George Chen, owner of 30,000-square-foot China Live, visits Eater’s Digest

Like many restaurant operators, George Chen faced one obstacle after another this year trying to keep his business afloat. But running what he deems the country’s largest mom-and-pop — the 30,000-square-foot Chinese food emporium China Live in San Francisco — came with some fairly unique challenges. And getting it back open again, keeping in mind the different requirements and interest in food halls, fine dining, events, retail, and bars, is its own unique challenge.

Chen, a longtime veteran of the industry, came on Eater’s Digest this week to discuss that unique challenge as well as how his business is forever changed and why he’s still bullish on the future. He launched 10 ghost kitchen operations to extend his delivery zone to new cities and regions, expanded his takeout menu, and has a large product line. How does he recalibrate as indoor and outdoor dining return? And how does he see expansion now, as he pulls out of his long-anticipated Amazon campus space in Seattle and instead eyes new opportunities to bring his “Chinese Eataly” New York and Chicago?

Listen and subscribe to Eater’s Digest on Apple Podcasts, and read the condensed and edited transcript of our conversation with George Chen below.

Tell us about China Live, for people who aren’t aren’t super familiar.

George Chen: China Live was my 16th restaurant. My first restaurant was Betelnut, and I’ve had restaurants in Shanghai as well. China Live is a big, ambitious project. It’s about 30,000 square feet. Four floors. I’ll probably never do that again ... I bit off a little bit more than I can chew, but we have established ourselves here.

People look at China Live as the modern Chinese food emporium. Food hall marketplace. We have retail. We have different venues for events. We have a curated cocktail lounge called Cold Drinks Bar. Eight Tables by George Chen is the fine dining component. It really has only eight tables. And so, on multiple floors we have this monster of a place. Some people say, “Oh, it’s kind of like Chinese Eataly.” Or, “Chitaly.”

We’re right in the heart of Chinatown on Broadway, and we help revitalize some of the energy in Chinatown. It’s the oldest Chinatown in the country. And I really wanted to do it there, even though it wasn’t a great walk-by traffic location. But we’ve done okay. Before the COVID, we were the 63rd highest grossing restaurant in the US.

I know you’ve been through a lot during COVID, but I want to ask you about reopening, because that’s really the phase we’re in right now. What is it like to reopen such a massive space like that with so many different moving parts?

It’s really tough. The reason that I never shut down, even after March 16th last year, is because I know that ... Of course, we have a huge investment, but we immediately moved to heavy take-out and had a volunteer group. We didn’t know what was going on. It was like a bomb was going off and nobody has felt the effects yet.

And so, we kept to-go. And then, we did outdoor dining when that was allowed, and just followed along. If we had shut down completely, it’s really hard to reopen, because all your electricity and plumbing, your stoves, your refrigeration.

You lose your core employees, most importantly. I had over 200 employees when we went into shelter-in-place. Now, I have only about 65. And I don’t think I’ll ever get back to that number. I’m just trying to do things a lot more efficient.

And then, of course the business level is not what it was. It’s also differentiated now, because so much delivery and meal kits and things like that. Opening this time, hopefully, is for good. Opening a big place like this takes a lot of planning in phases, because you have multiple venues with different people with different skill sets.

Eight Tables didn’t really do any take-out until the last time now in December when we were allowed to open for like three weeks. That crew, I only kept the chef de cuisine, and then we had to try and bring everybody else back. A lot of people are just not around.

Number one is getting the key people back. Number two is just the physical space of planning, because you move so much furniture around to make distancing and all this for whatever potential percentage are allowed to open. And then, you can reconfigure a restaurant, you have plastic barriers or whatever.

We didn’t have too many of those because we have a huge space, but it’s a tremendous amount of work. We kind of felt like we got jerked around a lot. Supposedly, June 15th, we’re allowed to open 100%. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

What’s it like on the fine dining side versus the rest of your venue?

Fine dining is different in that, first of all, you don’t know if people are willing to spend that much. When I reopened Eight Tables, I lowered the price to $175 per person for 10 courses and everybody else raised their prices. Because people were saying, “Well, the cost of restaurants is just so much more expensive.” But we realized that there is actually good demand for high-end, at least at Eight Tables.

And so, we’re lucky that we’ve been booking up pretty well. We brought it back to the old price of $225, but it’s a different feel. It’s like running multiple restaurants that are very different. The team at Eight Tables don’t really cross-train much downstairs. They’ll help out once in a while, when we get in a jam, but they’re dedicated to a different style of cuisine.

And downstairs, where you’re dependent on a lot of people being in one space at a time, do you see that business coming back? Or you think it’s just going to be slow and you’ll get there by the time you’re allowed to open 100% capacity?

Well, I don’t think we’re going to. Obviously, Europe is still Code Red. And so, the European or the other country travelers — we get a lot of Asian travelers — you don’t see a lot of those people. I think domestic travel is picking up, because everybody has this pent-up energy to travel and to go out and see things. And so, we’re seeing domestic visitors, but China Live is not really a neighborhood restaurant.

We did some big data stuff and found out that 85 percent of our business came outside of 9.7 miles. You can imagine during COVID with deliveries, that’s your perimeter, if you will. Your area of service for all the delivery apps. When you lose 85% of your business and that’s not in your neighborhood, let’s say, then you have to find other ways to do this business.

We did ghost kitchen. We had to, to enlarge our geographical footprint. I think it’s going to be slow coming back, until business traveling. It’s not just the tourists, it’s the business conferences, and also tech companies. We have a lot of tech companies here in San Fran. Right?

When people are allowed to work two, three days from home remotely, if you’re a downtown restaurant by, say, Salesforce Tower, I would be really scared, because it’s a ghost town down there. Same thing up in Seattle, in the South Lake Union. I don’t know about New York. But certain parts of the country are back, like Texas, Miami. They’re almost like a different country.

Right now, for us here in San Francisco, it’ll come back bit by bit. We’re seeing improvement even in the last month, we’re probably up 20 percent on sales month over month. We’re seeing better check averages and higher foot traffic. But it’s not going to be what it was. We used to do over a thousand covers a day.

When you say you did ghost kitchens, what does that mean? Did you just come up with whole new restaurant concepts out of your kitchen?

No. We have some brand identity, even though we’ve only been around since ‘17. There’s certain signature dishes that people really come for, like my SJB. The Sheng Jian Bao, the pan fried dumplings.

And so, I looked at a lot of ghost kitchen opportunities and I really didn’t believe in them. Because, first of all, the quality generally doesn’t travel. Two, the costs of setting up a ghost kitchen is like setting up a separate small restaurant without indoor dining. And then, you have to advertise and get the word out.

With our ghost kitchen, which is done with VKC, Virtual Kitchen Corp, they came to us and they had a couple of chef guys from French Laundry and from Chez Panisse that we worked with it on saying, how do we take my best dishes that can travel, and then have you guys [finish it]. It’s like par-baked bread, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

How do you guys then deliver it? If you think, it’s like taking Chinese food, taking it out of your fridge and reheating it in the microwave. That’s not going to work for me. It was tough. We actually went through four months of testing, and now we have 10 locations, from San Jose to Berkeley. We do about $3,000 bucks a day with our ghost kitchen business. They don’t like to be called a ghost kitchen, they like to be called a virtual kitchen. But I think they’re going to lose that battle.

When you’re opening in San Jose and you’re opening in different cities, has that been a separate marketing campaign? Or are you letting the delivery apps do the work for you?

The delivery apps will sponsor some exposure, like $5.00 off or no delivery fee, because they know that by dealing with us in San Francisco, in Chinatown, that we do $10,000 a day in to-go on a regular day. DoorDash is the biggest one. They’ll do $5,000, $6,000 a day just with us, so they know that we have numbers. And so, they understand that, “Hey, if you have a good product, you need to get it out there.”

We’re an independent restaurant and only one really large location, so we don’t have crazy marketing dollars. We’ll buy $100 in Instagram or a Facebook ad, and that’ll drive some support.

We do a pop-up in Marin, and we do between $5,000 - 10,000 on the third Thursday of every month. And we don’t use a delivery apps for that. We just send the email out, people order on our website. And then, we drop the food off at a friend’s nursery in Marin, and people come and pick it up. That’s not a ghost kitchen deal They don’t service Marin. They don’t service Walnut Creek and in that corridor, and that’s a big market.

