Foodies Clan

Small growers say they were snubbed by the USDA, with contracts going to corporations like Sysco instead

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Every time Lula Cooley dropped off food boxes at Black churches or on the doorsteps of low-income senior citizens in Laurel, Mississippi, she was met with jubilation. “‘Acorn squash, sweet corn, green peas, watermelon! Thank you, Jesus!’ They just went on and on,” said Cooley, who is retired and works as the city’s senior center coordinator. “I cannot express what these food boxes meant to so many people.”

The boxes — part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farmers to Families Food Box program — came overflowing with produce grown by small-scale, Black-owned farms in the South. And they were delivered to Laurel by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a group that represents Black farmers, landowners, and their cooperatives.

This summer, the Federation supplied 19,000 boxes over a three-and-a-half month period to 20 nonprofit organizations, churches, and community groups, which distributed them across Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. The boxes were handed out in places like Laurel, a town of 18,000 people whose population is 60 percent Black and where one-third of residents live under the poverty line and typically can’t afford to buy such fresh produce, said Cooley.

And although the program lifted up Black farmers battered by COVID-19 closures, reached historically underserved food-insecure communities, engaged scores of volunteers, and created two dozen jobs, the Federation’s food box contract has not been renewed. Other small growers across the U.S. say they were also snubbed by the USDA over the past three months, despite successfully fulfilling their earlier contracts.

Instead, the agency awarded new contracts to large suppliers — giant food distributors such as Sysco. The move left growers with unsold crops and communities in the rural South and other areas hard-hit by the pandemic with diminished access to produce. “When we no longer had a contract [from USDA] it wasn’t like [the Black farmers] got a call from one of these other suppliers,” said Cornelius Blanding, the Federation’s executive director. “They were just left out. There was a big void that was left.”

Despite challenges, program helps farmers, families

Launched in May under the USDA’s $19 billion Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, Farmers to Families was meant to help farmers, whose markets were upended by the pandemic, and funnel unsold produce and dairy to the neediest Americans.

The program was authorized to spend $3 billion in April and was expanded by another $1 billion at the end of summer. At the end of October, just before the election, the USDA announced it would add another $500 million in funding to continue Farmers to Families through December.

Through four rounds of contracts, the program has to date delivered more than 110 million food boxes. As the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s pandemic hunger relief, it has been much touted by government officials, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has called it “a miracle.”

Yet Farmers to Families has been plagued with challenges. When it launched in May, industry leaders accused the USDA of giving lucrative contracts to companies with little experience of working with farmers or storing and distributing perishable goods.

Complaints about geographic distribution gaps (some parts of the country not getting enough boxes, others getting too many), delays, and inflated payments to some contractors have also surfaced. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis is leading an investigation into the program.

In October, the USDA again drew ire when it mandated that a self-promoting letter signed by President Trump be included, both in English and Spanish, in the food-aid boxes. Many nonprofits that distributed the boxes decided to remove the letters due to worries that they would be seen as political activity just weeks before the election.

Despite such issues, organizations around the country have praised the program for feeding Americans at a time when food insecurity is skyrocketing in the U.S.

In the case of the Federation, the contract made it possible to pay fair-market prices for the more than half-million pounds of produce it purchased from 35 Black farmers — a boon given that the vast majority of farmers and landowners surveyed by the organization have seen their markets disappear due to the pandemic.

The support was badly needed, since small-scale Black farms typically operate within razor-thin margins, with 80 percent making less than $50,000 annually farming, Blanding said. And because they had crops already in the ground when the pandemic hit, the food box program not only gave them a source of income but also helped avoid significant financial loss. “Without this [program], I don’t know where they would have gone. I can’t even imagine it,” Blanding said.

For Ben Burkett, a member of the Indian Springs Farms Association, a Mississippi vegetable marketing cooperative that’s a member of the Federation, the food box program was a godsend: Through it, the co-op’s members were able to sell the crops they had already planted for New Orleans restaurants and food service establishments, which shuttered when COVID-19 hit. “This program stepped in just in time,” said Burkett. “And it was a blessing on both sides.”

The co-op’s members, who are all Black farmers, delivered about 11,000 boxes between May and August. The produce was a high-quality, colorful range of fruits and vegetables, said Burkett, and was delivered to families the day after it was picked. Such a feat was possible on a grand scale because of an incredible upswelling of community support. “Some people just came to volunteer, others we were able to pay for their work,” Burkett said. “It brought the community together.”

It all seemed like a grand success. So, the Federation and its farmers were surprised when then USDA rejected its application for the third round of Farmers to Families. The sting was especially severe given the long history of discrimination against Black farmers by the USDA. And they weren’t alone; other small farmers were also caught off guard by the lack of new contracts, and some were stuck with unharvested crops they had planted for the boxes.

A USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats by email that the agency modified the program after the first two rounds “to address feedback from nonprofit organizations that there was not adequate distribution of all different types of food boxes.” As a result, vendors had to bid for new contracts. They are now required to provide “combination boxes” (a mix of meat, dairy, and produce), identify their community partners and “last mile delivery” arrangements (in response to previous criticism about lack of such services), and gear their distribution to so-called “opportunity zones.”

Due to the shift, the contracts went exclusively to a small number of large national food distributors. At least half of the initial contracts were not renewed in the fall, and that number has been whittled down even more in the final months of the program.

For Burkett’s co-op, the loss of the contract meant a slew of surplus crops with no customers. And while restaurants had started reopening, most are only operating at one-third of their typical capacity, he said.

Now, says Burkett, “the food service companies don’t put much produce in their boxes.” His co-op is hopeful it can get another contract, if the program continues — but the farmers must make alternative plans for now. And without a sense of where he can sell next year’s crops, he doesn’t know what to plant.

Communities left without food

The changes to the food box program have also led to chaos and hardship for many of the organizations on the receiving end, according to interviews by Civil Eats and several complaints filed by lawmakers. (One of the largest recipients is alleged to have redirected $3 million to its own nonprofit despite a lack of track record in delivering food to people in need, House Democrats have alleged.)

The USDA acknowledged that while some nonprofits that did not receive boxes in the first two rounds received them in the third round, others received fewer boxes or none at all. “USDA made painstaking efforts to ensure comprehensive coverage for the states, with the goal of covering every county in the country,” the spokesperson said.

But none of the groups previously served by the farmers affiliated with the Federation are currently participating in the program, and that means thousands of families in the South are lacking access to food.

The Federation has intimate knowledge of the Black community in the South and the local groups and community organizers who serve it. As a result, its boxes reached people who “are usually not on anyone’s radar,” said Chawnn Redden, the Federation’s regional marketing coordinator. “We sought out where the real need was, as opposed to just taking the easy route and giving it out to the nearest food bank.”

The senior center in Laurel was one such example. The boxes that landed there were directed to hundreds of families. Cooley, the coordinator, ran food drives, worked with local pastors and community organizations, and drove to the homes of elders who were stuck at home. Reaching people by word of mouth and finding elderly men who seldom ask for help was especially important, Cooley said, and it’s something that traditional food banks rarely do. “Some people have a lot of pride, but when they had a chance to get the food, they would reach out to me,” she said.

Since the Federation’s contract ended, area churches have continued giving limited assistance, but they haven’t had the capacity to fulfill the community’s growing need, Cooley said. She hasn’t found another food box distributor.

“People still call me,” she said. “They ask: ‘Miss Cooley, when are we going to get some more food?’ I don’t feel good at all when somebody truly needs help and we have nothing to give them.”

