“This threat is blatantly unlawful and a continuation of the union-busting campaign,” Starbucks Workers United said in a statement

Corporate opposition to the unionization efforts at Starbucks continued this week. As CEO Howard Schultz announced in an earnings call yesterday, Starbucks will be committing $1 billion during the fiscal year 2022 to “additional investments in partners and stores for prioritized areas” including increased pay and training. The company first announced in October that it would be raising wages to at least $15 per hour in the summer of 2022, hitting an average pay of nearly $17 per hour for all hourly partners in the United States in the same period. But while yesterday’s call outlined the company’s raise and benefit plans more clearly, it also stated — as some speculated last month — that many of them won’t be extended to unionized stores or stores in the process of unionizing.

Yesterday’s announcement specified that the aforementioned wage increases will be effective August 1, with anyone hired on or before May 2 receiving “either a 3 percent raise or $15/hour, whichever is higher.” In addition, it made clear the raise scale for “tenured partners” with over two and five years with the company, and called out that the company will “double [its] planned investments” in raises for manager positions on August 1. The announcement also mentioned a growth of benefits options, including “opportunities to increase sick time accrual” and “tools and solutions to help partners refinance better student loan solutions” — all of which would be limited to stores that do not unionize.

In response to the announcement, Starbucks Workers United said in a statement: “This threat is blatantly unlawful and a continuation of the union-busting campaign. Starbucks is permitted by law to offer these benefits to workers at unionized stores. Our bargaining committees will demand that these modest improvements be given immediately to all the partners, and ultimately Howard Schultz’ union-busting maneuvers will not work. Starbucks will be a unionized company, where partners have a seat at the table.” The union has filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board.

Since the announcement of the first Starbucks union in Buffalo, New York in December, unionization efforts at the coffee chain have quickly gained momentum. Yesterday, Starbucks Workers United announced that with the Mt. Auburn location in Watertown, Massachusetts, it hit 50 unionized stores nationwide. Amid these successes, Schultz continues to maintain an anti-union stance: Just last month, he reportedly confronted an organizer and said, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?”

Susie Dumond’s “Queerly Beloved” has it all: steamy love scenes, and a thoughtful exploration of queer wedding cake discrimination. Plus, a recipe for your own pride celebration cake!

There is nothing that evokes a wedding quite as much as a big, fluffy cake. It acts as a metaphor for the whole celebration — a little fussy, a little expensive, and tricky to get right but incredibly rewarding and sweet when you do. Though wedding traditions, and who is allowed to participate, have changed over the generations, cake remains a must in Western culture.

In her debut romance novel Queerly Beloved, author Susie Dumond makes weddings, and therefore cake, a central part of the narrative. The story centers on Amy, a baker and bartender in Tulsa, OK, who is trying to figure out how to navigate a crush on a new-in-town lesbian working in the oil industry. Through community and baking, Amy navigates being a queer woman in sometimes-conservative Tulsa, and her people-pleasing instincts. Working as a part-time for-hire bridesmaid, she also finds herself managing weddings and bridal feelings while watching ceremonies she worries she’ll never be able to participate in. And through it all, she bakes. She bakes cupcakes and bread and petit-fours, both for her friends and for her fledgling wedding business, in times of joy and in times of stress. It’s the one thing she’s continually able to count on.

Queerly Beloved is not only full of mouthwatering descriptions of confections — it also highlights the role wedding cake has played in modern queer history. In 2012, a year before the book is set, real-life couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins were denied a wedding cake from Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, because owner Jack Phillips said it went against his Christian beliefs. In a lawsuit, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that Masterpiece Cakeshop had discriminated against Craig and Mullins, though the Supreme Court reversed that ruling. Later, Masterpiece Cakeshop refused to make a cake for a customer’s gender transition.

Between baking and Amy working at a lesbian bar, Dumond dives into how food and drink anchor both weddings and queer communities, and provide stability in times of emotional chaos. And, because she’s a baker in her own right, Dumond created a few recipes featured in the book for readers to try in real life, to further transport them into Amy’s wedding world. Find her recipe for the Queerly Beloved rainbow cake at the end of the interview!

Eater: What made you want to set so much of your story around baking?

Susie Dumond: I’m an amateur baker. I worked at a bakery briefly in college, but for the most part I’m self-taught and very enthusiastic and I am always pushing myself to learn more. Baking is my happy place. And when I first started writing this book, I was writing it for myself and I thought, You know what makes me happy? Baking things and eating things. So I’m going to put as much of that into this book as I possibly can. Making my protagonist Amy a baker just made so much sense in figuring out what it was that she liked and what brought her peace and joy, and then also kind of setting up how she could land in the wedding space.

What other research did you do around professional baking?

Working in a bakery was part of my research. I also talked with some friends who had worked a little longer in baking than I had. But also anything that I had her baking in the book, I tried to make myself. There are very few things that she bakes that I have not tried.