We’re trying to do everything we can to bring quality food to a bigger area, because people are starting to travel. I see the traffic is getting much worse in certain parts of the city, but I still think it’s not going to be the same behavior. There’s still a lot of people here in California, in San Francisco, that don’t feel comfortable dining out, and certainly, indoors yet.

Especially, because you have such a huge space ... Were you frustrated with the general perception of what it meant to push for indoors throughout the pandemic?

Oh, yeah. I felt that they just lumped us all in the same pot. There were better operators and there are not so good operators. Some bars will secretly — a lot of people are not wearing masks, and they’re like the old days. People are going to get sick. And then, there are people more like us, where we had temperature robots, contact tracing for our employees, mandatory checks of COVID tests every two weeks for our employees.

Thank God we had the PPP. Because we do large volume and high payroll, we got a large PPP, but all that money went towards this indoor “getting ready.” What really bugged me, or pissed me off actually, was last December. Early December, they shut everything down, including outdoor dining. That was brutal. That almost took the air out of all of us. Thank God, now we’re 50 percent, and hopefully opening up a bit more.

But we have to stay open. Because shutting down completely, and then to try to reopen a place this size is, I would say, nearly impossible.

But you must be happy that you didn’t panic in the beginning. I think if I had a restaurant in March 15th or whatever, I probably would have closed it.

Yeah. I’ve been in this business a very long time and I’ve had restaurants that have had to close for various reasons. I had a steakhouse in Shanghai when the trade wars happened. American steaks and American wine went up to 100 percent plus tariff. How do you do business there? Sometimes you have to shut the doors.

My first restaurant, Betelnut, was there for 21, 22 years. And so, it’s shuttered finally as well. Restaurants tend to have a lifespan. The institutions that last 50 plus years are very rare. With our investment and what we’re trying to do ... I just couldn’t imagine, towards the latter part of my restaurant career, to just give up.

There’s an old saying that Abe Lincoln said, “You can’t fail unless you quit.” We weren’t going to quit. If we don’t quit, maybe we don’t fail. And so, there was no choice in the matter. Did I panic? I was freaked out. I even said to Eater, when they interviewed me that next day, I said, “It’s like Armageddon.” I had not experienced anything like this.

We’ve been through SARS and Bird Flu and 9/11 and the dot-com bust and god knows what else. The Great Recession. The restaurant business gets hit a lot, but this one directly more affected our industry. It’s like other people can still work remotely and get paid. Well, if you can’t open restaurants, nobody gets paid. And then, what do you do? You’ve got so many variables.

I thought it would be over by summer. And I thought it was Armageddon. Now, we’re approaching Summer 2021. It was just unbelievable to me. If I had known last year, March 16th, that it was going to last over a year, I may have said, “Okay, we got to rethink this. Can we survive a year?” The government’s certainly been helpful now, with the Restaurant Relief Fund. I think that’s what they’re calling it. And some other ...

Will you be applying for that?

Oh, heck yeah. My wife and I are the primary owners, so she’s a female minority. And there’s some terms in there that says, “If you were disadvantaged because of AAPI hate,” or whatever. We’re going to try and get first dibs of that pie. The pie is not big enough, just to put it simply. It is just not big enough. Everybody’s going to be competing for it on Monday. A lot of restaurants are going to be trying to jump the gun and get in there. We’re doing that right now.

Since you’re such a big business, will the maximum cover your losses?

Oh, I don’t even want to tell you what my losses were last year. It’s horrific, but at least we have enough reserves from the second PPP to keep pushing. Obviously, we’re still losing money, but a big place like this just has certain overhead. Our PG&E bill, our energy bill is over $20,000 a month. Our trash is over $10,000. It’s crazy.

Your insurance is crazy. You can’t not insure your place. Especially, in COVID times. And so, these fixed costs are ... not to even mention trying to renegotiate our lease. There’s still variables. It’s still scary. I’m confident that we’ll make it, but there are no guarantees.

Are there other pivots in addition to the ghost kitchens that you guys have done that you think will stick around, that were successful?

I don’t know if meal kits will survive. I’ve studied tons of meal kits, and some of them require so much work from fine dining restaurants. “Put this in your convection oven.” What if you don’t have a convection oven? Some, like from Goldbelly, it’s pretty expensive. It’s like twice what you would pay, and so ...

Quickly, for those who don’t know Goldbelly, essentially, it lets you order famous dishes from restaurants all over the country, and they’re packaged up and ready to cook at home.

If you’re stuck at home and you’re bored and you haven’t been out, and you want to say, “Hey. Well, maybe I want to go to that Jewish deli in New York?” Well, how? But I think you try it once, and you just paid 20 bucks, 30 bucks for a sandwich or whatever.

Look, I don’t know if that model will sustain once people can travel. I think fine dining restaurants ... We stopped doing to-go at Eight Tables, because you can’t do both well. We’ve stopped, but downstairs, China Live is ... Chinese food is one of the largest delivery components, like pizza.

And so, that’ll hopefully keep up. My decision is, shall I reduce the menu? Before COVID, I had a very limited menu for to-go, because I didn’t think certain dishes traveled. And then, during COVID, okay, we give up on some quality. Because we all did. Right? And so, I expanded that menu to include a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have delivered.

A lot of restaurants are getting into this problem of, I’m doing this much to-go, and then now I’ve got indoor dining coming back. Now, outdoor parklets are meant to be staying. And so, where do you put all that stuff?

Your production is crazy. You can’t have boxes stacked up where diners are. I think some of those issues will resolve themselves. We’re working on it every day. We’ll see, but we’re not out of the woods.

Right before COVID hit, you had announced you were expanding to Seattle. I think it was supposed to be this year. Is that still on? Is it happening next year now?

Seattle is going through some of the same. It’s considered a tech center. We were going to go into an Amazon corner, 50 yards from the Spheres and the AWS building. We just had a conversation, you’re the first to know, we’re not going to do Seattle.

I think it’s not the right concept in the right location. I have friends up there, and they said it’s really dead.

It was a mutual decision to end the lease. We had signed the lease a year and a half ago, and if push came to shove, we would have done it. But they felt as well that it was best to just terminate the lease, so we’ve done that. And we appreciate all their support. A lot of people don’t like Amazon. I’m an Amazon fan. I order stuff from them all the time. It’s just convenience. But we’re looking at Chicago and New York right now.

I’m going to head out there on the 23rd, and we have some meetings that week. I can’t tell you what space, but it’s very exciting. I think the location is right, the opportunity is right. There’s a lot of repurposed spaces now, even food halls, that will suit us well.

Because it reduces your capital costs. New York is the Big Apple, and we want to be in the Big Apple, but it’s a big flag to plant.

Have you noticed rents becoming more affordable as you’re looking at spaces fresh now?

I think so. I think commercial real estate is down substantially. A lot of restaurants closed. There were thousands that closed in New York.

I see it coming down. I see people still wanting experiential, which was a big word before COVID. We’re still going to do part of that, but in a more safer, distanced way. Using a lot more technology, and a lot more safety concerns, and things like that to enhance that experience. I think you have to transform your business now in restaurants.

You can’t just have four walls and hope everyone jams your place forever. It’s just not going to happen. You got to reach out to your ghost kitchens or deliveries. But still, rents are coming down. You just have to find the right opportunity. I think there are a lot of opportunities.

If you are a restaurant person and you actually believe that things are going to get back to normal, it’s a great time to get in it, because you’re going to get the best deals. I encourage people to get back into the business, because I hate to see San Francisco particularly lose a lot of good people in this business.

It must be really interesting looking at neighborhoods now, because you don’t have these worker centers. That Amazon campus would have been a home run two years ago, and now it seems like a dud.

In New York, as I’m thinking about the different neighborhoods here, FiDi, there were a lot of office workers there. Will that come back? Midtown, will it come back? And so, I think it changes the calculus when you’re choosing where to set up shop.

We’ve been revising our business model ever since COVID started. I created a commissary where there was corporate offices, so that we can make our in-house sauces. Like our chili bean sauce is a huge seller and people love it. We make everything in-house, but if you’re doing it in a kitchen, it’s just getting in the way.