Another of the Federation’s partners was Mississippi Rising Coalition, a nonprofit that delivered about 500 food boxes every week to both rural and urban communities across the state over the summer.

“These areas are not only impacted by COVID, but they’re also food deserts where nutritious food is hard to come by, expensive, or inaccessible,” said Lea Campbell, the organization’s president. “The food box program filled a really desperate need and I don’t understand the rationale behind ending the [Federation’s] contract.”

James Skinner, the director of the group’s Food Security Initiative, personally drove a rented U-Haul truck from the Gulf Coast to Mississippi’s Pine Belt to deliver the boxes to community centers, immigrant advocacy groups, international students, and a university food pantry. Hundreds of volunteers worked to make the deliveries and distribution a success. “It was very disappointing when the contract ended,” Skinner said. “The hardest thing was to turn people away.”

Mississippi Rising has not been able to connect with one of the new USDA-approved box distributors since its contract ended in September. The group has continued to occasionally provide food when they receive direct donations from farmers, but Skinner and Campbell say the donations in no way match the consistency and volume of the food box program.

Gainesville-based Hispanic Alliance of Georgia, another group the Federation supplied over the summer, is having a similar experience. “The company that supplies [food boxes to] Georgia is in Florida and is not answering the phone,” said Vanessa Sarazua, the Alliance’s executive director. “We can’t reach them and we need to be able to provide this food.”

In Gainesville, where the Latinx community is more than 40 percent of the population and most Latinos toil in low-wage jobs such as poultry processing plants, the more than 40 agencies that are part of the food bank distribution system rarely serve their needs, said Sarazua. The boxes helped fill this gap.

For communities that are still receiving boxes, the contents have changed significantly. Despite the promise of “locally sourced” produce, as touted in Trump’s letter, many of the boxes now come packed with processed meat and other commodities. According to the USDA, for rounds three and four, contractors were required to include “1 or 2 locally grown fruit or vegetable items, as available, and if none available, add additional items of vendors choice.”

“In essence, it’s gone from a model where we’re serving collard greens and peas to serving hot dogs,” Blanding of the Federation said. “Yeah, people are eating. But I think it matters [what they eat]. So, this shift is concerning.”

Limited model program continues

Knowing the program had been a lifesaver to both farmers and hungry families, the Federation is working to build off of the USDA model and continue providing its own food boxes. The organization has started using private funding to pay member farmers for their produce and continue to send food boxes to its partners.

But the Federation’s private efforts have only been able to provide a fraction of the previous amount of produce, said Redden. “[The shift] dramatically reduced what we could purchase from farmers who had hopes they would be participating through the end of the year.”

Moving forward, Blanding says that providing families with a box of raw ingredients direct from farmers is an approach that makes sense with or without the pandemic: “It’s a model to build off for providing food during disasters, as well as something that could be extended as part of the social programs of our country.”

Sarazua of Hispanic Alliance of Georgia agrees. “Hopefully, the USDA can look at it as a future model to more directly reach vulnerable children and families.”

• Black Farmers Say They Were Dropped from the USDA’s Food Box Program [Civil Eats]

The “Small Axe” miniseries depiction of the Mangrove Nine — and the restaurant that they’re named after — bristles with both anger and joy

A man’s right to be nothing but a restaurateur, “to serve spicy food for a particular palate,” and a society’s flat refusal to allow him the satisfaction of this simple wish is at the heart of the molten magnificent Small Axe: Mangrove. The first in a five-part miniseries that chronicles England’s oft-overlooked Black civil rights movement, Steve McQueen’s feature — which was released last month and whose brilliance has already been unfortunately eclipsed by the stellar Small Axe follow-ups, released weekly on Amazon Prime, Lovers Rock and Red, White and Blue — bristles with anger (righteous), outrage (outrageous), and joy (palpable). It also is, though not technically about restaurants, the film that most holistically captures what a restaurant can be, and why they’re so vitally important, particularly in times of duress and to communities under threat.

Mangrove is the true story of Trinidadian immigrant Frank Crichlow (portrayed in the film by Shaun Parkes), who ran a restaurant in Notting Hill in the 1960s, long before the neighborhood was synonymous with the affable and questionable sexiness of Hugh Grant. Notting Hill was then a Caribbean neighborhood, home to many recent West Indian immigrants, the so-called Windrush Generation, named for the MV Empire Windrush, the ship they first arrived on in 1948. Wooed to the U.K. to fill positions left vacant by the post-World War II labor shortage, the immigrants were nevertheless met with hostility. Mistreatment ranged, much as it did in the United States, from individual acts of cruelty to systemic oppression. As a film, Mangrove deftly weaves such acts together so that they are, as they always are, inextricable.

The film follows Crichlow as he opens the Mangrove in 1968 and is visited immediately by a local policeman, the sneering D.C. Frank Pulley (played with true unlikability by Sam Spruell). Pulley is, off the bat, a bully. He demands, as a sign that the Mangrove is truly a restaurant, “a sausage and egg.” After Crichlow tells him, “We don’t do that kind of thing,” Pulley intensifies a campaign of harassment that culminates in a protest march and the resulting trial of the Mangrove Nine, of which Crichlow is one. The second half of the episode, no less powerful than the first, chronicles this drama. (Riaz Phillips has written a wonderful overview of the Mangrove Nine for Eater London.)

Pulley is, of course, a mere twig of a far more odious tree. In fact, the title of the series, Small Axe, comes from a Bob Marley song of the same name, in which he sings, “If you are the big tree / we are the small axe / sharpened to cut you down.” The big tree, in Marley’s song, initially signified the stranglehold that two producers, Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid, had on Jamaican music at the time. But that it’s so applicable to a broader struggle reflects the fact that, just as Crichlow might wish to be simply a restaurateur, when the pall of injustice is thick, all art, all life is often impressed in service to fight it. And that is a burdensome thing indeed.

In the beginning, Crichlow is a reluctant activist. He is a restaurateur, and the Mangrove, is, as he tells Pulley, “a restaurant [which] serves West Indian food for people who eat that kind of thing. Just like any other restaurant: Greek. French. English, for that matter.” That he shouts this down the street at the marauding policeman’s retreating back, who strides away with self-satisfied impunity, drives home the fact that this isn’t any other restaurant. It is a Black man’s restaurant in a Black community. That the fulfillment of any wish, the claim to any human right, by a Black man is, by its very nature, a threat to the white hegemon. These are the long-neglected skeletons of English history, but Mangrove is not some bleached bone. It thrums with life and with joy — self-made joy that is often found at the table.

For the Mangrove is a restaurant, and though it is the center of the community, the center of it is the Mangrove’s kitchen. A small one, from what we see in the film, with about two cooks, including Crichlow prepping when need be. And spicy food is, as he says, what they serve. Calling out the night’s menu early on, Crichlow says, “Fish curry. Goat curry. Mutton curry. My mother’s crab and dumpling. But first we gonna start with our roots.” The dark shaggy root in question, a taro (also called dasheen, and a staple in Caribbean kitchen), is sliced open by Crichlow’s blade to reveal a perfect full moon inside. The roots give life.

From this food, one divines the transverse currents of slavery, servitude, and exploitation. Curry, like roti, came to the West Indies from Indian laborers forced there by indentured servitude to replace the enslaved Africans to work the sugar plantations owned by British colonialists in the late 19th century. Here it is a century later, being served in West London to the descendents of those enslaved and indentured people of the West Indies.