That’s so cool! Did you develop the recipes or did you find them elsewhere? I loved the description of the raspberry mint cake.

I’ve always done a blend. I had done raspberry and basil cake and kind of fudged the mint for the book because I thought that it would be good.

That sounds fantastic.

I used to be an entirely online recipe person because I love being able to read the comments to see what people who have tried it at home thought. But I’ve recently gotten very into actually using all the beautiful cookbooks that I have. I used to just have them and would thumb through them and look at the pretty pictures, but I wouldn’t necessarily try the recipes from them. It’s been really fascinating to actually try the recipes from the cookbooks instead of just judging them by their pictures.

Do you have any favorites from the cookbooks you’ve tried?

I really love Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person. Every single thing I’ve made from it has been incredible. I love her videos, too, so I get to mix the online portion and the cookbook portion. My most recent favorite is Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking. It’s remarkable. There are hundreds of recipes jam-packed in there, and it’s the classics. She’s really saying, “Sure. All these other cookbooks can offer you twists on all these things, but this is the classic way to make cornbread, pineapple upside down cake, whatever.” All the things I’ve made have been wonderful. Also Life Is What You Bake It by Vallery Lomas. She was on American Bake Off and then her season didn’t actually air, so she talks about that being kind of a challenge for her, but still being able to find her way forward in baking. I feel it in the recipes.

Your book takes place in 2013, a year after everything happened in real life with Masterpiece Cake Shop. Were you explicitly evoking that history in this book?

That exact circumstance doesn’t happen in the book, but in my head, Daily Bread, where Amy works, is a place that would have denied same-sex couples. It’s just such a weird clash of feelings around that because bakeries are happy — everything is sweet and lovely at a bakery. They’re a centerpiece in so many romances and rom-coms because you have good feelings in a bakery. And to come to a bakery at the potentially most exciting moment of your life and say, “I want this cake for my wedding.” And then for them to say, “I don’t approve of your wedding and I won’t do it.” It’s horrible. That’s so crushing because it’s supposed to be this big celebratory thing.

I think that’s what really has stuck with people from those kinds of news reports. I definitely wanted that to be front of mind. I didn’t necessarily want to put that exact situation on the page, but I think that seeing Amy get fired from that bakery, it’s kind of reminiscent of it.

The book also takes place before same-sex marriage became federally legal, though obviously there are lots of legislators now that are trying to roll back the clock. What made you want to set this book at that time?

I had some deep conversations with my editor and my agent about that as we were going through the editorial process, because they were like, “What if we were to set it today? By setting it in the past, we almost worry that it creates this illusion that everything’s better now, that was in the past and that’s not the case, obviously.” But the reason that I pushed for, and we decided to ultimately keep it in that timeframe, is because traditional publishing has not embraced LGBTQ books in the way that it does today. And the books that we did see often had really sad endings, and they were almost always New York or LA. So I feel like it’s kind of a lost period in history, in a way; those specific years when we were going through these conversations about same-sex marriage. I remember the very nuanced conversations that I was having with my friends at that time about what it meant and what it didn’t mean and how much more there was to go, when sometimes the media made it out to look like same-sex marriage was the only thing that mattered and once it was passed, things are equal and it’s done.

So I wanted to look at that moment and show that we were already thinking those things at the time and looking down the road at what kind of battles would still come to be. And I wanted to show that moment in a place that you didn’t traditionally see queer stories set. I love Tulsa, it’s my heart place, and I think there’s this idea that queer life in Oklahoma is Brokeback Mountain style — two sad, gay cowboys. And that’s not the case. It’s a very vibrant and wonderful community. So I wanted to highlight that and I wanted to show those complex conversations that were happening at that time.

A lot of this book takes place inside a queer bar called Ruby Red’s, and there’s a lot of conversation about how many of those spaces have been lost to us. Why was it important to you to include that?

Similarly to baking, when I was writing this book and not expecting anyone else to read it, I was like, What’s my happy place? A hole in the wall, grungy gay bar. That’s where I want to be. And there is a particular bar in Tulsa that has some similarities to Ruby Red’s. That is where I was twice a week when I lived there. And it’s just, it’s such a great place for community.

I moved to DC in 2014 and I remember being kind of shocked that it felt like there were fewer gay bars and lesbian bars in DC than there were in Tulsa at the time. DC has some of the highest LGBTQ population, so I was confused. But then I thought about it and it’s because, in DC— I mean, it’s not free of homophobia, but you can pretty much go anywhere on a date with your girlfriend. In Tulsa, you have to think about who’s watching and who else is in the room and what might happen if somebody sees it and reacts to it in a bad way. So those queer bars and those queer spaces were almost more necessary. And because it’s surrounded by a more rural area, people would come from out of town to go to the queer bars in Tulsa.