We did that, and we’re trying to sell our branded products. We have a whole line now. We have snacks, like duck fat popcorn, and broken fortune cookies with chocolate, and Asian granola and things like that. It’s ways to survive and produce and sell outside of your box.

If you don’t have that model, then you’ve got to go small and neighborhood-y, maybe. There are a lot of places that can survive and do good business in your neighborhood. But we’re not really, I hate to say, a neighborhood restaurant. We have to look at different demographics, different economics.

After everything that’s gone on, are you still glad to have these mega-restaurants?Or would it be easier to have smaller operations spread throughout the city?

It’s much easier to manage a large sum of revenues under one roof. We all know what happened to Eataly at the Flatiron, right? They did huge business. I once had five restaurants in the Bay area, and I couldn’t get from one to the next store in the same day without dealing with traffic and loss of time.

My feeling is, I’m still going to look at more of a hub and spoke model when China Live is in New York. But we’ll try and reach out to the different neighborhoods even the suburbs a little bit through geographical distribution. I don’t think I’m ever going to take on a space this size. The one we’re looking at in New York is half the size, the one in Chicago is half to a third of the size.

We’re looking still to do this concept, but get a lot more efficient. Your first restaurant is never your prototype. We made a lot of mistakes in China Live, in San Francisco on multiple floors, which I don’t want to do. Really, at most, maybe one floor and maybe a part of a second or a part of a basement. But it’s not a multi-story concept. It’s just too hard to maneuver.

Will I have another floor just for events? No. The real estate is not going to make sense. You have to be much more flexible in your design.

Well, George, thank you so much for all this time.

All right, guys. Really appreciate it.

Whether it’s Spaghetti-Os pie or table-top nachos, everything can be traced back to (literal) magician Rick Lax

Sometimes a meteorite will reach a velocity fast enough to traverse the vacuum of space, piercing Earth’s atmosphere and giving us a small glimpse of the unfathomably large and chaotic universe just beyond our own world. Similarly but in a virtual world, viral videos of white women making extremely questionable food continue to escape the confines of Facebook and end up on our Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram feeds.

These videos all tend to have a similar aesthetic. A beautiful woman in her 30s stands at a counter or a sink or a stove doing something unholy with eggs or a waffle maker or McDonalds hamburgers or, sometimes, a power drill. The videos typically jump from Facebook to TikTok before appearing without warning on Twitter and instantly becoming trending topics. “I’m proposing a ban on white women making TikTok videos of them cooking until we figure out what the hell is going on,” user @papermarkis wrote recently.

Some of these videos are just bizarre recipes from professional chefs, like Molly Yeh’s recent ”popcorn salad” Food Network clip. They weren’t necessarily designed to go viral, and the intention certainly wasn’t to evoke mockery or disgust. (It’s also worth pointing out that Yeh is biracial.) Other videos that get lumped into this subgenre come from a corner of TikTok where extremely bad home cooks share utterly misguided culinary tips, like the woman who rinsed cooked ground beef under a sink faucet to make it less greasy. But more often than not, these videos are coming from a handful of the same Facebook pages. Also, if you’re getting the sense that more of them are popping up every day, that’s not just in your head. Craziest of all, they’re all basically connected to one magician named Rick Lax.

In January, a photographer from Minnesota named Janelle Flom posted a three-minute video titled “EASIEST DINNER HACK EVER!!” It shows Flom dumping multiple cans of Spaghetti-O’s into a piecrust. “Make sure the chunks are all spread equally,” she says to the camera as she mushes the Spaghetti-O’s around.

She then covers buttered slices of bread in garlic powder and flattens them with her forearms. She dumps skim milk and more garlic powder onto the piecrust with the Spaghetti-O’s. Finally she bakes the pie, removes it from the oven, and tells the camera with a straight face that this is her “best one yet.”

The video went viral, prompting a Vice writer to ask, “Why Is My Feed Full of Gross Cooking ‘Hacks’?” and inspiring The Atlantic to explore “The Absurd Logic of Internet Recipe Hacks.” Both pieces make good points about the commodification of online food content and the viral catnip of process videos: There is something innately compelling about watching someone execute a recipe, no matter how deranged it is. And this absurd “pie” wasn’t a one-off for Flom. Her account is full of pranks and gross food. A few weeks before the Spaghetti-O pie, she posted a video about melting down candy canes and serving Chinese food on top of them.

But what was left out of the Spaghetti-O pie discourse is that Flom is the sister of Justin Flom, a magician who has appeared on TV programs like James Cordon’s Late Late Show. And Justin Flom, Janelle, and dozens more are part of a viral Facebook content network run by another magician named Rick Lax.

Janelle Flom told Eater she met Lax 11 years ago, through her brother Justin. Flom said she also works regularly with a country singer named Adley Stump. “She’s a good friend of ours. We enjoy filming together and creating new fun videos when we connect,” Flom said.

When asked how she comes up with her video content, Flom said that no one in Lax’s group is directly coordinating with one another, beyond featuring one another in their videos and having their content shared through Lax’s pages. According to Flom, the reason her recipe videos keep going viral is because they’re less polished and more relatable than what you see from professional cooking channels.

“Our recipes are definitely a little unconventional,” Flom said. “We love simple recipes that anyone can recreate if they want. [We’re] mostly just having fun with creating new recipes, as well as finding inspiration from other recipes we find. Sometimes TV or gourmet chefs seem out of reach or [their recipes are] hard to recreate for the average person with average cooking skills. We enjoy bringing some comic relief to them as well.”

It is, at this point, statistically impossible to not half-recognize magician Rick Lax. He is essentially the face of Facebook’s Watch program. Launched in the U.S. in 2017, Watch was meant to be Facebook’s Netflix or YouTube competitor. It hired the former news anchor Campbell Brown as head of news partnerships and convinced outlets like Vox, BuzzFeed, and Fox News to create Facebook-exclusive shows. Watch shows still live on a separate tab called Watch, but in the years since, it has sort of blended back in with the rest of the video content on the app. The only Watch show to really break out has been Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk. But Lax has continued to dominate the Newsfeed, even if you didn’t notice.

Lax is a professional magician from Detroit who has worked for David Copperfield, written several books about Las Vegas, and in 2014 spearheaded a reality competition show about magicians for SyFy called Wizard Wars. Justin Flom appeared regularly on the show.

Around 2015, Lax started taking his street magic to Facebook, posting cellphone videos that began going extremely viral. Six years later, it is functionally impossible to get a full sense of the scale of Lax’s media operation on the platform. His verified page has 14 million followers. He also has 1.4 million followers on a page called Rick Lax Has Fun, a half million followers on a Watch page called Rick Lax’s Favorite Videos, and 12,000 followers on a page called Making Magic, which launched in 2019 and featured Justin Flom in its first episode.

Lax told Eater that when the pandemic hit, there was suddenly no way to perform in front of live audiences, so he started bringing his friends into his Facebook network. “I said, ‘Let’s make videos together,’” he said. “It’s both friendship and business.”

The network extends from his friends’ pages to those friends’ friends’ pages. Search the phrase “Rick Lax Productions” and you’ll be greeted with the source code to pure Facebook virality. Lax is so popular on Facebook that a few years ago, Redditors were reporting one of his pages for harassment so it would be suggested less by Facebook’s algorithm.

The other important piece of Lax’s content network is Adley Stump, the country music singer from Oklahoma who competed on season two of The Voice. Stump has a Facebook Watch show called The Adley Show, which has 1.2 million followers. In 2018, Stump told CM Chat Live, a country music news site, that Facebook let Lax pick creators to give Watch shows to and Stump was one of them. Lax said he didn’t remember the specifics of how Stump was brought onto Facebook Watch. Eater has reached out to Facebook for comment.

“I’d been doing vlogging and connecting with influencers much bigger than myself, never asking for much,” she said. “Rick Lax is a big name on Facebook and they have given him the opportunity to pick three original content creators to give shows to. It’s a testament to keeping your head down and focusing on the long game paying off, because I am by far the smallest creator in that group.”

Stump appears in a lot of the videos Lax shares on his page. In fact, she’s the other woman in the melted candy cane and Chinese food video that Janelle Flom, of Spaghetti-O pie fame, shared last year, which was also promoted on Lax’s main Facebook page. Between Lax and Stump’s pages, there is an entire constellation of accounts churning out completely bizarre prank videos, street magic, weird inspirational content, and, of course, videos of beautiful women making awful food.