In Mangrove, there are plenty of scenes of destruction. The cacophony of glass shattering, the thud of bodies being hit, the workmanlike grunts of those doing the breaking are harrowing as they occur again and again, as they did in real life. A thing is broken. It’s repaired. Broken again. But McQueen gives space to not only the violence but also the silence that follows it. Perhaps one of the most affecting scenes, at least to me, is a static shot of the kitchen after yet another police raid. The camera angle is low, almost at ground level. In the foreground: a potato masher, a can of chickpeas. To one side in the middle ground is a colander, right side up. Next to it, another, toppled on its side, sways back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, for a good minute. And in that stillness, one recollects and re-collects a mind scattered, a mind knowing it might be reassembling only to be scattered again. In some ways, 20 years later, this is the antistrophe to the famous omelet sequence of Big Night. This is real time.

It seems a disservice to transpose thoughts of the Mangrove to the present or leverage realizations in other areas. It is enough to keep our gaze trained on the story at hand. To be sure, the story continues. Kettling, the police maneuver seen in the film, is still used today. “Hands off Black people,” chanted in the film, is the leitmotif found in “Hands up. Don’t shoot.” The Windrush Generation, heroes of the film, are still fighting for legal status well into the 21st century. Most of the Mangrove Nine are dead. Crichlow died in 2010, though the Mangrove closed well before that, in 1992, a victim of Notting Hill’s gentrification and Frank Crichlow’s persecution.

But art is applicable always and speaks to us through time. At one point in the movie, Black Panther activist and one of the Mangrove Nine Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright) sits in the parlor of an Indian factory worker whom she is attempting to convince to join a trade union, drinking tea. (That the women are remanded to the kitchen is McQueen’s nod to the often lopsided intersectionality of many political and civil rights movements.) “If colonialism is good for anything, it brought us around this table,” says Jones-LeCointe. Though it’s not uttered at the Mangrove, it’s a line that stuck with me, for it holds in it the transmutation of suffering into action and joy (while never, not even for a second, absolving the sins of the infliction). And that too is the promise of kitchens and restaurants, that while they don’t offer the answers, they at least give us tables around which we can collect, and recollect, ourselves.

Joshua David Stein is the co-author of the forthcoming Nom Wah Tea Parlor and Il Buco Essentials: Stories & Recipes cookbooks and the memoir Notes from a Young Black Chef with Kwame Onwuachi. He is the author of the six children’s books, most recently The Invisible Alphabet, with illustrations by Ron Barrett. Follow him on Instagram at @joshuadavidstein.

Whether you need a classic malasada to get through the day or a takeout omakase to cap off your evening in, here’s where to eat in the capital of Hawai‘i

In the years leading up to COVID-19, a wave of restaurateurs from the continental U.S. and abroad were opening restaurants in Honolulu, with everyone from Japanese conglomerates to Michael Mina setting up shop. This was nothing new — outside interests have been looking to make money in Hawai‘i for centuries — but simultaneously, Honolulu’s homegrown businesses were riding that wave of excitement to expand themselves. Tiny mom-and-pop restaurants opened second locations, while established local chains expanded their reach. More and more chefs over the last decade worked harder to learn about Hawai‘i’s history and culture and respectfully incorporate aspects into their restaurants. That is to say, diners in Honolulu were a bit spoiled for choice.

COVID-19 hasn’t entirely dampened that momentum. New restaurants continue to open. Both local and foreign eateries continue to fight to stay open, even as many places close around them. The city’s famed King Street is a reflection of the times: The doors are closed forever at famed spots such as Alan Wong’s. Yet others, like M by Chef Mavro and Sushi Sasabune, are facing the challenge, repackaging their high-end fare for some of the most luxurious takeout on the island (at relatively reasonable prices, too). Elsewhere, fiercely loyal diners have helped sustain enduring icons like Helena’s Hawaiian Food. Some restaurants have found success by pivoting to weekly takeout-only menus, like the rotating prix fixe option at elegant Senia, while others have doubled down on the comforting malasadas, noodles, and stews that diners are craving, now more than ever. And if there is a silver lining in the pandemic, it might look like the new outdoor dining areas that have popped up outside restaurants. Temporary city permits have made al fresco dining an option in a city once surprisingly averse to the practice.

Pre-pandemic, there were many ways to enjoy a meal in town, from industry haunts popular with chefs to cheap eats to a full-blown eating tour through the Hawaiian islands. While the spots in those guides still very much deserve patronage, it’s worth looking at the Honolulu restaurants that are surviving and even thriving during this trying year. From stellar sushi to poke by the pound, from the Ritz-Carlton to roadside shacks, here’s where you should be eating right now.

Note: A number of Honolulu restaurants have resumed dine-in service, but their inclusion here should not be taken as an endorsement for dining in, as there are still safety concerns. Studies indicate that there is a lower exposure risk when outdoors, but the level of risk involved with patio dining is contingent on restaurants following strict social distancing and other safety guidelines. For updated information on coronavirus cases in your area, please visit One Oahu.

All the restaurants on this list offer takeout. Those with outdoor dining are indicated.

Prices per person, excluding alcohol:

$ = Less than $10

$$ = $10 - $20

$$$ = $20 - $40

$$$$ = More than $40

Martha Cheng is the food editor at Honolulu Magazine, the author of The Poke Cookbook, and a writer for national publications.

Plus, lab-grown chicken is available for consumption in Singapore, and more news to start your day

First on the agenda: Convince the rest of the country to screw gig workers out of employee benefits...

After coming to an agreement in July over an acquisition, Uber Eats has officially bought Postmates in a $2.65 billion all-stock deal. The deal consolidates two of the biggest players in the third-party delivery space. In a statement, Uber Eats explained that “the consumer-facing Postmates and Uber Eats apps will continue to run separately, supported by a more efficient, combined merchant and delivery network.”

The deal comes on the heels of California’s passing of Prop 22, which was heavily campaigned for by Uber Eats, Postmates, and other delivery services. Many California voters say they were misled into voting yes on the ballot measure, which denies delivery workers employee benefits and bargaining rights. After that win, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company would “loudly advocate” for more Prop 22-style legislation around the country, and apparently that push is already happening.

Pushing this legislation could be what Uber Eats’ new “listening tour,” announced by the company yesterday, is about. In addition to announcing the Postmates deal, Uber Eats is asking restaurants and merchants to register for virtual listening sessions so it can “put restaurants and merchants at the head of the table and create an open dialogue on products, policies, pricing, and more.” Given that Postmates is among the many third-party delivery services accused of listing restaurants without their permission, restaurants might have a lot to say.

And in other news...

• Bon Appétit published a recipe for Haitian Soup Joumou from Marcus Samuelsson’s new book and it is being widely panned, with many Haitians saying it in no way resembles the traditional dish. It’s gotten to the point where the book’s co-author Yewande Komolafe is specifying she had no part in developing the recipe and wants her name taken off the page. [BA]

• For all of December, Starbucks is giving free coffee to healthcare workers, hospital staff, mental health workers, and active-duty military. [CNN]
• Bang energy drink is suing PepsiCo, saying the company “has falsely represented to independent distributors and retailers that PepsiCo is Bang’s exclusive distributor” after they ended their exclusivity deal. [Fooddive]
• Cultured chicken meat grown in a lab is going on sale for the first time ever in Singapore. And now the question: does this count as vegan? [The Guardian]
• Would a pizza made with 250 types of cheese even taste good? [NYPost]
• The alcohol industry really does not want people to know alcohol is a carcinogen. [The Counter]
• Popeyes is launching its chicken sandwich in Mexico. [Adweek]

The chef tries her hand at recreating the squishy, soft rolls at home

“Who does not love a delicious, squishy, rich, amazing bun?,” asks chef Nyesha Arrington, holding a Martin’s Potato Roll in her hand. On this episode of ‘Plateworthy,’ she attempts her own homemade take on the famous bun.