I’ve been following the Lesbian Bar Project by Lea DeLaria and a bunch of other really fascinating folks. They’ve been doing some fantastic reporting on the situation with queer bars, and particularly lesbian bars, disappearing, and helping to promote the ones that are still around. I think that’s incredible, and even though I know that the pandemic especially has been really hard on these spaces, they’re incredibly important. I’ve seen a couple new queer spaces opening up recently in DC.I think that that’s fantastic to see and I’m excited about the future of queer bars.

Your book does such an interesting job of talking about marriage and tradition, and what traditions you keep and what traditions you can leave behind. But it also sort of seems like no matter what, cake winds up being a part of our celebrations. Why is that? Is cake just inherently romantic?

I feel like I go everywhere with a cake. I’m showing up with cake for anything. It has such a way of making everyday moments feel celebratory, and celebrating love is one of the most fun things to celebrate because there’s never enough of it. I have made cookie cakes for a wide variety of situations. Good and bad. Sometimes bad. I have a picture of one that I made for a friend that says, “Sorry you got chlamydia.”

One of the things that comes up in the book a lot is how Amy is dealing with her own feelings through baking. Early on, there’s a bit where she talks about making peanut butter cupcakes for a breakup, and had some [other things to bake for specific situations]. And that is how I feel about baking as well. That’s a part of me that I baked into the book. If I’m stressed, if I’m overwhelmed, if I’m sad, if I’m scared, there’s always something that I can bake that will make me feel better. Baked goods is my love language, so being able to show people in my life that I care about them—cake. It’s always cake.

Amy goes to all these weddings in this book, and each has its own vibe and menu. What’s the best wedding food you’ve ever had?

I have a very strong memory of one of my cousins’ church wedding that was potluck style. She’d gotten some barbecue as the basics, but everybody brought different stuff. And she didn’t like cake so everybody who came brought a different kind of pie. It was just the most incredible spread of pies that I have ever seen. So I think about those tables full of pies sometimes.

Just a couple of weeks ago, two of my very best friends, a gay couple, got married in Tulsa. And the wedding was at a bunch of places that are mentioned in the book. The ceremony was in the Philbrook Gardens, where Amy goes on a date. And then the reception was at the Mayo Hotel, where there is another wedding reception in the book, and where characters Damien and Joel get engaged on the rooftop. So it was really funny, just ahead of the book, to see all of those places happening in a gay wedding context. And I’ve got to say, that was a gorgeous wedding and the food that was catered by the Mayo, which is this amazing historic hotel in Tulsa, was incredible. I am never excited about hotel catering, but that food was so good.

Queerly Beloved Rainbow Cake Recipe

A colorful, towering cake, perfect for Pride or any other LGBTQ+ celebrations.

Ingredients:

For the rainbow cake cake:

24 tablespoons (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3 cups granulated sugar
7 large eggs, room temperature
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
5 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups buttermilk, room temperature
Gel food coloring*

For the frosting:

24 tablespoons (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
2 pounds (32 ounces) powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup milk (2% or whole), room temperature

Instructions:

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Prepare 9-inch cake pans using desired method**. Depending on how many cake pans you have, you will likely need to wash and reuse them between baking layers.

Step 2: In the bowl of a stand mixer or in a large bowl using a hand mixer, cream butter until light and fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add 3 cups of sugar and mix until thoroughly combined. Mix in 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract.

Step 3: Add eggs one at a time, mixing after each egg. Scrape down sides of the bowl as needed.

Step 4: In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt.

Step 5: Add a third of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, mixing until almost combined. Add a half of the buttermilk (¾ cup) and mix until almost combined. Repeat process: add a third of flour mixture, then remainder of buttermilk, then remainder of flour mixture, mixing each time until almost combined and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Step 6: Separate batter into five equal portions***. Use gel food coloring to color one layer each an orange-red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Put each portion of batter in a separate cake pan, spreading for even layers, and bake for 16-20 minutes until cake is light and springs back when gently poked.

Step 7: As each layer is removed from the oven, let cool for 2 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Let all layers of cake cool completely.

Step 8: Make the frosting. In the bowl of a stand mixer or in a large bowl using a hand mixer, cream butter until light and fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add powdered sugar gradually, about 1 cup at a time. (You may not use the full 2 pounds.) Once the butter and sugar mixture becomes thick and dense, about halfway through the sugar, add the milk, vanilla, and salt. Mix thoroughly, then continue gradually adding sugar until you’ve reached your desired, spreadable consistency. If the frosting becomes too thick, add an extra tablespoon of milk.

Step 9: Assemble the cake. Once cake is completely cooled, place purple layer on a cake plate and top with a thin layer of frosting. Repeat process with other cakes in this order: blue, green, yellow, orange-red.

Step 10: Apply crumb coat. Spread a thin layer of frosting across the top and sides of the cake. Let stand at room temperature for about 20 minutes or in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes, until the frosting is less sticky to the touch.

Step 11: Use the remaining frosting to smooth out the exterior of the cake. If desired, top with sprinkles, edible flowers, or piped frosting.