“I’m not a foodie, I’m not an expert,” Lax told Eater. “Calling [the recipes] ‘gross,’ I would object to that.”

Lax and the women behind the recipe videos aren’t the first to figure out that people on the internet will watch you debase yourself with food. In fact, it was Korean users who first put a name to this kind of thing — mukbang, or “eating show.” Mukbang videos range from harmless and wholesome to intentionally outrageous and grotesque, like the YouTuber who ate a live octopus on camera last year. Mukbang has also long carried with it a connotation of being related to a fetish. Many of the most popular mukbang influencers are all thin, beautiful women who eat large quantities of, oftentimes, very messy food. One could argue that Rick Lax and this endless rabbit hole of gross food women have used Facebook’s algorithms to create a uniquely American mukbang.

In February, shortly after the Spaghetti-O pie video ripped through the internet, a new video surfaced on Twitter, this time shared by a now-suspended user named @PettiBetti. The video, retweeted 30,000 times, features a woman dumping cheese and ground beef and other various types of taco fixings onto a counter. She precedes to mash it all up into a paste with her hands, and then uses an ice cream scoop to put them in a hardened taco shell that’s been bent to look like an ice cream cone.

The woman in the video is a musician named Taylor Watson. She has her own page and also appears in a lot of the videos on Stump’s page, like this one of Watson greasing up a hot dog before using a power drill to jam it inside a pickle.

Asked about the inspiration for the tabletop nachos, Lax said, “The nachos came from the street food videos.”

Though Lax’s network of creators make content on their own, they also brainstorm ideas together. He said he’d noticed that videos of food stalls and street food vendors were doing well on Facebook, and he figured the reason may have been the visual impact of seeing lots of food spread out in front of a camera. He said, “Whenever we see a video trend doing well on Facebook I try and ask, ‘what is our version of this popular trend?’”

A few weeks after the counter nachos, an upload of a TikTok video went viral on Twitter. In the clip, a woman puts raw spaghetti inside clumps of ground beef. Then she covers the clumps of meat and uncooked noodles with Nerds, a pebbly candy, and bakes it. The video was shared on Twitter by a user named @bjbjonez and retweeted thousands of times. But the video originally came from a TikTok account called @gettishow, which is run by a hula hoop instructor named Getti Kehayova, a friend of Lax’s. The Getti Show Facebook page says it’s a “page by Rick Lax,” and he also shared her Nerds spaghetti burger video on his own account.

Kehayova told Eater that her videos are all spur-of-the-moment things meant to be fun and entertaining. She said she used Nerds in her spaghetti burger video because she didn’t have any sugar. The entire gag was based on a dinner she had with some friends years ago. “It’s nothing that people should do,” she said. “We’re entertainers. We’re just trying to put smiles on your faces.”

She said she’s affiliated with Lax and he helps share her videos, but there’s no formal coordination. She makes videos, and if he likes them he shares them. Not everyone Lax promotes knows one another, she said, stressing the informal nature of the whole thing. Most of them, like her, are entertainers who had a ton of downtime during the pandemic.

“I grew up in the circus and I traveled the world with my family of acrobats,” Kehayova said. “So this is like the next best thing.”

Kehayova said she knows that some people get angry about her videos — Italian users were pretty mad about the spaghetti burger — but for her it’s about making her viewers happy. “It’s all positive,” she said. “It’s about making people go ‘what the eff?’”

And finally, most recently, there was the toilet ice cream punch. The video was shared by a user named @curlyixing and has been retweeted more than 30,000 times since it was first shared on Thursday. The video features a woman filling up a toilet with ice, ice cream, and gummy worms. Then she dumps more candies, juice, and soda in the toilet tank and attempts to flush it all. The toilet backs up and then the clip ends with her ladling the concoction out into plastic cups. The original video was posted to a page called the Anna Show. The punchline at the end of the video is that the toilet ice cream soda slurry is then served to unsuspecting guests as a prank.

Many users on Twitter incorrectly assumed that the counter nachos woman and the toilet punch woman were one in the same. However, the woman who posted the toilet slurry is named Anna Rothfuss. According to the About section, her Facebook page is run by “Rick Lax Productions.” Rothfuss, who occasionally wears wigs in her videos, is the same woman who went viral for cooking a vertical rigatoni, blending and then freezing a Big Mac into a kind of pate, and making bacon and eggs in a waffle maker. Rothfuss’s page has a test video that Lax posted when it was first set up.

Lax is extremely adamant that the videos going viral outside Facebook aren’t his videos — they’re stolen. He’s especially angry at Ellen DeGeneres for posting other creators’ reaction videos to his own videos without linking back to his page.

“On the one hand it’s flattering, I guess, or it’s nice to know that no matter what the social media platform it goes on, it gets seen,” he said. “But also that’s really frustrating.”

He said he suspects his videos are downloaded and reuploaded to platforms like Twitter so often because they don’t look like produced, scripted content. (Which is also probably part of their initial appeal on Facebook.) “I think this happens to us more than other chefs, let’s say, because our content feels home produced,” he said. “I think people are comfortable stealing.”

These pages are not only going more viral outside Facebook but also multiplying at rapid speeds inside Facebook. Janelle Flom’s page was created in 2019, as was the Anna Show, while Taylor Watson’s was set up in October 2020. Many of these pages link to and share content from and interact with other similar pages, like the Alli and Viv page, which was also created last year and recently posted a truly horrifying video of a woman covering a chicken in hand soap, cooking it in butter, and then basting it with root beer. There are so many of these pages and they’re all sharing one another’s content.

Viewed within the context of Lax’s main Facebook page, these videos sort of make sense. Videos that do well on Facebook tend to have some kind of payoff. Which plays off why we watch cooking videos to begin with. There’s a recipe that’s easy to follow, and you know that at the end you’ll see whatever’s been cooked. Prank videos work the same way. The prank is established, and then you wait to see what happens when it’s finally triggered. Lax and his collaborators have combined a prank video and a cooking video into something that people really can’t look away from, the culinary equivalent of a zit extraction.

Lax said that this is really the key to his network’s success. It’s not the fact that he has a huge network that can share the videos between pages, but it’s actually just because they’re making content that specifically optimizes for watch time, both on Facebook and off. “We’re working so hard to design content that has a long watch time and what I’ve found is that when you do that, the content tends to perform well across different platforms which is something we’re after,” he said. “Our speciality is creating videos that people engage with and right now the thing that people engage with is a high watch time.”

Even with the most outrageously unhinged food video — like this one, titled NEW WAY TO MAKE CORN DOGS! — you’re going to stick around to see what the ultimate result is. The corn dog creation, which came from a woman named Penny Wiggins (the Penny Show), was shared to the Anna Show page. It involves dumping a can of corn into a piecrust, covering it in cheese and taco seasoning, wrapping that around a hot dog, and then sticking the whole thing in a waffle maker.

As you scroll through Lax’s pages, though, common formats or tropes begin to appear: Women, almost always white, almost all of them identifying as young mothers, typically wearing expensive athleisure, cooking weirdly sexualized recipes in huge suburban homes or doing silly pranks in Targets or department stores.

On Sunday, Lax shared two different videos about cooking something in a waffle maker, one from Watson and one from Janelle Flom. Lax’s collaborators are also huge fans of the dramatic sign reveal video. And there is an endless amount of household prank content. Most importantly, almost all of the videos produced by Lax or the influencers working with him come with some variation of the same disclaimer: “Thanks so much for watching this video! I do hope you enjoy it. Please note that this page features scripted dramas, PARODY HACKS, parody and satire. The events that take place in this particular short-film video are for entertainment purposes only. Thanks,”

For instance, the original toilet ice cream soda video had this written in its caption: “Please note that this page features scripted dramas, parody and satire. The events that take place in this particular short-film video are for entertainment purposes only. Similarities to actual people or actual events are coincidences. Thanks!” These disclaimers are conveniently left out by the TikTok users and Twitter accounts that go viral sharing them.

Satire or not, the main refrain when content from Lax’s collaborators goes viral is based on some joke about how white women don’t know how to cook. It’s an undeniable part of the appeal of hate-sharing these videos. And it’s something Lax said he’s aware of.