Using dehydrated potato, leftover potato water, and other ingredients similar to those in brioche dough, Arrington begins to add everything to her stand mixer. Once the dough is mixed, she rolls six pieces with her palm to create a dome shape, gives them an egg wash, and bakes them. Once they’re done, she rips one open to reveal the puffy dough and a wisp of steam.

While the buns are cooling, she prepares a simple smash burger. “Really this meat here is just a vessel for the burger bun,” she says before assembling the burger and taking a bite. “Hell yeah. For me this is the perfect cheeseburger. A little bit of cheese, ketchup, and an amazing bun.”

Check out the recipe below:

Potato Rolls

Dough

2 Eggs + 1 Egg Yolk

5 TBSP Granulated Sugar

2 TSP Kosher Salt

½ Cup Instant Mashed Potatoes

2.5 TSP Instant Dry Yeast

½ Cup Reserved Potato Water (Or ½ Cup Lukewarm Water)

¼ Cup Whole Milk

2 Cups AP Flour

Burger

2-3 1.5 oz Prime Beef Patties

Cheddar Cheese (Sliced)

Ketchup

Recipe:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a stand mixer, add instant dry yeast, whole milk and salt. Mix briefly.
3. Slowly add in AP flour, sugar, instant mashed potatoes, lukewarm water and eggs. Mix until dough begins to form (should be tacky)
4. Once dough has formed, add to a medium glass bowl, cover and let rest until doubled in size (approximately 1-2 hours)
5. Once dough has risen, roll out onto a floured surface. Knead for 5-10 minutes.
6. Cut off pieces of dough and begin to roll into small dough balls slightly smaller than a tennis ball.
7. Place dough balls on a baking sheet, cover and rest for 1 hour or until doubled in size.
8. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until dough is slightly browned on top and cooked all the way through. Let rest.
9. Add seared beef patties, cheddar cheese, your favorite condiments and enjoy!

Restaurant owners say public health officials can’t definitively link on-site dining with a rise in cases, and they’re (mostly) right — but that’s not why officials shut them down

The hospitality industry and those who work in it have suffered tremendously over the last nine months, and this meager aid package isn’t going to help

July — so recent, yet so long ago — was truly a different time. During the summer, just a few months after millions of Americans received $1,200 stimulus checks and small businesses were keeping the lights on with Payroll Protection Program (PPP) loans, Congress was already talking about a second stimulus package to ward off impending economic chaos.

It seemed logical, at the time, that Congress would find their way to some deal on a stimulus package that would help at least some people before the 2020 election. That, of course, never happened. When negotiations fell apart, proposals from Republicans and Democrats differed by more than a trillion dollars, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to pass any bill that didn’t include protections from liability for employers who got their workers sick during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the following months, things just got worse. Sure, the stock market hit record highs, but low-income people were forced to wait in line for hours at food banks to feed themselves, faced eviction even though there was supposed to be a federal moratorium on evictions, and struggled to find work. And of course, the pandemic also raged on, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans while Congress waited until the election was over to address the impending catastrophe.

Whether you think these negotiations failed back in August because the Democrats held the package hostage in an effort to sway the outcome of the presidential election or because Republicans are stingy greed monsters who would prefer to give billions of dollars to banks and big business instead of struggling Americans, it’s inarguable that the country has been without any meaningful new federal aid since the CARES Act was signed into law on March 27. Now, for the first time in months, there’s bipartisan support for a new bill that would pump more than $900 billion into the economy.

Unfortunately, pretty much all of that money will be directed into industries other than the one that arguably needs it most: the hospitality industry. While it does call for an additional $300 billion infusion into the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) and rental assistance for families facing eviction, among other measures, it completely fails to address the problems that threaten to collapse the restaurant industry.

As the first round of PPP loans indicated, $300 billion isn’t nearly enough to be a lifeline for restaurants. Back in April, a similar amount of money — $349 billion — was snapped up in less than two weeks by businesses of all sizes. Now that the PPP has been closed since August, it seems reasonable to think that businesses, scraping by since those funds ran dry, are champing at the bit for something to help them survive the winter. That is, of course, assuming that those businesses are able to pay back the loans they’ve already taken out, or qualify for forgiveness.

This is almost beside the point because small businesses that are also restaurants don’t need loans, they need relief. They need some of what the airline and transit industries stand to gain under this proposal — about $45 billion in funds that don’t have to be paid back. After months of very limited revenue, restaurants don’t have enough money coming in right now to make promises about what they’ll be able to pay back in the future.

It’s not surprising that Congress is willing to bail out major corporations with no strings attached while the lifeblood of the economy withers on the vine, but it is disappointing. So many restaurants have already closed — at least 100,000, according to the National Restaurant Association — and more of those closures are coming. Winter is here, and it’s soon going to be too cold in most cities for restaurants to continue limping along with outdoor dining. Without any relief, the coming months are going to be devastating as we all watch our favorite establishments close.

What’s worse is that when those restaurants do close in December or January or whenever the axe finally falls, they’re going to leave potentially millions of workers unemployed. The newest stimulus proposal does pretty much nothing for those workers, outside of some assistance for those who are facing eviction. That seems like a pretty bare minimum for people who have already been scraping by on unemployment benefits for months, or risking their lives by working in restaurants during the pandemic.

It’s also important to remember that the lack of aid for restaurants is a serious about-face for Democratic leadership. Back in October, the Democratic-led House voted to pass the RESTAURANTS Act, which would have directed $120 billion in federal assistance to the restaurant industry. It’s unclear, and certainly unfortunate, that party leadership has essentially abandoned restaurants in this proposal. Republicans have pretty much ignored the RESTAURANTS Act altogether, so I wouldn’t put much faith in the idea that they’ll be the ones to come to the rescue of the country’s restaurants.

And of course, the stimulus proposal is just a proposal right now. There will be more horse-trading and shifting of the numbers, but it seems highly unlikely that aid for restaurants will miraculously find its way into the final bill. Right now, Democrats are describing the plan as an “interim package,” per CNBC, intended to stem the bleeding until President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. But at this very moment, McConnell is busy passing an even stingier proposal around to lawmakers

It’s a nice thought that Biden and the new Congress will be able to come to some sort of deal on a restaurant relief package at some point, but considering that the Republicans still hold a majority in the Senate, it’s unrealistic to think that some great bill is coming in the near future. .

Let us not forget that Mitch McConnell, a man who “revels” in being called the Grim Reaper and has vowed to make it as difficult as possible for the Biden administration to get any progressive legislation through Congress, will possibly still be Senate majority leader when the new Congress is seated in January. That depends on how the two runoff elections shake out in Georgia, which could shift the shape of the Senate. If that shift does happen, then we’re talking about a much sunnier future for some kind of restaurant relief.

But at that point, how many restaurants will still be around to benefit from this extremely hypothetical assistance package?

“He asked me to take my mask off so they could see my face and decide how much to tip me”

A new report from One Fair Wage outlines the unsafe and unfair treatment of tipped service workers during the pandemic, and as is unfortunately expected, the current state of affairs is bleak as hell. The survey of 1,675 tipped service workers in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Washington D.C. reveals that workers are worried for their health and safety as restaurants refuse to follow COVID-19 guidelines and customers ignore mask protocols.

