francisco apartment.

Annie Kamin went on a bad date. No, “a really bad date.” So when it was over, she did what one does after a terrible first date: She went to the grocery store. Meandering through the aisles of Bi-Rite, a beloved San Francisco market near her Mission-neighborhood apartment, she picked up all the peak-of-season produce that caught her eye. “I was like, you know what, screw it, I’m going home and I’m going to cook a delicious steak,” the 2019 Eater Young Gun remembers, laughing. Once everything was ready, she ate the entire meal standing in her kitchen, loading dishes into the sink and wiping down the counter between bites.

This is how Kamin has cooked at home — sporadically, often not for weeks at a time — since she became the Chief of Staff at San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate almost two years ago, and was tasked with opening the company’s massive new factory and tasting room.

Even now that the factory is finally done, Kamin hasn’t exactly settled into a life of peaceful, drawn out dinners. “Maybe it’s just the way that my brain works,” she says. “I end up thinking about all the things that happen after the meal and all the things leading up to the meal, but when it actually comes time to eat, I eat it really quickly standing up.”

It would be easy enough to put cooking aside altogether, to sign up for a meal delivery service, or rely solely on takeout. But Kamin grew up around a different model for how to manage the pressures of a busy life. During Kamin’s childhood, it was her mother’s practice to come home after a stressful day of work and crank on the oven. Kamin stood at her hip, leveling off cups of flour, mixing dough, sneaking crisp corners of lacey cookies as her mother pulled them from the oven. “[My mom] was always trying out something new,” Kamin remembers. “Sunday night dinner was big in our family, she would try all the new recipes. And so I was always around that, helping her out where I could.”

Kamin might not have the bandwidth to cook every time she’s stressed, but on days when work is particularly exhausting, she’ll sometimes dream up a home-cooked feast during her commute home. “If I have a particularly hard day or if I need to just disconnect a little bit, I’ll cook an incredibly elaborate meal,” she says. “Sometimes for my roommates, sometimes for myself, sometimes for a few friends.”

With plans for more Dandelion expansions already on the horizon, Kamin is home less than ever. But it’s on her busiest days that she’ll sometimes steal away for an evening to wander the aisles of Bi-Rite, shopping for a dinner she’ll likely eat standing over her kitchen sink. On those nights, long after the sun has set, Kamin takes a leaf from her mother’s book, rolling out pasta in the soft light of the lamp on her counter, or waiting patiently as hominy tenderizes in a pot of simmering pozole. “I’m trying to actively make more time for myself to cook now,” she says. “These days I’m focused on making comfort food. If I’m going to cook, I want it to be something that takes a little bit of time.”

Nearly every piece of equipment in the Dandelion chocolate factory is custom-made to fit a specific need. But at home, Kamin relies on an old, creaky, extremely loud stand mixer she refuses to part with. “I won this ugly Viking mixer — sorry Viking, but it’s ugly — at a cake competition. It was my first year at culinary school,” she remembers. “My friend and I entered the competition and we had the worst cake. Somehow, someway we both won, and that year they were handing out these mixers to the winners. It’s got a special place in my heart and it’s made five wedding cakes. I just can’t get rid of it.”

Since Kamin is never sure when her next meal at home will be, she only buys what she’ll need to make one or two dishes at a time. “I just go to the market and get what I need for the meal I’m going to cook. I don’t have a lot of storage space, and so I have a semi-clever way of storing things,” she says. Lined neatly on her kitchen shelves, along with garlic and plenty of lemons, Kamin always has a stock of dried peppers, and hominy to make pozole.

Some nights Kamin goes all out, feeding a gaggle of hungry friends, or making the perfect steak just for herself. But more often than not, she comes home from work barely able to keep her eyes open, and on those days few dishes materialize more quickly or are more comforting than pasta and red sauce. “Take an onion, saute that, add a little bit of cream and sherry, pour the Rao’s vodka pasta sauce in there, and then boil some fresh pasta from one of the 18 farmer’s markets in the Bay Area,” Kamin suggests, based on plenty of firsthand experience. “And if you’re proud of yourself, top it off with some parm, and you’re good to go.”

When she invites over more than a few friends, Kamin’s kitchen starts to feel a little tight. But compared to most San Francisco apartments, it’s enormous. “I have a kitchen that is probably four times the size of most San Francisco kitchens, which isn’t really saying much,” she says, laughing. And while Kamin might not spend a ton of time in her kitchen these days, she’s made it feel like her own. “I put some artwork up on the wall, and I have a lamp to help with lighting, because I hate overhead lights. I hung up a pot rack, too, which I was really proud of — I did that by myself. It’s just little, tiny things that all kind of come together.”

“I have books everywhere in my apartment and they hold a really special place in my heart,” Kamin says, running her hand along the spine of The Food Lab, a dictionary-length food science cookbook she keeps next to her cutting board. “Honestly, I don’t reference them very often, but I just like having them around. Surrounding yourself with the knowledge of people far greater than you is pretty neat.”

Elazar Sontag is an Oakland-raised, Brooklyn-based cookbook author and food writer. Find him on Instagram, and read more about his work.
Adrian Octavius Walker is a Chicago-based photographer.

Plus, the Bumble Bee tuna price-fixing scandal ends in an acquisition, and more news to start your day

The most memorable Super Bowl commercial was also the worst

“Silent nut. Holy nut” indeed. Planters mascot Mr. Peanut, who was killed off in one of the most blatantly virality-aspiring brand stunts in recent memory, was reborn as a top hat-sporting baby peanut on Super Bowl Sunday thanks to the magic of Kool-Aid Man’s tears at Mr. Peanut the Elder’s funeral.

Almost certainly an answer to the phenomenon of Baby Yoda, the reincarnated legume known as Baby Nut is small, round, and calculatedly “cute” in a way that is tailor-made for merch (which — surprise, surprise — Planters has in stock and ready to go). The rollout of Mr. Peanut’s new body was met with not only greetings from other brands, but also memes from accounts that Insider reports had been created before February, suggesting they were part of the ad campaign — a move that would violate Twitter’s rules against spam and platform manipulation. (As of press time, some of the accounts have been suspended.)

But Planters’ milquetoast memes will never live up to the narrative that the internet actually wants to see: Baby Nut destroyed and ground into peanut butter. He is risen, but Twitter prays for him to roast in hell.

And in other news…

• After bankruptcy and years of legal trouble rooted in a canned tuna price-fixing conspiracy, Bumble Bee Foods has been acquired by a Taiwanese company for $928 million. [San Diego Union-Tribune]
• Empty malls are gaining new life as a place for ghost kitchens. [WSJ]
• A giant Reese’s Take 5 has set the Guinness World Record for the largest chocolate nut bar, just two weeks after Snickers earned that title. [Food & Wine]
• “Is Canada the New Napa?” The U.S.’s northern neighbor is apparently gaining more attention for its wine. [Town & Country]
• A viral claim that soy burgers would make men grow breasts — which is not true — plays into preexisting beliefs about masculinity and meat. [The Atlantic]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]