*Gel food coloring is recommended because you can get a more vibrant color with less dye, and without changing the consistency/taste of the cake. Liquid food coloring can be used in a pinch.

**Cake pan prep: I recommend rubbing the inside of the cake pans with butter, then coating them with a thin layer of flour. Alternatively, you can line the cake pans with parchment paper or spray them with baking spray.

***The most accurate way to do this is to weigh your batter using a kitchen scale and divide the total weight by five to get five equal layers. It can also be done by visual estimation.

Where to find Kentucky Stack Cake, bourbon bone marrow luges, sticky apricot tofu, chocolate cigars, and mole-covered fries in Derby City

Louisville is home to more than baseball bats, bourbon, and the fastest two minutes in sports. Set on the Ohio River on the border with Indiana, Derby City is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, with the robust cultural scene to go along with that status, especially when it comes to good food. The city is home to the famous hot brown: a mess of turkey, Mornay sauce, cheese, and bread cobbled together at the Brown Hotel nearly a century ago. Louisville also has plenty of Southern dining, from old-fashioned classics to dishes inflected with French and Mediterranean twists, plus lots of Cuban specialties, vegan beer, Scandinavian pastries, and pan-Asian comfort food. The city’s best eateries offer way more than pit stops before the races.

Health experts consider dining out to be a high-risk activity for the unvaccinated; it may pose a risk for the vaccinated, especially in areas with substantial COVID transmission.

Lennie Omalza is a Kentucky-based freelance writer. Originally from Hawaii, she is a yoga-loving foodie who travels as often as she can.

Popeyes’ newest sandwich officially clinches 2022 as the year of Buffalo flavoring

Buffalo wings as we know them have generally been attributed to Buffalo, New York’s Anchor Bar in 1964. As the story often goes, co-owner Teressa Bellissimo found an instant hit when she tossed fried chicken wings and hot sauce together for her son and his friends, so she added them to the menu. As with many invention stories, however, it’s not that simple — as the New York Times helped elucidate last year, John Young of John Young’s Wings and Things was actually the first in the city to pair red sauce (in his case, mumbo sauce) with wings. Either way, thanks to the city of Buffalo, we’ve learned in the half-century since that crispy chicken + spicy sauce = good.

But there are only so many ways you can Buffalo a wing, and thus, Buffalo flavor, like pumpkin spice and Flamin’ Hot before it, has transcended the bounds of its original form. In recent years, we have built to — dare I say — Buffalo sauce saturation. “Virtually all pizza chains both large and small serve a Buffalo-accented pie,” Nation’s Restaurant News claimed in a 2020 piece about Buffalo flavoring’s novel applications on American menus, also calling out its presence on breakfast menus, and in salads, pastas, and vegetables. There are multiple brands of Buffalo hummus on the market and Buffalo-flavored nuts and snack mixes; better-for-you-esque snacks like cauliflower chips employ Buffalo flavor — perhaps in an attempt to distract you from the fact that you’re eating yet another reimagining of the cauliflower.

Popeyes via Business Wire

In this context, it feels a little “well, duh” to read today’s announcement that Popeyes is introducing a Buffalo ranch version of its extremely popular chicken sandwich, which will run $4.99 and be available at locations nationwide. Unlike a standard Buffalo wing, the chicken doesn’t appear to be tossed in sauce, but topped with a “zesty and buttery” Buffalo sauce seemingly mixed with “creamy buttermilk ranch.” Dolloping a creamy sauce on top of chicken does not seem to constitute a proper Buffalo-ing — I expect drippy, red, Wet-Nap-requiring glaze — but as with the other versions of the Popeyes chicken sandwich, it’s bound to be pretty good, especially since most of us already know and love Buffalo flavor.

Sami Siddiqui, president of Popeyes North America, says in the press release, “Two years ago, our chicken sandwich reintroduced the world to our chicken mastery, and we have not stopped innovating since.” One does have to wonder how innovative this creation really is given, y’know, all of the above, and that Buffalo is one of the main ways you’d expect to see chicken on an American fast-food menu. The fact that Popeyes has waited until now to introduce this flavor even seems a little surprising. I suppose at least we have restored some sense of order to the world with a new Buffalo product that is actually on chicken, not chickpeas.

I’m not arguing with the presence of Buffalo flavor, but this whole thing smacks of the idea my colleague Jaya Saxena explored in a recent piece about why American chip flavors are so boring: Brands cater to what’s considered “generally acceptable” in the United States and are thus less likely to take risks on flavors that appeal to smaller groups. No doubt about it, the Buffalo-ing of everything will continue.

For stars like Kevin Hart, Idris Elba, and Lorde, eating spicy wings is the key to relatability

According to Kevin Hart, “your clothes are a clear virsitation of who you are.” That’s the closest I could translate from his interview on First We Feast’s Hot Ones in 2016, after host Sean Evans asks him how he approaches fashion in his comedy shows. By this point, Hart has just eaten his ninth chicken wing, this one coated in Mad Dog 357 hot sauce, which clocks in at about 357,000 Scoville units. His eyes have turned glassy, and his quick, snappy demeanor has shifted as though his blood has been replaced with molasses. He thinks his tongue has stopped working.