Some of the most appalling revelations from the survey are regarding sexual harassment. About 250 workers reported a massive uptick in sexual comments from customers, “a substantial portion of which were requests from male customers that female service workers remove their mask so that they could judge their looks, and, implicitly, determine their tips on that basis.”

One Fair Wage reports tips overall have declined through the pandemic, making the dynamic between a customer and a tipped worker even more fraught. Nearly 65% of workers report customers docking tips if they are asked to adhere to public health protocols, and that they are “even more vulnerable to have to tolerate harassment that is now compounded with a threat to their physical safety, even life.” Over a quarter of those surveyed said they’ve witnessed a rise in sexual comments and harassments from customers, and 43% of women surveyed reported they had experienced it themselves.

“[A male customer] asked me to take my mask off so they could see my face and decide how much to tip me,” said one worker surveyed. Women were also accused of being rude and inhospitable if they refused to remove their masks, or asked customers to wear them, and often received even more harassment for attempting to protect themselves and others.

The ethos of “the customer is always right” often places tipped workers in the uncomfortable and unfair position of enduring abuse from customers in order to make a living wage. In 2014, the Restaurant Opportunities Center United called sexual harassment, from both customers and fellow employees, “endemic to the restaurant industry.” In its report, 80 percent of female restaurant workers reported experiencing sexual harassment from customers at some point.

Niko Prytula, a nonbinary server in Virginia, told Eater in June that they endured misgendering from guests, “because I don’t want to get in an argument with some elderly person when it’s literally a matter of my income.” That’s because, as they described, “your income depends on whether or not guests find you palatable, or performing the right way, or, god help you, attractive.” And with the pandemic raging and restaurants around the country on the brink of closure, some managers and owners are even less likely to stand up for their workers. Nobody wants to lose customers at a time like this.

The reports of sexual harassment are, of course, on top of the other horrific details of the survey. 44 percent of respondents said someone at their restaurant contracted COVID, 31 percent say they interact with over 30 unmasked people during their shift, and only 31 percent say their employers consistently follow COVID safety protocols. And “should a worker contract COVID-19 while employed by a restaurant, only a little over one quarter of workers, 28 percent, would be offered paid time off by their employers.”

President-elect Joe Biden has made a $15 federal minimum wage, and the elimination of a tipped minimum wage, part of his platform. While $15 an hour is still not a “living wage” in many states, it would at least mean that workers had less pressure to tolerate abuse for the sake of a paycheck. As One Fair Wage puts it, “Paying workers a full minimum wage would empower them to enforce safety protocols on customers and to reject sexual harassment and the life-threatening demands on women to remove their masks for the sexual pleasure of customers.”

Say goodbye to messy icing and tedious rolling and cutting

I hate frosting cookies. Absolutely loathe it. Unlike other, more forgiving aspects of baking, for me, cookie decorating has a well-proven zero-percent chance of success. I’m a decent baker (check it) but never, not once, have I managed to pull off a cute woodland creature or Christmas tree or butterfly or whatever that bears even a slight resemblance to the original. In other words, I Nailed It.

But the thing is, I have kids, and kids love decorating cookies. They live for it. Honestly if you gave them the option of a trip to Disneyland (currently not an actual option), a week’s worth of unfettered Netflix viewing (very much an option), and decorating a dozen cookies, it would be a hard toss up — which is only a little ironic because kids are actually terrible at decorating cookies. My son once glued three miniature M&M’s to the upper left corner of a star cookie with a smear of blue frosting and you would have thought he was Rembrandt.

I sort of get it. A fancy cookie is slightly more enjoyable and impressive-looking than a non-fancy cookie. But the effort to success ratio has just never been worth it for me — sugar icing is almost always too runny or too stiff and it sticks to everything, which is especially crummy if you want to pack and ship cookies to friends or family, the whole reason you’re going through the trouble of making fancy-looking cookies anyway. And so I have thus far doomed my children to a life of squidgy round drop cookies and lumpy chocolate chips.

Enter: cookie stamps.

I had never in my life heard of these until about a month ago when I went looking for a sandwich cookie recipe for a recent Eater project. I stumbled upon a King Arthur flour recipe for some maple shortbread cookies that, in the accompanying picture anyway, looked impossibly chic, with beautiful patterned, petal-like indentations that gave the shortbread a graphic pop but (and this is important) with zero icing, frosting, or other annoying baubles.

Lesley Suter

In the footnotes, the recipe mentioned the “option” of using Nordic cookie stamps to achieve the same look, which I immediately purchased. For around $30 and a few days wait, I became the proud owner of a trio of stamps and set to work.

The first thing I realized about the superiority of cookie stamps is that there’s no need to roll out the dough. (The rolling and cutting and re-rolling and re-cutting is another reason why cookie baking is sort of the worst.) With stamps, just form about a tablespoon’s worth of dough into a little ball and squish away. A few reviews had warned about the dough sticking to the stamps, but a quick dip of both the dough ball and the stamp in flour or powdered sugar helped with that a bit.

The cookies do still sort of stick, but that’s how I discovered what’s inarguably the best part of cookie stamping in 2020: banging stuff! After you stamp the dough, give a few rhythmic but solid thwacks of the edge of the stamp on the kitchen counter and watch your cookie pop out like magic. This time of year, any excuse to work out a little extra aggression is welcome. Doubly so if it involves a bunch of sugar and butter. (Just make sure there’s nobody trying to nap nearby.)

All in all, I found the cookie stamp experience not only way easier and arguably fancier than frosting, but it was actually fun. Even the kids (who kept asking when the damn frosting was coming out) appreciated the joy of slamming metal and quartz together a few dozen times. The resulting cookies baked up perfectly, looked very impressive, and the little red-handled stamps themselves double as cute kitchen holiday decor. And now I get to be the one to send obnoxiously perfect cookies to friends and family to overcompensate for the rest of my life that’s a pandemic-imposed hellscape. Best. $30. Ever.

Florence, Trieste, and San Pietro All’Olmo have new two-star restaurants in the latest edition of the dining guide

Given the state of things in the U.S., Michelin is steering clear from restaurant ranking in cities like Los Angeles and New York, but the French tire company is continuing to award stars to restaurants elsewhere in the world. And last week, the company dropped its 2021 starred selections for Italy.

The dining guide covers the whole country, and its 29 new additions are located in 13 of the 20 Italian regions. There are no new three-star restaurants this year, but the 11 three-starred restaurants from last year retain their status, including Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana. Among the 29 new restaurants, three were awarded two stars for a total of 37 Italian restaurants at that level: Ristorante Harry’s Piccolo in Trieste; Santa Elisabetta in Florence; and Ristorante D’O in San Pietro All’Olmo, which also gets a Michelin Green Star for chef Davide Oldani’s “commitment to young staff and instilling them with local values,” according to the Michelin post.

This leaves 26 new restaurants in the one-star category, bringing that total to 323 restaurants. There’s strong representation from Italy’s culinary new guard, with 16 of the 26 restaurants run by chefs under the age of 35, including Zia in Rome, whose chef Antonio Ziantoni wins Michelin’s young chef award.