“We’ve worked with a lot of diverse creators,” he said. He said that if people were actually viewing his content on Facebook, they wouldn’t just be seeing white women cooking outrageous things. “Unfortunately, people can’t see the diversity if they’re not engaging in all the diverse content we’re putting out.”

But whether he and his creators are doing it on purpose or not, the videos Lax is sharing across his absolutely massive pages all present a very specific middle-class, suburban portrait of the world, where beautiful, young newlyweds play sexy pranks and do nice things for older people. Where construction workers, who are played by people of color, defend white women from street harassment. They’re the kind of videos that do well with Facebook’s overwhelmingly conservative user base.

Throughout his interview with Eater, Lax maintained that most of the recipes being created within his network are legitimately meant to be practical. He repeatedly objected to descriptors like “gross” or “awful.” “We are creating good videos,” he said, before clarifying, “When I say ‘good videos,’ I mean videos that perform well on social media.”

When pressed and asked directly if he would eat, say, the counter nachos, he said it might be fun for a big party. When asked in a follow-up if he would eat the Nerds hamburger spaghetti, he conceded that he and his team do occasionally publish some outrageous stuff: “I’ll say, sometimes, we do things for fun.”

Lax and his team aren’t done “having fun” yet, either. Last week, he posted a new video of a woman making food directly onto a countertop. This time it was spaghetti instead of nachos. Not interested in spaghetti? You’re in luck: On Sunday he shared a video in which a woman makes mac ’n’ cheese with her bare hands on the same countertop, and it’s, despite Lax’s objection to the word, just as gross.

Pollo a la brasa eases me back into my routine

This post originally appeared in the May 10, 2021 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.

For some reason, figuring out what my first dinner should be after arriving home from out of town has always been a fraught internal debate for me. We could try to hit a restaurant on the drive back from our trip or from the airport, but I’m usually a little worn out and just want to get home. Ordering delivery, like pizza or Chinese, feels like a good lazy option, but also indulgent after I’ve spent a lot of time eating out over several days. I could cook something pseudo-healthy, but odds are there aren’t a lot of groceries in the fridge. I could pull a meal out of the freezer, but that would be just a little anticlimactic for Last Day of Vacation eating.

Enter Peruvian chicken.

Pollo a la brasa places are a dime a dozen in the area of Northern Virginia where I live. It’s definitely possible to put together a takeout order loaded with fries and yucca, but I tend to go the route of mostly focusing on the chicken and its fabulous accompanying green sauce, and then augmenting with sides like salad or beans if I’m feeling a little gross after travel. (My husband tends to have no such qualms, so we typically end up with some fries in our order, or chaufa, which is the Peruvian take on fried rice.) Peruvian chicken joints here have always had quick service — even in pre-pandemic times — so there’s no real need to call ahead. You can stop by for takeout on your way home if you know you’ll be starving by the time you pull into your driveway. It’s also pretty affordable, so justifying the expense is easy even if you stretched your restaurant budget while you were out of town. But it still feels festive, and it means I can put off cooking for at least one more night.

An order of Peruvian chicken also sets me up for success for the rest of my week. I’ve never ordered less than a full chicken for the two of us, so that means leftover meat can be eaten for lunch, folded into chicken salad, or repurposed in any number of ways, even before I have time to restock my fridge. Sides can play a similar role: Frequently, my breakfast the next day will either be an omelet made from chaufa or some stewed beans with a fried egg on top.

But Peruvian chicken is more than just our no-brainer post-travel meal (which is a good thing, since travel isn’t exactly a frequent thing these days). We pick it up whenever the world seems to get the better of us and cooking just feels like too much effort. Massive fail in the kitchen? Work went until 8 p.m.? The pork roast I ambitiously defrosted now just looks unappealing? Peruvian chicken is the answer.

If you aren’t lucky enough to have access to Peruvian chicken close to where you live, I’m sorry for your loss. A store-bought rotisserie chicken might accomplish a lot of the same goals as you prepare for that dreaded first week back from being out of town, but I can’t promise that it will be quite as satisfying. Maybe if you make your own green sauce? Though that sounds like an awful lot of work after just getting back home.

From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week

This post originally appeared on May 8, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

This week, we announced the 2021 class of the Eater New Guard, a group of future leaders that are making a positive change in the world of food. The people on the list — chefs, restaurateurs, activists, and farmers — are working towards building a better future, centered on serving their communities and supporting others.

Last spring when the pandemic hit and we paused our decade-long Young Guns program, it gave us a chance to think about how we would refresh the series in 2021 and what kind of leaders we want to highlight in a post-pandemic world. We decided to expand the mission to include up-and-comers who don’t necessarily work in restaurants but care deeply about food and their communities.

The resulting list is full of individuals as interesting as they are inspiring. I highly recommend you check out editor Hillary Dixler Canavan’s intro to the crew and dive into the full list.

On Eater

— New York City will open at 100 percent capacity (with social distancing or partitions in place) on May 19, while Chicago eyes July. Meanwhile bars were just allowed to reopen in San Francisco.

— Eleven Madison Park will be mostly vegan when it reopens next month, joining a new wave of vegan restaurants in New York, including the pandemic openings of Guevara’s, Aunts et Uncles, Fat Choy, and Xilonen and the reopening of newly-vegan wine bar Ruffian.

— High-end Seattle restaurant Canlis announced its first female head chef in 70 years.

— The first big food festival is back in (where else?) Miami. How the SOBE Wine and Food Fest will change for this pandemic era.

— Michelin announced its stars for New York.

— Restaurateurs Greg and Subrina Collier of modern juke joint Leah & Louise have organized a Black Food & Wine Festival for October 22 through October 24 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

— Illinois joins New York and California in considering banning third-party apps from partnering with restaurants without their consent.

— One of Las Vegas’ most famous buffets will reopen on May 20 after a multi-million dollar overhaul.

— Miami’s Casa Tua will replace Daniel Boulud’s recently closed 20 year-old restaurant Cafe Boulud on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Rey Lopez/Eater D.C.

Openings: Dauphine’s, a highly anticipated New Orleans-inspired restaurant, and Little Food Studio, a bakery and takeout spot with some standout sausage rolls, in D.C.; Flatiron, a much-delayed new restaurant in Nashville; The Oasis, a 35,000-square-foot food hall with an indoor/outdoor cocktail lounge and stage for live performances, in Miami; Brasserie, a French, er, brasserie (that imo owes a lot to Keith McNally), in Boston; and Saint Bread, an exciting new bakery in Seattle.

— Looking back on ten years at n/naka and its influence on the Los Angeles dining scene.

— Pasadena’s dining scene is maybe the most exciting thing happening in LA-area food right now.

— How to navigate a pandemic-era Disney World right now.

— To bake: This delicious-looking PB&J-inspired crumb cake.

Off Eater

• Get ready for more influencer-driven pop-up virtual kitchens and “meme-able ghost kitchen brands” (a cursed combo of words to be sure). [Modern Retail]
• The new designs for Penn Station, aka “that long-festering sinkhole at the center of the city,” are surprisingly elegant. [Curbed]
• The pandemic has led to some legitimately bizarre junk food flavors and mashups that are banking on “the new nostalgia.” [FastCo]
• Loving this list of bonkers responsibilities a Scientologist family expected of their new nanny. [@hollis_jane]

Why chefs are turning takeout meals into delightfully old-school TV dinners

The panko-breaded pork cutlet, served old-school-style with a mushroom and onion gravy, corn, and mashed potatoes, is “one of our favorite things,” says chef Kate Williams, owner of Karl’s in Detroit’s Siren Hotel. “Maybe it was one of our family meal meals or something once.” Williams now serves the dish on the Karl’s menu — but unlike the usual plates of diner classics, this one comes in a four-compartment aluminum tin, looking like another familiar meal: the TV dinner.

Over the past year, the pandemic has forced us to rethink how we get meals on the table. When case numbers were high and restaurants had to halt indoor dining, many people who were accustomed to eating out several nights a week had to scramble to figure out what to do for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Meanwhile, restaurants have had to jump through hoops in order to adjust to months of ups and downs, constantly pivoting and finding creative ways to bring in enough cash to stay afloat. For most business owners, this meant embracing boxes and bags like never before. For some, it meant reimagining the old-school TV dinner. Williams wanted to pay homage to the original dinners in some way, “but it also fit perfectly with our style of food at Karl’s, so it was kind of a no-brainer.”