This is exactly how Hot Ones — “the show with hot questions and even hotter wings” — is supposed to work. If you’ve never seen the hit YouTube show, now in its 17th season, the premise is deceptively simple. All celebrities have to do is eat 10 hot wings, each doused in a progressively hotter sauce, while Evans eats along with them and asks them questions. The result, typically, is celebrities losing their minds, sweating, crying, coughing, chugging milk, cursing out their agents, and barely able to hear the last few questions Evans asks.

At the time of his appearance on Hot Ones in October 2016, Hart was promoting the standup tour What Now?, which went on to gross $100 million worldwide. In the previous year and a half, he’d starred in Get Hard with Will Ferrell and Central Intelligence with Dwayne Johnson, whom he teamed up with again for 2017’s remake of Jumanji, which was probably filming around the same time that he made his Hot Ones appearance. Already on the A-list, Hart could have gone on any traditional talk show or spoken directly to his fans through social media to promote his projects. So why did he — or any of the A-list, Oscar-nominated, or generally thriving celebrities with their pick of media opportunities — feel the need to subject himself to a YouTube show that, three episodes later, caused comedian Bobby Lee to shit his pants on camera?

Since its creation by Complex Media in 2015, Hot Ones has turned from a semi-prank show cracking jokes in a semi-populated corner of the internet to a heavy hitter on the talk-show circuit, and more than most celebrity entertainment, it’s actually entertaining. It’s where viral celebrity moments are made, from Idris Elba choking and crying to Lorde iconically and calmly eating all her wings like she’s popping something as mild as marshmallows. It’s also where celebrities face a sort of forced vulnerability, opening up about personal or private subjects they might not otherwise, all thanks to Evans’s thoughtful questions and the capsaicin-induced mania. By throwing wings into the mix, Hot Ones became the talk show for the 21st century.

Sean Evans has told the show’s origin story multiple times: One day in 2015, First We Feast general manager Chris Schonberger asked him, ​​“What do you think of a show where we interview celebrities while making them eat violently hot chicken wings?” The phrase “violently hot chicken wings” is what sold Evans, but this was at a time when much of digital media was beginning a “pivot to video,” as the Verge wrote in 2019. “Goosed largely by Facebook’s exaggerated video metrics, news publishers had begun to change their editorial strategies to boost their user engagement, which they could then use to sell advertisers on higher ad rates.” Digital publishers were throwing every idea into video and seeing what would stick.

At the time, Schonberger was trying to build up the First We Feast brand, and Evans was working as an anchor at Complex News. The two didn’t know each other that well, but Schonberger says he had a sense Evans was the man for his weird idea. Speaking to Eater, Schonberger describes Evans as having a Midwestern sensibility that makes him “extremely relatable, but also had this undercurrent of sense of humor… he was very good at creating space for humor.” He also was doing a lot of stunt journalism at the time — trying the Rock’s diet, playing sports against professionals, and often putting his body on the line. Hot wings would be up his alley. (Though it almost didn’t end up that way. Schonberger says the last line in his pitch email about Hot Ones was “I could do the interview, or Sean Evans.”)

More than his willingness to punish himself physically, Evans shared with Schonberger a curiosity about the celebrity-interview format. The two were fans of interviewers who maintained a bit of aloofness during their interviews—Evans of Howard Stern and David Letterman, and Schonberger of, as well as British presenters Alexa Chung and Simon Amstell. They weren’t trying to impress their guests, and they weren’t afraid to ask questions that might rattle them. But “the main thing was the hook,” says Schonberger. “We were like, ‘Celebrity interviews are boring. How do we not make them not boring?’ Here’s a disruptive element.”

The powers that be at Complex largely stayed out of their way, according to Evans, or at least responded positively to pushback from Evans and Schonberger. Still, the impetus behind a pivot to video — producing short clips to grab the attention of scrollers on Facebook — can be seen in Hot Ones’ first episode, which is just over five minutes long. But its early days are different from the fiery behemoth it would ultimately become. Initially, the wings were served on a round tray, complete with celery sticks and ranch dressing. There was no talk or display of the hot sauces and little drama. The second episode is different, and it’s clear Evans and Schonberger fought for the videos to be longer against the prevailing logic of media experts at the time. But it still took a while to gain momentum. “I used to joke to Chris, like, ‘I’m eating a lot of scorching-hot chicken wings, and no one cares. I don’t know how tenable this is,” says Evans.

The 16th episode (Episode 8 of the show’s second season) featured comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele promoting their feature-length film Keanu. The two brought their signature energies to the wing eating, with Key screaming about what felt like an MMA fight happening in his sinuses and Peele staring into the distance as if he were astral projecting. “Why are you asking the deepest, most referential shit?” demanded Peele after the fourth wing out of five and Key yelling, “I’m having a stroke!”