The new Michelin guide also includes 252 Bib Gourmand restaurants, 11 of them new. See below for the full list of Italy’s new Michelin stars:

New two-star restaurants

Ristorante D’O - San Pietro All’Olmo

Ristorante Harry’s Piccolo - Trieste

Santa Elisabetta - Florence

New one-star restaurants

Don Alfonso 1890 San Barbato - Lavello

Relais Blu - Massa Lubrense

Re Santi e Leoni - Nola

Lorelei - Sorrento

Osteria del Povero Diavolo - Torriana

Zia - Rome

Essenza - Terracina

Nove - Alassio

Impronta D’Acqua - Lavagna/Cavi

Kitchen - Como

AALTO - Milan

Borgo Sant’Anna - Monforte d’Alba

Piano 35 - Turin

Casa Sgarra - Trani

Poggio Rosso - Castelnuovo Berardenga

Gabbiano 3.0 - Marina di Grosseto

Franco Mare - Marina di Pietrasanta

Sala dei Grappoli - Poggio alle Mura

Linfa - San Gimignano

Peter Brunel Restaurant Gourmet - Arco

Prezioso - Merano

Senso Alfio Ghezzi Mart - Rovereto

Vecchio Ristoro - Aosta

SanBrite - Cortina d’Ampezzo

La Cru - Romagnano

Amistà - San Pietro in Cariano

• The MICHELIN Guide Italy 2021 unveiled [Michelin]

Plus, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has his own ice cream flavor, and more news to start your day

Bipartisan group of lawmakers unveil stimulus package proposal in attempt to break stalemate

A bipartisan group of senators plan to unveil a $908 billion stimulus proposal today, following a monthslong stalemate that has prevented additional economic aid to people, businesses, and a country desperately in need of it.

The group includes senators Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Angus King (I-Maine), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), according to the Washington Post, which first reported the news.

The proposed plan is a compromise between Democrats’ desired $2.2 trillion package and Republicans’ $500 billion, Warner told CNBC, calling it an “interim package” until President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.

Although the details of the package are still subject to change, the Post reports that so far, the plan would provide:

• $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits, rather than Democrats’ desired $600 per week
• $240 billion in funding for state and local governments, a Democratic priority opposed by most Republicans
• a six-month freeze on coronavirus-related lawsuits against companies, a Republican priority opposed by most Democrats
• an additional $300 billion for small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program
• $40 billion for transit agencies
• rental assistance for people facing eviction
• $50 billion in health care funding, including to help with COVID-19 testing, tracing, and vaccine distribution
• no second round of stimulus checks

It’s not yet clear whether this proposal will move forward or help stimulus talks resume between the two parties. Federal aid is critical as we move into the holidays, as several emergency relief programs — including an extension on unemployment insurance, a moratorium on federal student loan repayment, and some eviction protections — expire at the end of December.

And in other news…

• Chipotle is testing smoked brisket in select Cincinnati and Sacramento locations. [CNBC]
• 10,000 free McRibs. [CNN]
• Recall alert: some baby spinach, organic basil, and vegetable mix. [Thrillist]
• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson created a new Salt & Straw ice cream flavor called “Dwanta Claus.” Hope it’s dwalicious? [People]
• Hershey’s debuted a new holiday ad that uses human actors in addition to stop-motion Hershey’s Kisses, and a handful of people are mad with grief. [Today]
• Yet another restaurant owner says it took months to get Grubhub to remove his menu and photos that were posted to its site without permission. [WZZM13]
• The wife of a member of the E Street Band says she was banned from an Arizona restaurant for asking corporate headquarters to issue a mask mandate. [NJ.com]
• Thrillist is opening a delivery-only ghost kitchen with Zuul that will rotate New York chefs and restaurants from December to April. [Media Post]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

This combination of leafy green herbs, olive oil, and garlic are the building blocks for a truly versatile sauce

This post originally appeared in the November 30, 2020 edition of The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move. Subscribe now.

If there’s a scrappy bouquet of parsley wilting on your counter, or a few scraggly mint leaves drying out in the back of your fridge, I have just the recipe for you. Well, it’s not exactly a recipe, nor does it have a name, but when the herbs pile up in a sad bunch, and the last lemon is starting to wrinkle up and shrink, this sauce makes use of what would otherwise get scrapped. It’s good on pretty much everything but ice cream, and it’s incredibly simple to make.

I first had some version of it years ago while I was cooking in a Bay Area restaurant, where I worked prep shifts before the real cooks came in for dinner service. One of my only jobs was to make this sauce, which would later be spooned over Brussels sprouts crisped in a wood-burning oven. Depending what was in the box of produce heaved onto the counter each morning, the sauce would change week to week. But the building blocks were always the same: a cup of olive oil poured into a small cast-iron skillet, a big pinch of red pepper flakes, the zest of a lemon, and some finely slivered cloves of garlic. Once the garlicky oil, which acted as a blank canvas, cooled, I’d add chopped parsley and cilantro, along with a big pinch of salt and a heaping handful of crushed or chopped black olives. Once in a while, usually when a chef was yelling at me to work faster, I’d mix up the herbs and add mint instead, and sometimes that day’s sauce ended up with twice as much garlic as usual or no parsley at all. No one ever complained.

Oftentimes, I’d finish my shift, go home, and get started on another batch of sauce, so I could have it handy in my own kitchen all week. In the eight years since that job, I’ve continued to make the shapeshifting green sauce. At some point, I forgot exactly what went into the original recipe, and my sauce turned into something that the restaurant’s chef probably wouldn’t recognize. But that’s part of what makes a non-recipe like this one so beautiful: The building blocks, not the exact ingredients, are what make for such a trusty and reliably delicious result. If it’s going on a fatty piece of meat, I up the acidity to cut through all that richness. If it’s being paired with fish or roasted vegetables, I go a little heavier on the briny olives.

Instead of offering yet another holiday recipe for you to follow to a tee this season, maybe I can convince you to join me in improvising your way through a batch of recipeless green sauce. Start with olive oil — this is really the only bit that can’t be ignored or improvised. A cup or so goes into a little skillet, along with a two-finger pinch of red pepper flakes, or a few cranks of black pepper, or maybe some whole cumin seeds. Or all three! Grate or finely slice three or four (or five) cloves of garlic, and add those to the skillet, too. (You could swap the garlic out for paper-thin half-moons of shallot, but really, why would you ever swap anything for garlic?) This is when you turn on the flame to a lowish heat, and watch the oil for those little bubbles to get bigger, for the spices to become fragrant, for your garlic or shallot to take on a tiny bit of color.

Pull the oil from the heat and search around for all the forgotten herbs on windowsills and tucked away in the fridge. Pluck the leaves from these tender herbs — no rosemary, sage, or thyme here, please — and keep plucking until you’ve got about an equal ratio of herb to oil. Roughly chop, and toss them into a bowl with your garlicky olive oil. To this already-perfect mixture, you’ll want to add the juice and zest of a whole lemon, or if you stopped buying citrus when you realized you never use it up in time, you can go with a quarter cup of sherry vinegar or even plain white vinegar instead. Add a pinch of salt and this is ready to spoon over all your Thanksgiving leftovers, some fried eggs, or really anything else. I have yet to find a better match for it than a pan of well-crisped Brussels sprouts, though.

For me, this sauce isn’t done until it gets a very large helping of something briny and salty and fresh. I usually stick with the same black olives — not canned! — that I first learned to make this with, about a cup of them crushed or chopped. There’s nothing stopping you from using capers instead — about a quarter cup sounds right. You could skip the briny stuff altogether, crushing up a couple good anchovies with the side of your knife and tossing them into the oil while it’s still warm. Right before I use the sauce, I like to add a big handful of toasted and chopped almonds or some whole pine nuts.