Like many innovations, the story of the development of the TV dinner — a usually frozen complete meal that needed only to be reheated in the oven before eating — is not straightforward. Gerry Thomas, a Swanson employee, is often credited as the inventor of the meals that debuted in 1953, but the first frozen dinner, created for the airline industry, actually dates to 1944, and other brands claim versions that launched in 1952. Still, it wasn’t until 1954, when the Swanson TV dinner was first sold in retail outlets, that it took off in the United States. Traditionalists viewed the TV dinner as an “abomination,” but it turned out to be incredibly lucrative: As millions of American women entered the workforce, wives and mothers who were no longer at home to cook elaborate meals had a prepared answer to the question “What’s for dinner?” By 1955, 64 percent of U.S. households had a television set; the frozen meal was essentially catering to the changing times.

These days, for many people, the TV dinner is more of a novelty, nostalgic down to the TV tray. But while there are remnants of it in the frozen foods aisle, from Amy’s to Stouffer’s, the iconic portioned aluminum trays were somewhat of a rarity in restaurants — until COVID-19 led some chefs to revisit the container. “There’s so much space for opportunity and creativity in TV dinners,” says Los Angeles chef Nyesha Arrington, who recently reimagined a Stouffer’s TV dinner in a video for Eater. “They don’t have to be meatloaf and mashed potatoes. They can be very fun and interesting.” For her, that means a play on Salisbury steak with a wild mushroom sauce and nacho cheese-inspired mac and cheese. “It’s a really creative way to [enjoy a meal], especially if you’re not a chef.”

Before Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office announced the suspension of indoor dining in Chicago for a second time, Marvin’s Food & Fuel owner James Geier had established enough awareness to keep going the takeout route. Bbut his decision to introduce TV dinners — featuring dishes like lasagna, meatloaf, and enchiladas with roasted veggie sides and chocolate cake — was a way to bring the restaurant experience to customers’ homes. “People started dining at home more,” he says, “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we try to truly deliver full, properly plated meals to their homes while they’re watching TV?’”

In New York City, Hearth chef/owner Marco Canora’s “laptop dinners,” which are sold frozen, serve the same purpose. “Sometimes takeout doesn’t feel like you’re eating nutrient-dense goodness,” Canora says. “It’s an indulgence that comforts you, but it’s not exactly something that fills you with energy.” With meals like roasted salmon with salsa verde (portioned with risotto and roasted cauliflower and broccoli), chicken Parmesan (with compartments for baked ziti and broccoli rabe), and beef stew (with sides of polenta and root veggies), Canora hoped to create a solution. “I want an actual dinner… but I don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes in the kitchen.”

For Williams, the choice to tap into something fun and nostalgic seemed obvious. “The world was on fire, and people were craving stuff from their childhood and comfort food,” she says. When her stylish luncheonette reopened briefly in the fall for indoor dining, she added to-go TV dinners (and breakfasts) for folks who weren’t comfortable with eating in person during the pandemic.

One look at Karl’s online menu — the separate compartments of the aluminum trays, each tray containing a full meal (think: warm chicken tenders with coleslaw and potatoes with garlic butter) — and you’re immediately transported back. “We just had a lot of fun with the branding of it,” Williams says. “We did movie recommendations with the meals, too.” Reheating instructions came along with suggestions to pair spaghetti and meatballs with Goodfellas and the kids’ mac and cheese with Troop Beverly Hills.

Eric Kleinberg/courtesy Marvin’s Food & Fuel

Geier says there has only been one negative: For many diners, there isn’t enough dessert. And there are some challenges to creating dinners where all the components are reheated simultaneously. Karl’s is well known for its patty melt, but Williams decided to forgo that particular TV dinner because she knew the bread would absorb steam and turn to mush. “Sandwiches are pretty hard to do,” she says. “And anything that’s breaded and fried. Fried foods don’t travel well.”

Chefs making their own TV dinners have to know how long to cook certain components of a given meal so that when people reheat them all at once, nothing is undercooked or overdone. “It’s a whole art and science and delicate ballet of balance to bring a meal together,” says Arrington. “There are so many moving pieces, from boiling water for the pasta to grilling the Salisbury steak.” For pasta, Arrington recommends an al dente texture: “I might cook it 60 percent and I might add more sauce that looks uncomfortably [like too much]. It might look like a macaroni soup in the container, but the reality is when we hit zap on the microwave the pasta’s going to cook, the starch is going to come out, and thicken that sauce. By the time you enjoy it, it will be creamy.” And while some chefs opt to use a fish-based protein in their TV dinners, specifically as fillets in fish sticks, Arrington recommends grinding it or serving it as a stew, like a chowder. “The type of protein you use is extremely important. Fish would not lend itself well because it can rubber-y after you freeze it. The water retention completely changes the protein structure.”

As vaccines continue to roll out across the country, experts predict a return to some kind of normal by the summer. While the pandemic has decimated countless businesses and livelihoods, the industry is rebuilding. Restaurant owners have learned new lessons over the last 12 months and are applying them to new practices. For these three restaurants, TV and laptop dinners are here to stay. Williams says she’s looking forward to the day when people return to the Siren Hotel because she believes her TV dinners will be a room service hit; Geier hopes to sell his dinners to office workers on the way home who need a quick meal for the night, or, when the weather is nice, to folks on their way to the park or a drive-in movie.

Canora is installing glass-door freezers in his side dining room, which he hopes will act as a small supermarket for customers who want to take the laptop dinners home along with other items from his frozen food line. “I think there’s a real future in it,” he says.

More cities nationwide are considering guaranteed income for low-wage earners, which could empower food and farm industry employees

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Sukhi Samra grew up with a mother who worked up to 80 hours per week to support three children and a husband with a disability. None of her three jobs paid her well enough to make ends meet in Fresno, California, in the late 2000s. So she juggled work as a housecleaner with shifts at a Subway restaurant and a gas station convenience store, and still struggled financially.

Samra said receiving just $500 in additional income a month would have reduced her mother’s workload and stress load, she said. Instead, the food worker developed hypertension, arthritis, depression, and anxiety before dying suddenly in June after 25 years of low-wage labor.

“In the richest country in the world, one job should be more than enough to make sure that you’re able to keep the lights on and feed your children, but that wasn’t the case for her,” said Samra, director of the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) project and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Both programs were founded in 2020 by former Stockton, California Mayor, Michael Tubbs, and they’re both on a mission to provide low-wage earners, a category that disproportionately includes food workers, with a guaranteed income.

The idea is rapidly gaining traction nationwide. While universal basic income (UBI) initiatives provide no-strings-attached cash payments to all community members whether or not they are economically disadvantaged, guaranteed income projects like SEED aim to reduce income inequality by specifically giving “free money” to financially fragile constituents.

“Guaranteed income is a targeted policy solution to address racial and gender disparities in income insecurity,” Samra said. “Also, guaranteed income comes in a little bit cheaper than universal basic income just by virtue of the fact that you’re not serving the same number of people.”

In recent years, several cities have begun offering a guaranteed income to small groups of economically disadvantaged residents, and a number of others — including Los Angeles — are considering doing so. In February 2019, the SEED project launched a two-year guaranteed income program in Stockton, a racially diverse city of 300,000 on the eastern edge of the Bay Area that has been working to rebound from bankruptcy since 2008. The program provided a $500 monthly allotment to 125 randomly chosen residents in neighborhoods where earnings fall at or below the city’s median household income.

Recently released data from the program’s first year indicates that receiving a guaranteed income allowed participants to pay down their debts, cover unexpected expenses, and improve their mental health. In addition, full-time employment among these residents rose by 12 percent, a finding that flies in the face of the notion that free money disincentivizes low-income people from working. The success of Stockton’s program inspired other California cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Compton, to follow suit. Nationwide, Richmond, Virginia; Saint Paul, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and the Massachusetts cities of Chelsea and Cambridge have all adopted guaranteed income programs.