“[Key and Peele] had a real big breakthrough moment… We woke up the next day, and there’s millions of views on the video, and we’re like, ‘Whoa, what happened?,’” says Evans. And it wasn’t just that episode. Evans says that with Key and Peele, every other episode had huge jumps in its viewership, too: “It’s like this thing was just hidden away, and once someone discovers it, they’re interested in the show and they’re watching it the whole way through. They binge the catalog after they see it.”

The Key and Peele episode is the one that hooked Brett Baker, a Hot Ones superfan and, to date, as he says, “the only person to be on Hot Ones who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.” Baker immediately adored the concept. “I loved the idea of what the hot wings do… it kind of throws people off their game instead of giving the canned answers that they’re going to give to every other talk show,” he says. Watching late-night too often felt like watching staged conversations, but on Hot Ones there was still an element of surprise.

It wasn’t even the comedy duo sweating and swearing that got Baker’s attention. “The thing that hooked me was Sean Evans,” he tells Eater. Baker, who works in broadcast journalism, was struck by the host’s composed demeanor and dedication to the interview. “He’s still a young guy, but he’s holding his own with two of the bigger, brighter names in Hollywood and comedy, and he’s got them kind of on the ropes… he’s getting some good, deep-dive questions in.”

Evans’s charm is undeniable. It’s thrilling to watch him keep his cool, moving from question to question as his guests beg for mercy. He lets their behavior lead his tone, but he never tries to match their energy. His straight-man persona is what makes the show palatable to people of all ages and backgrounds. You don’t have to be a YouTuber or understand the week’s memes to watch him. When I showed a few episodes to my family, they were all awed by his demeanor. They kept wanting to watch more, asking over and over, “How does he do it?”

More than the wings, it’s the “deep, referential shit” being asked that pulled in viewers. In an interview on the Drew Barrymore Show, Evans says that he, Schonberger, and his younger brother, Gavin, dive into every guest, scouring their social media accounts, their old interviews, and even analyzing their body language to see what kinds of questions will light someone up. This is all to create, Evans says, a space that is “an extension of the guest’s personality. It’s not The Sean Evans Show or The Wings Show. It allows the guest to fill that space naturally.”

He also tells Eater: “There’s a humanizing experience in the whole show, which is taking celebrity, this thing that, by definition, is unobtainable, and then taking that person down to a level that we all understand, which is dying on hot sauce. It ends up being this humanizing experience that I think is unique to its format.”

After the Key and Peele episode, Hot Ones was positioned for ascension and started booking bigger and bigger stars, rounding out the second season with guests like Hart, Tony Hawk, Rachael Ray, and Tom Colicchio. “The Kevin Hart episode is one that ... I mean, he was huge,” says Baker. “And as I understand … he really wanted to do it, and so they brought the crew and everybody out to him.” Evans adds, “Hot Ones being embraced by the industry on a higher level, on a more serious level and what we’ve turned into — I think that inflection point was the Charlize Theron episode.” It was one thing to have a slew of comedians and athletes already somewhat in Complex’s orbit, but hosting an Oscar-winning actress took it to a new level of success.

The more episodes there were, the more guests wanted to come on and be seen talking hot sauce and chomping on chicken wings — or, increasingly, their vegetarian counterparts; Evans says the best wings he ever ate were the vegan wings from Temple of Seitan in London, which they got for Russell Brand’s and Ricky Gervais’s episodes. By now, the enthusiasm the guests have for the show is palpable. Schonberger says celebrities come in mentioning Gordon Ramsay’s episode or saying their kids are fans or that they just thought it looked fun and wanted to give it a go. “Dave Grohl said it was SNL that he dreamt of, Letterman that he dreamt of, and now his bucket list was Hot Ones. That was very validating for Dave Grohl to say that,” says Schonberger. “But it also helps you achieve that type of interview because they’re coming to play.”

A combination of the wings, the guests, and Evans has turned Hot Ones into a talk show with an extraordinarily dedicated fandom. That energy is what allows it to compete not just with the traditional late-night circuit but with the rest of streaming, linear TV and a celebrity’s own social media presence. Shortly after Baker started watching, he began making Hot Ones rankings on Twitter, writing short reviews of each show and guest. Soon the drop of Baker’s reviews was almost as anticipated as the episodes themselves among fans. Fans also regularly post themselves doing their own challenges, reviewing hot sauces and pranking their friends.

“We have people that watch, they’re engaged, they watch all the way through,” says Evans, which is no small feat when episodes are regularly over 20 minutes long. That means celebrities can know whatever they want to say is being heard, whether that’s promoting a blockbuster movie or a passion project, and people won’t be zoning out. “You get more out of your time doing Hot Ones than, I would say, any other show out there right now,” says Evans.