When all is done, and you’ve made a batch to last you through the week, I’m sure your sauce won’t be quite like mine. As far as I’m concerned, that’s exactly as it should be.

In a statement posted to Instagram, True Kitchen owner Kevin Kelley explained his rationale — and then went on TMZ to explain further

At least six Michigan restaurants have received fines or liquor license suspensions for deliberately not complying with the three-week indoor dining closure

Baking for others is a delightful pursuit. These are the recipes Eater editors reach for when cookies are in the cards.

It’s cookie season, and it couldn’t have come soon enough. After the contortions of modified and shrunk-down Thanksgivings, it’s exciting to bake something meant for sharing. This year is an especially good one to double that batch and send cookies to family and friends.

Eater conducted a cookie exchange experiment in which 12 editors sent all different types of holiday-ish cookies through the mail to see what survived best. The TL;DR is that no one type of cookie performed better than another — the key is to keep the cookies packed tight and well padded. Below, the Eater editors and writers who participated share why they chose the cookie recipes they did. Even if you’re not normally a baker, many of these recipes are simple enough to pull off. As executive editor Matt Buchanan says, “What I’ve learned from this serendipitous experience is that baking cookies is incredibly easy, even without an electrical mixing apparatus of any kind, so anyone can do it, and that I never will again.”

Chocolate crinkle cookies: My husband is dairy-free, which tends to limit the cookies we’re able to make: Often, all-vegan recipes will require ingredients I don’t have on hand (I’m lookin’ at you, applesauce) and adapted-to-dairy-free recipes usually fail to work out for me (enter a tragic, time-consuming batch of snickerdoodles that came out hard as rocks). But these crinkles have become a go-to because they’re naturally dairy-free, don’t require a mixer for the dough, and the beautiful crinkling on top looks impressive despite being easy to create. Admittedly, I knew going in that the powdered sugar topping would likely take a beating in the mail — and it definitely did, losing a lot of the crinkle effect — but this is the one cookie recipe I will commit to time and time again. —Erin DeJesus

Tartine All Day brownies and Edd Kimber’s tahini chocolate chip bars: I chose these because of the relative indestructibility of brownies and blondies; they’re sturdy enough to stand up to the slings and arrows of the U.S. postal system, and also tend to stay fresh for quite some time. I chose Liz Prueitt’s brownie recipe from Tartine All Day because a) they’re always a hit and b) they’re gluten-free (they use sorghum flour), which means most people will eat them. The tahini blondies are adapted from Edd Kimber’s tahini chocolate chip cookie bar recipe in The Boy Who Bakes; I added an extra egg and more butter to them, as well as malt powder and white chocolate chips. Maybe it’s the malt and the extra fat, but the result is very tender and enjoyably squidgy. —Rebecca Flint Marx

Peanut butter swirled brownies: One of the funniest things to me is when people A. write subjective opinions as objective truths (e.g., “[X Food] Is Bad and if You Like It, You’re Wrong”) and B. when people get mad about subjective opinions as if one person’s dislike of a favorite food someone how negates the other person’s right to like it. So color me surprised when I found myself taking this Mel blog about how chocolate and peanut butter are a bad combination, like, way too personally (I chalk my overreaction up to election stress, okay???). Anyway, the Mel hot take made me really double down on the marriage between chocolate and peanut butter, what with it being a SACRED institution and all. I also just really love these perfect moist-yet-sturdy Smitten Kitchen brownies (as I love all Deb Perelman’s baked goods) and had all the ingredients already in my home. Chocolate and peanut butter — the only food combination that is actually objectively good. —Madeleine Davies

Chewy molasses cookies: I love a slightly spicy cookie that’s not too sweet, and molasses cookies are the epitome of that balance for me. I like that they have a tendency to crack on the outside and stay soft on the inside, and they’re great for dunking in coffee with breakfast. They’re also, incidentally, very easy to make and hard to mess up. I used a straightforward chewy molasses cookie recipe from Bon Appétit circa 2013. The coarse sugar on the outside gives the cookies a nice finished appearance and acts as a bit of a protective barrier during shipping. —Brenna Houck

Rose pistachio shortbread cookies from Sister Pie: For my crispy cookie, I wanted to try out a recipe from Detroit’s Sister Pie. I’ve always liked the appearance of the shop’s rose pistachio shortbread cookies, but as I flipped through Lisa Ludwinski’s cookbook I came across the buttered rum shortbread; it felt a little more festive for the holidays, with the same pretty rose frosting on top. Unlike the molasses cookies, these are a little bit more involved, but still simple for a novice baker. To start, you prep the dough, which includes a splash of rum (I used Two James Distillery’s Doctor Bird Jamaica rum). After the dough comes together, you wrap it up and let it sit in the fridge and then slice and bake the cookies as you would a premade dough from the grocery store. The frosting, which also includes booze, came together well and set up nicely. I let the cookies sit overnight for the frosting to completely cure before shipping them out. —Brenna Houck

Miso peanut butter cookies: I’m a big fan of miso-spiked sweets, especially when combined with something nutty, as with these miso peanut butter cookies from Krysten Chambrot at the New York Times. They’re sweet and salty, chewy at the center and crisp at the edges. That is to say, they’re perfect. The recipe calls for sweeter white miso, but I opted for red miso because I like the more assertive flavor. I even tried scaling down the sugar in the first batch to highlight that savory edge, but it affected the composition too much, turning the cookies into tall, crumbly biscuits (not bad, but not decadent holiday cookie material). After I returned the sugar to the proper proportion, they came out great. On round two, I did underbake them by three minutes (two minutes before removing the pan the first time, and one minute on the second pass in the oven) to account for my oven, ensure they would arrive chewy after a cross-country journey, and optimize structural integrity — yielding something like a Mrs. Fields cookie, but fancy. —Nick Mancall-Bitel

Smitten Kitchen blondies: When I was in high school, my mom started making blondies for every sleepover, every late-night play rehearsal, and every study session. They probably stuck around because there’s nothing wrong with a thick square of chocolate chip cookie, and because as much as I love cookies, measuring out dough or (gasp) cutting out shapes is too tedious. A few years ago my mom switched from the recipe on the back of a Hershey’s chip bag to this one from Smitten Kitchen, which has far fewer ingredients and really ups the gooey, fudgy factor. I thought the density would make them ship well, but I may have underbaked them a little, and I ruined a few trying to extract them from the pan. Still, once they cooled, they cut cleanly into bite-sized blocks perfect for nibbling. —Jaya Saxena

Walnut alfajores from Flavor Flours: I went with a familiar cookie recipe for our inaugural cookie swap, because the thought of shipping cookies was nerve-wracking enough and I didn’t need to add more variables to the mix. I followed a recipe for walnut alfajores, from queen of baking Alice Medrich’s gluten-free cookbook Flavor Flours. The book has introduced me to so many excellent desserts made with nonwheat flours and grains, but this recipe is a particular favorite. The cookies are crisp with just a tiny bit of chew (which I hoped would make them sturdy enough to ship), and I filled each sandwich with store-bought cajeta, though it’s easy enough to make from scratch. The cookies didn’t come out perfectly round, which made for a few wonky sandwiches, with caramel spilling out from the sides. That could’ve made for messy transit, but I individually wrapped each cookie before packing them all up. Luckily, the box I packed the cookies in was a couple inches too small, and I had no choice but to eat an extra alfajor... or two. —Elazar Sontag

Sugar cookies: I went with a very straightforward sugar cookie for two main reasons: 1. You get to decorate them and 2. They are uniform and thus easier to pack and ship. The Susan Spungen recipe is dead simple and easy to roll and cut out (I used jam jar covers for a consistent shape) and can be the base for infinite decorating strategies. At first I was tempted to make a whole batch of tie-dye cookies, following this Bon Appétit technique, but I quickly realized it’s incredibly tedious and I’m especially lazy. Instead, I went with two solid colors and played with some swirls at the end. —Amanda Kludt

Peanut butter miso cookies, Round Two: I’ve never baked cookies, even out of a can or a tube or whatever ready-to-bake cookie dough is packed into these days — has anyone disrupted cookies yet? — and anything that comes out of my kitchen is nearly exclusively by way of the NYT Cooking app (though shoutout to Just One Cookbook) because, despite its half-broken search, it is still the least annoying way for a lazy (or is it burned out?) person to acquire and successfully transubstantiate a list of ingredients and instructions into something edible without having to put down their phone. So there was only one possible outcome if I successfully forced myself to bake cookies: the New York Times peanut butter-miso cookies.