While most of these initiatives focus on low-income families, San Francisco’s program stands out in that it will funnel $1,000 to 130 struggling artists for six months starting in May. This could pave the way for other municipalities to target economically specific groups of disadvantaged workers. The effort is being watched closely by food workers’ advocates, who say that monthly cash payments could offer those workers the financial stability to live in dignity.

Madeline Neighly, director of guaranteed income at the Economic Security Project, a funder and partner of SEED, pointed out that many foodservice workers don’t earn a living wage. The Raise the Wage Act of 2021, introduced to the U.S. Senate in January, would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by June 2025, but has faced pushback from industry groups such as the National Restaurant Association. The proposal also suffered a blow when the Senate opted against including minimum wage legislation in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus plan.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past year about the ways we rely so heavily on foodservice workers — from the people who pick our food to the people who deliver it and prepare it to everybody in between,” Neighly said. “So, a demonstration that shows how guaranteed income can level some of the economic shocks for those individuals seems like a great idea.”

Fighting to earn a living wage, relying on tips to survive, facing sexual harassment, and often getting paid under the table because of their immigration status, food workers are among the nation’s most exploited group of workers, advocates say. A guaranteed income could be just what many need to transition out of poverty and work in settings where they’re treated with respect.

Bloomberg/Contributor via GettyImages

The Case for a Guaranteed Food Worker Income

Food workers are significantly more likely to live below the poverty line than other workers. Roughly 30 percent of farmworker families live in poverty, as do 16.7 percent of restaurant workers. About 43 percent of restaurant workers earn twice the official poverty level, which suggests that they are barely making ends meet. Overrepresented in low-paying restaurant jobs — cashiers, counter attendants, dishwashers, or cooks — food workers of color, especially women, are among those most prone to poverty. In addition, more than half of the people working for supermarkets and big box stores earn poverty-level wages.

The COVID-19 pandemic only worsened economic conditions for restaurant workers, with nearly 400,000 restaurant jobs lost in December alone. Overall, the coronavirus resulted in the restaurant industry losing almost 2.5 million jobs. Tipped workers were acutely impacted, according to Sekou Siby, president and CEO of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. “It is not a wage,” he said of tips. “It’s a gratuity.”

Because restaurant staff typically worked fewer hours last year, their tips went down proportionally. That is one reason why ROC has been advocating for restaurant workers to earn a federal living wage of at least $15, but Siby said that a guaranteed income could also help. “We should provide targeted outreach toward families still working full-time but not making enough to [get by].”

A guaranteed income could provide some much-needed economic stability to restaurant workers whose wages have fluctuated or stopped entirely over the past year, Neighly said. As restaurants open up to full capacity, she added, it will take time for workers to resume earning their pre-pandemic wages, even if those wages were meager. A guaranteed income could also empower workers in other ways.

According to a recent study from the living-wage advocacy nonprofit One Fair Wage, more than 40 percent of restaurant workers reported “a noticeable change in the frequency of unwanted sexualized comments from customers” during the pandemic. Because they rely on tips, many of these workers feel they have no choice but to endure sexual harassment in the workplace.

Similarly, 58 percent workers said they hesitated to enforce COVID-19 protocols for fear that they would receive smaller tips. In fact, 67 percent of workers said they got unusually small tips after enforcing these protocols.

A guaranteed income would make restaurant workers less dependent on tips. “Cash is freedom, and it’s the freedom to walk away from a situation that’s unsafe,” Neighly said. “It’s the freedom to make decisions about your career that are best for you and your family.” A demonstration focused on food workers would allow researchers and advocates, “to show the power that workers have when they have economic stability to call for better working conditions,” she added.

In addition to leaving unsafe work environments, participants in the Stockton program reported that they left abusive partners and did not have to rely on financial help from family members with whom they had strained relationships, Samra noted. So, a guaranteed income, “really allows you to shift to situations that you choose to be in,” she said. “It’s giving people their agency back.”

Jose Oliva, campaigns director for HEAL Food Alliance, said a basic income would be “hugely beneficial” to farmworkers. He argues that they are among the most vulnerable, particularly because they work seasonally and perform grueling labor. But he also said such an income would help food workers employed in transportation, logistics, and warehousing roles, since automation and mechanization are increasingly threatening their job security. Their job protections also depend on whether or not they belong to a union. He suspects that a basic income could lead employers to improve the wages and conditions they offer to workers, who would have more leverage.

For this shift to occur, Oliva said, immigration reform is a must. Without it, employers can pay undocumented workers low wages and avoid making substantive changes. But at present, restaurants are struggling to find enough workers as business picks up and more than half of U.S. adults have received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Some experts blame this problem on food workers leaving the industry when restaurants limited their hours of operation during the pandemic. And, in many cases, the alternative work they landed provided higher pay and more job security than their food industry positions did. Others attribute the trend to these workers collecting unemployment benefits and stimulus payments that collectively amount to a higher sum than their restaurant wages did. In any case, the food industry might have to do more to cater to workers to lure them back.

The inaugural SEED study found that a guaranteed income isn’t likely to stop the public from working — but it did give them the resources to explore their options. “People had a lot more brain space and mental capacity to set goals for themselves and envision a different future,” Samra said. “So, you combine the mental capacity with the tangible ability to take the day off from work — as we know a lot of [low-wage] jobs don’t come with paid time off — and people were taking days off to go to interviews, whereas that just wasn’t possible before.”

Addressing the Critics

Although Stockton’s project saw positive results, guaranteed and basic income programs still face opposition. Critics argue that they would do very little to decrease income inequality. Rather, they say the programs could cause inflation and taxes to increase, landlords to raise rent, and people to lose the will to work. In response to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s recent proposal of a $24 million “basic income guaranteed” pilot program, Jon Coupal, the president of the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told the Los Angeles Times that government initiatives that “give away free money” minimize the importance of hard work and being “a productive member of society.”

Samra said these messages are rooted in damaging stereotypes related to race, gender, and class. They play on stereotypes that suggest “poor people are poor because of their own choices, and that if you give people money, they will spend it on drugs and alcohol or they will stop working,” she said. “None of the data bears out in that way. For us, it was really important to reverse the pattern of not trusting families who are experiencing economic insecurity and show that they’re just like the rest of us. When they’re given $500 a month, they spend it to better take care of themselves and their families.”

Samra also disputed the idea that “free money” would stop people from working, since $500 or $1,000 is not a large enough monthly sum to meet cost-of-living needs. As for the idea that a guaranteed or basic income might depress wages, rather than raise them, Samra said that such initiatives should not exist in a vacuum. A number of policies should be put in place to reduce income inequality and improve living standards — from tenant protections to a living wage.

“These policies are not in competition, and, in fact, they work best in tandem: [workers need] a living wage and guaranteed income,” Neighly said.

The Stockton program not only garnered attention for distributing “free money” but also because it didn’t require participants to take drug tests or spend their cash in a certain way. Compare this to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which restricts what recipients’ purchases, most notably prohibiting hot foods. Moreover, some states have tried to bar recipients from purchasing unhealthy foods, such as candy or sweetened beverages, with SNAP benefits.

Samra said it was important to give Stockton’s guaranteed income recipients autonomy because no government program or policymaker can predict families’ individual needs on a month-to-month basis. In May, they might use the money to pay for a car repair, and in June, they might spend the money entirely on food.

“Cash is something that allows freedom and choice,” Neighly said. “By showing how [guaranteed income programs] work in different communities, we’re seeing how something can be universal in its solution, even though each family, each community, each individual, interacts with it differently.”

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Give a man a fish...and he and his family might get to eat a nutritious meal finally

We are here to report some breaking news that may come as a shock: Giving people money for food means they can buy food and thus not go hungry. Please take all the time you need to process this revelation.

According to Census data, initiatives to increase access to SNAP benefits and the stimulus payments have shrunk adult hunger rates from 11 percent in March to around eight percent now, the lowest level since the pandemic began. “Money helps,” Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist and director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, told Politico. I’m no economist, but I will also give my two cents: No shit!

The pandemic has spurred unprecedented levels of food insecurity, as people lost jobs or fell ill. Food banks, community fridges, and other mutual aid efforts helped but quickly became overwhelmed. In December, an estimated 12 percent of Americans said they hadn’t had enough to eat that past week. And according to a recent report from Feeding America, “significant racial disparities in food insecurity which existed before COVID-19 remain in the wake of the pandemic. Feeding America projects that 21% of Black individuals (1 in 5) may experience food insecurity in 2021, compared to 11% of white individuals (1 in 9).”