On December 11, 2017, Hot Ones removed its interview with chef Mario Batali, which had been up for fewer than three weeks. That day, Eater NY first reported on a slew of sexual misconduct allegations made against Batali by former employees. After the allegations were made public, Batali stepped away from the day-to-day operations of his restaurants, and in 2019 he sold all his restaurant holdings and has remained largely out of the public eye ever since. A rep from Hot Ones confirms Batali’s interview is the only video the show has removed from YouTube and its site.

However, Batali is far from the only Hot Ones guest to have controversies and allegations of misconduct arise. In 2018, Kevin Hart withdrew from hosting the Oscars after Benjamin Lee, an editor at the Guardian, and others pointed out a slew of homophobic tweets the comedian had made mostly between 2009 and 2011. Chris D’Elia, James Franco, Neil deGrasse Tyson, T.J. Miller, and others have all been accused of various forms of sexual misconduct or assault. The allegations gained public attention after these guests appeared on the show, though some scathing evidence, like Hart’s tweets and comments and Franco’s messages to a teen girl, had long been out there had someone looked for it.

Because celebrities are people and many people do bad things, a celebrity-focused talk show must learn how to navigate such controversies as they surface. And talk shows have served as spaces where celebrities go to specifically address their scandals or, more rarely, be confronted by them. But Hot Ones can avoid such questions because, as an internet-based show still considered less culturally relevant than something on network television, it doesn’t have to play by those rules, and so the vibes can always stay weird and positive. When asked about whether the show explicitly won’t bring up certain topics, Evans says, “What we do is we talk to movie stars about movies. We talk to athletes about their sport. We talk to musicians about their records.” The mission is not to catch people at their worst moments but to find out what they want to talk about.

Which, according to Schonberger, is a matter of good entertainment as much as anything else. A good interview happens when someone wants to talk. “If a celebrity doesn’t want to talk about something,” and that could be a movie or a relationship or an offensive statement made in the past, “there seems to be this almost masochistic compulsion in entertainment media to focus on that thing at the expense of all sorts of value that could be brought to an audience,” says Schonberger. “I think part of our approach to Hot Ones is, ‘What’s positive and exciting about this person that we can share with the world and give them a platform to get excited about?’”

Evans is uninterested in forcing people into mea culpas or surprising them with controversy. “There’s probably a part of me that sees good in people. I’m a second-chance person,” he says. “People are complicated. People are imperfect. So, I try not to, not just in the interview but in my life, define people by their mistakes.” The show is also apolitical, which according to superfan Baker, is how it should be, much for the same reasons Schonberger says. Asking people about their politics, or having politicians as guests, makes for “divisive” television, which is not what people turn to Hot Ones to see. “That’s not the show that I think they want to do,” says Baker, “and it doesn’t matter who it is, on one side or the other, there’s going to be half the room that doesn’t want to hear it or see it.”

First We Feast, now hitting its 10th anniversary, has taken the Hot Ones branding beyond the show, into anywhere fans demand it. It debuted its own hot sauce in 2016, on an episode with Joey Fatone, and now sells a variety of sauces and sauce packs through Heatonist. Since 2020, they’ve launched frozen boneless wings, a Truth or Dab card game, and Hot Ones Jr., which may be the first-ever hot sauce for kids. But after 17 seasons, Hot Ones has evolved into something neither Schonberger nor Evans quite expected at the beginning. Schonberger characterizes the first episode as 80 percent trying to be disruptive and 20 percent trying to be a good interview. “I think now we’re trying to be 90 percent Terry Gross, 10 percent Jackass.” And given that they’re at a point where they have no problem getting some of the most famous celebrities on the show (though they say their white whale is Keanu Reeves), the goal instead is to make the career-spanning interviews deeper and deeper. Inside the Actor’s Studio through the lens of hot wings.

Evans finds that as they go on, guests come in with some degree of veneration for the institution. “That’s what I’m starting to feel right now, and feel somewhat consistently, is that people are like, ‘All right, I’m here to do the Hot Ones interview,’” says Evans. “That’s been the most valuable by-product of all of this from where I sit.” The wings may force vulnerability, but the guests don’t need to be forced; they arrive, to a certain degree, open and wanting to talk.

Hot Ones may thrive because Evans is a compelling, competent, and entertaining host who asks guests unique questions, but it also thrives because guests, and the audience, can trust that they’re in a safe, albeit spicy, space. Which is ultimately the promise all celebrity-driven talk shows provide — You answer our questions and give your name to our brand, and in return we will be nice and won’t try to ruin your career. This is the dance that’s been performed ever since the rise of the modern celebrity. Whatever value each party provides, they rely on each other to survive, and as such there are limitations as to what each party can do.

Hot Ones took a step toward reckoning with the darker ways celebrities wield their power by removing Batali’s interview, ensuring no memes making him appear likable and relatable were made of his performance. But celebrity-driven media has rarely been about speaking truth to power, and ultimately Hot Ones has stayed out of conversations about power and influence. This isn’t an issue for Hot Ones to solve. Instead, it is the sauce in which it and all of celebrity-centered media is doused. Guests don’t have to reckon with their missteps, and viewers don’t have to reconcile that their faves are problematic. The hot wings get close to shattering a celebrity’s controlled veneer, but not so close as to ruin it completely. If anything, Hot Ones is a vacation from the discourse, both for the viewer and the guest, and by being that, it’s become something everyone can enjoy.