But I find cookies that don’t have chunks in them crushingly boring, even ones loaded with miso, so I threw in a heap of white chocolate — admittedly risky for a virgin cookie expedition — and hoped it would work out. What I’ve learned from this serendipitous experience is that baking cookies is incredibly easy, even without an electrical mixing apparatus of any kind, so anyone can do it, and that I never will again. —Matt Buchanan

Maple shortbread sandwich cookies: Sandwich cookies are the sneakiest move. Really, you’re eating two entire cookies masquerading as one, with a bonus layer of sugary cream in the middle. I ultimately landed on this recipe because A. I love maple (everything tastes like pancakes!) and B. King Arthur Flour recipes are known to be well tested and always feature gram measurements as well as cups. Using a scale means you can just dump stuff in a bowl straight from the container, which is great for lazy cooks and reluctant dishwashers like me. The clincher with these cookies, though, is the Nordic cookie stamps that I’d been eyeing for a while and finally purchased, which are a good way to make cookies feel fancy without frosting them. (I. Loathe. Frosting. Cookies. I’m terrible at piping, and the icing is always too thick or too runny, and way too fragile for shipping.) These cookie stamps took a little getting used to, but once I figured out the sturdy and rather satisfying thwack needed to pop the cookies out, it was a cinch.

Note: I doubled the recipe as suggested for stamping, but in the end it still only made 13 cookies. I’d quadruple the recipe if you want to make more than just a batch, or skip the sandwiching altogether, which made for some pretty burly cookies. That is in no way a problem for me, but daintier tastes could get away with one at a time. —Lesley Suter

Mexican wedding cookies: Along with sugar cookies shaped like reindeer and snowmen, I grew up making Russian tea cakes, aka Mexican wedding cookies, around the holidays (although back then I just called them snowballs). So for this project, because I was not in an ambitious mood and do not own any cookie cutters, Christmas-themed or otherwise, I opted for a Bon Appétit recipe for Mexican wedding cookies that I’ve made before. The brown butter in this recipe makes the classic cookie feel a little bit more special than the ones I baked as a kid, but they’re thankfully still incredibly easy to make — and, I was happy to learn, they ship okay too, even if they ended up looking less like snowballs when they reached their final destination. —Monica Burton

Photo credits: Cookies from Tomalu, LindasPhotography, Anjelika Gretskaia, Alinakho, James Andrews, and AnjelaGr/Getty Images

Plus, delivery workers are burned out, and more news to start your day

Some restaurants are resisting shutdown orders as second COVID-19 wave surges

As restaurants face a new round of indoor dining shutdown orders amid rising coronavirus cases and colder weather, some are choosing to stay open in spite of the legal and public health consequences, arguing that it’s the only way that their businesses can make it through the pandemic.

Restaurants face fines, citations, and enforced closures if they don’t comply with dining bans, but it’s typically up to local authorities and health departments to police the offending businesses. For some owners, avoiding the loss of more business is worth the risk of staying open, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“We are NOT trying to be rebellious or are anti-masks, anti-people’s health or any of the other nonsense. This is a decision out of survival,” owners of Lockport Stagecoach, an Illinois restaurant, wrote on Facebook, Eater Chicago reported last month. Still more restaurants, bars, and industry groups are pushing back, with a handful attending rallies or filing lawsuits to fight dining restrictions, as Nation’s Restaurant News detail.

Restaurants have been linked to coronavirus transmission by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and researchers from Stanford University. The health risks of indoor dining — to both customers and, in particular, employees — are clear, as masks are off inside an enclosed space for long periods of time.

That restaurant operators are defying orders to remain closed despite risks to themselves and their workers highlight the difficult position that businesses find themselves in, caught between a public health crisis and an economic disaster, and a federal government that has done little to stem either. Never forget: the government could have paid businesses to remain closed and people to stay home.

And in other news…

• Coca-Cola is allegedly among the major companies lobbying against a bill that would ban imported goods made with forced labor by Uyghur minorities in China’s Xinjiang region. [NYT]
• While food delivery apps are booming in pandemic times, their workers say they are facing even more precarious working conditions. [NYT]
• On the other end of delivery app transactions, some restaurants are eschewing platforms like Seamless and Uber Eats — which often charge them fees as as high as 30 percent — for local alternatives or DIY delivery. [CNN]
• DoorDash, which recently agreed to pay $2.5 million in a tip-skimming settlement, is seeking up to $2.8 billion in an IPO. [Bloomberg]
• As hunger levels have risen to historic levels in the U.S., so too have the number of Americans on SNAP. [The Counter]
• ShopRite workers in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey will be getting retroactive hazard pay, thanks to an agreement that their union reached with the company. [New Haven Register]
• To few people’s surprise, Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey is anti-socialism, very pro-capitalism. [Newsweek]
• Singer Rita Ora apologizes for throwing a party in a London restaurant in the middle of a lockdown. [The Guardian]
• Food reporter Tim Carman writes about his experience getting COVID-19. [WaPo]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Showcase your devotion with some cozy swag

You’ve wanted it. We’ve wanted it. At long last, Eater merch is here.

We’ve long told you where to eat and drink, helped you book food-filled vacations, and dug up all the restaurant intel you’ve ever wanted to know. Now we can all wear that devotion on our sleeves with Eater’s first-ever merch drop. This capsule of cozy items with a collegiate feel is the first of many small collections to come, each with new products and a different vibe, available for just a limited time.

For now, this debut collection should see you through winter — get it while it’s hot (and go ahead and get something for a friend, too). Check out the products below and find our storefront here. For FAQs, keep scrolling.

And now, for a few FAQs...

If I buy now, will my merch be here in time for the 2020 holidays?

Depends what you buy. Due to the pandemic’s impact on manufacturing and shipping, many processes have been slowed down to protect warehouse workers and adhere to social distancing guidelines.

Stickers and water bottles may be processed faster than apparel and arrive before December 24; just be sure to purchase them in a separate order from sweatshirts or hats, as all items in an order are shipped at one time, rather than incrementally (and sweatshirts and hats are unlikely to be ready by December 24).

Can I receive my order internationally?

Yes. DFTBA, our merch partner, ships internationally via USPS (though at this point, items shipped internationally are unlikely to arrive before December 24).

I need a return, refund, or replacement. Who do I contact?

You’ll work with our friends at DFTBA for this. You can find that support page here.

The Momofuku chef’s winnings will go to the Southern Smoke Foundation