But yes, money helps. Last summer, Census data showed 80 percent of households surveyed spent their first stimulus checks on food. And recent numbers show an 18 percent drop of adults living in households that either sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the two weeks after the mid-March stimulus checks went out. Those were part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which also expanded SNAP benefits and extended unemployment benefits. Taken with December’s $900 billion relief package, it’s an unprecedented (if still not enough) amount of money given directly to people.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently praised the dramatic decrease in hunger rates, and said the government should “take the lessons from this horrible crisis and let’s figure out how to turn it into something more permanent.” For instance, some advocates are fighting for free school lunches, which have been made widely available by federal waivers, to become permanent.

Making sure everyone has access to the most basic necessity required to live, on a planet where there is enough food for everyone, seems pretty obvious. But of course, the opposition insists that feeding oneself and one’s family must be a matter of “earning,” and that some people just don’t deserve food. It’s remarkably cruel, and as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic and beyond, poverty and hunger have little to do with how hard someone works.

Peanut butter and peanut butter powder help transform a lunchtime classic into a homey but indulgent cake

This is the first official installment of For Goodness Cake, a monthly cake column from pastry chef Joy Cho. Each month we’ll give you a recipe for cake that is not only relatively easy to make but also rewarding and comforting. Because cake, we firmly believe, isn’t just for special occasions — it’s for celebrating the sweetness that can be found in every day life.

Peanut butter and jelly doesn’t take me back to third-grade bagged lunches or after-school snacks. It actually evokes close to zero childhood memories for me. I preferred other kid-friendly foods, like turkey sandwiches or Velveeta mac ’n’ cheese, when I wasn’t eating the Korean meals my mom or grandma prepared. Lunchables and Gushers were up my alley, but Uncrustables? Not so much.

Given this history (or lack thereof), I find it both hilarious and fascinating that PB&J is one of the foods I now eat most frequently as a 20-something adult. My road to enthusiastic PB&J consumption began when I was a very lazy college intern in search of a regular meal option that was cheap, transportable in the summer heat, moderately filling, and borderline nutritious. The humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich seemed to fit the bill perfectly. (Mom, if you’re reading this: I promise I ate vegetables too!) What started as a matter of practicality became a ritualistic and even enjoyable part of my life — at the end of almost every workday, I would eat one while walking home across the Brooklyn Bridge. At a time when I was feeling aimless and lonely (even a few weeks in New York can do that to you), a PB&J provided dependable, cheap comfort, if only for a few minutes a day.

My habit stuck even after I shed the college-age angst: I now eat a PB&J a whopping five to six times a week, in either sandwich or toast form. The simple yet profoundly satisfying combination of salty, sweet, creamy, and jammy on sliced bread delivers every time — and it’s as low-effort and low-cost as a sandwich gets. Even though (or perhaps because) I discovered PB&J relatively late in life, I’m weirdly, thoroughly obsessed.

Creating a PB&J cake, then, was among the most on-brand projects I could take on. But where to start? Despite how ubiquitous the sandwich is in American culture, PB&J-flavored cake doesn’t really seem to be a thing. I discovered during my research that peanut butter, when it appears in a cake at all, usually shows up as a sidekick to chocolate. As I started tinkering in the kitchen, my recipe went through several iterations: I tested a peanut butter loaf cake with a jam glaze, and then a square snack cake with the jam glaze swirled into the top of the batter before baking. They weren’t quite right, and neither was my first attempt at a streusel topping, which did not resemble streusel, to put it mildly. But hey, it’s called recipe development for a reason. So I marched on through test cake leftovers, believing that the PB&J cake I was pining for was out there, somewhere.

And then I found it. Just as everyone has their unique sandwich preferences (creamy or crunchy nut butter; jelly, preserves, or marmalade; white or wheat bread, etc.), this homey but indulgent cake is my very personal ode to PB&J: tall, distinctly peanut-buttery squares of crumb cake with a sweet-tart jam layer and an even thicker layer of nutty streusel on top. To really tease out the peanut butter flavor, I use both jarred and powdered peanut butter. And because I’m a fan of using one ingredient in more than one way, the peanut powder shows up again in the streusel, taking the place of the more typical cinnamon or spices. The resulting sweet, salty, peanutty (and slightly addictive) crumb topping is my favorite part of the cake, in large part because it reminds me of a similar streusel topping on soboro-ppang, the first item I reach for at any Korean bakery.

I’m under no illusions that a PB&J cake can ever wholly replicate a good old-fashioned PB&J sandwich, but if it tastes just as good, who cares? So cut yourself a thick slice of cake, pour a second cup of coffee, and contemplate the perfect pairing that is peanut butter and jelly (and perhaps a childhood memory or two). While I’m late to the PB&J game, I think this familiar-but-upgraded cake can make up for lost time — that and eating PB&J on the daily, a habit I won’t be breaking anytime soon.

PB&J Crumb Cake with Peanutty Streusel

Makes one 8-by-8-inch square cake

Ingredients:

For the peanut streusel:

¼ cup (50 grams) granulated sugar
¼ cup (50 grams) light brown sugar
¼ cup (35 grams) all-purpose flour
2 level tablespoons (12 grams) powdered peanut butter (such as PB2 or Crazy Richard’s)
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, cold and cubed
Flaky salt, such as Maldon, for topping (optional, for those who really like sweet-salty desserts)

For the cake:

½ cup (70 grams) all-purpose flour
½ cup (70 grams) whole wheat flour
3 level tablespoons (18 grams) powdered peanut butter
¾ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup (150 grams) granulated sugar
¼ cup (50 grams) light brown sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup (150 grams) smooth peanut butter (use a commercial brand like Jif or Skippy for best results)
½ cup buttermilk, at room temperature

For the filling:

½ cup jam or preserves of your choice (Tip: Go with a seedless variety if you don’t want the slight bites from the seeds.)

Instructions:

Step 1: Make the peanut streusel: In a medium bowl, combine the sugars, flour, powdered peanut butter, and kosher salt, mixing them thoroughly with your hands. Work the butter into the dry ingredients with your fingers until the streusel resembles wet sand and clumps together when you squeeze it. (Some small bits of butter are okay, but for the most part the butter should be worked into the streusel). Refrigerate until ready to use..

Step 2: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease an 8-by-8-inch square cake pan with nonstick cooking spray. Line the bottom with parchment paper, leaving a 2-inch overhang on the sides (to make it easier to remove the cake after baking), and grease the parchment.

Step 3: In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, powdered peanut butter, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Step 4: In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or a large bowl with an electric hand mixer, beat the butter until smooth. Add both sugars and cream the mixture until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Scrape down the bowl with a rubber spatula.

Step 5: Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition until well combined. Scrape the bowl once more, then beat in the vanilla and peanut butter until the mixture is smooth.

Step 6: Sift half of the dry ingredients over the peanut butter mixture and beat until just combined. Carefully beat in the buttermilk, and then sift in the rest of the dry ingredients; beat just until the batter is smooth. (Don’t overmix.)

Step 7: Transfer half of the cake batter into the prepared pan and smooth the surface with a small offset spatula. Dollop the jam on top and spread gently, doing your best to leave a half-inch border around the edges. (The border prevents jam from sticking to the sides of the pan during baking.) Dollop the rest of the cake batter on top of the jam layer, carefully smooth the surface, and sprinkle the streusel evenly on top. Sprinkle the cake with flaky salt, if desired.

Step 8: Bake the cake for 45 to 55 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through, until the streusel is browned and a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.

Step 9: Let the cake cool in the pan for 30 minutes, then gently loosen the edges with a small offset spatula and carefully transfer the cake (using the parchment paper sling to assist) onto a rack to cool completely. If you find it difficult to remove and transfer the tall and hefty cake, you can also let it cool completely as is and serve slices right out of the pan.

Joy Cho is a pastry chef and freelance writer based in Brooklyn. After losing her pastry cook job at the start of the pandemic, Joy launched Joy Cho Pastry, an Instagram business through which she sells her gem cakes to the New York City area.
Celeste Noche is a Filipino American food, travel, and portrait photographer based between Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA.
Recipe tested by Deena Prichep

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