Hot Ones initially positioned itself as the anti-talk show, the one where, by the power of Evans’s research and a bottle of Da Bomb sauce, you’d see what a celebrity was really like behind the press junket. Now, it has turned into the best of the genre, with all that implies. Everyone does understand dying on hot sauce. Maybe that’s as close to scratching at the veneer of celebrity as we’ll get.

Marylu E. Herrera is a Chicago-based artist with a focus on print media and collage.
Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

You won’t regret it... or maybe you will

In the 2009 Luca Guadagnino film I Am Love, food forces Tilda Swinton to have an awakening that ultimately leads her to abandon her family. This is similar to the effect that certain food Tik Toks have on viewers today. You’ve probably heard of some of the biggest food-fluencers from the app, like Emily Mariko, who inspires us all with her clean kitchen, silent knife skills, and incredible ability to utilize leftovers, or Tabitha Brown, who taught us how to make vegan bacon out of carrots. But in order to fully immerse yourself in the vast world of culinary TikTok, you have to push further, into the unexpected depths of the app. Real-life relationships be damned.

Below are some accounts that take food content to the next brilliant (and sometimes terrifying) level.

For restaurant recommendations

@printfairy

Jackson and Dakota are a North Carolina couple who frequent a variety of fast-food and fast-casual restaurants and bring their gay friends along to tell you what they’ve ordered. Special appearances by Emily, Brandon, and Jackson’s mom are always treats. A sample order includes an appetizer (for the table), a main, sometimes a dessert, and of course something “for to drink” to “WORSH it all down.”

They’re the new generation’s Guy Fieri. An inspiration for everyone.

@rox30503

Roz the JerZ Queen, regent of the shore, is a Florida/tristate lifestyle influencer and Pitbull superfan, who in addition to going to Ulta and Starbucks also shows you how to travel and dine in style. Whether it’s where to get a cheesesteak in Miami, how to order at the bar, or how to make the most amazing potent yet low-calorie drinks to bring with you to the beach (Ocean Spray LITE, not diet), she’s got you covered.

If living the beach life is on your agenda, Roz is the guide for you.

For lifestyle

@fiarvest

A food and lifestyle king who wears a sleep gown and uses a selfie stick to document his life. His page features his cat Sesame, a really big candle, instructions on what to do with parsnips, bergamot-infused vodka, egg salad, and our favorite, his clam chowder canoe. Here he is explaining how to source wick for your butter candles.

@quincylk

Quincy’s Tavern is a man in Florida who cosplays as a tavern keeper in a video game; you stop by while on your mythical journey, and he makes you really comforting food. Health Potions, Shroom Creme Soup, and Sunrise Breakfasts are often served up with a healthy dose of ASMR and a sidequest. If you’re feeling lonely, don’t worry — he’s happy to sit and eat with you.

For entrepreneurs

@theres.food.at.home

If you’re ever like, “Okay, how do I even grocery shop?” August from @theres.food.at.home is a must-follow. Whether it’s basics like sharing her weekly grocery list and meal planning, a “how-to” for cleaning shrimp, tips on getting the most juice out of your limes, or a guide to making meals like Panera-inspired broccoli cheddar soup, garlic rosemary mashed potatoes, and shepherd’s pie, her page has everything. She also takes you behind the scenes to see how she runs her restaurants. She just opened an erotic dessert bar called Kinky’s, and we can’t wait to try one of her Dicky waffles.

@erikajamescarder

Erika documents the life of a Chick-fil-A wife. Her husband is also her boss at Chick-fil-A, and she gives us updates on things like the fact that men can now have beards while working there. She has only nine TikToks and hasn’t posted in more than a year, but she has a lot on her plate, so we understand.

For organ meats

@heidimontag

A recent entry in the food-recommendation sphere, Heidi posted a video of herself munching on raw liver while explaining all the dietary benefits it offers. The video is doing great numbers, so we expect to see more. She also once shared a recipe for a fabulous margarita.

@liverking

Perhaps Heidi was influenced by the Liver King, who is a really rich man who exercises all day and then breaks his fast with a “liver king concoction” along with protein shakes, liver and other organ meat, bone marrow, tomahawk steaks, etc.

Sometimes he eats potatoes, but if he sees fruit, he gets mad. He uses a standing desk, he sleeps on wood, and his wife doesn’t allow cellphones in the bedroom unless they’re in a special bag. He has two sons, “Striker” and “Liver Boy.”

Heidi Montag still eats fruit, though.

For vegetable lovers

@bakedbymelissa

If you’re full of meat and need a veggie break, Baked by Melissa, known in New York for the tiny colorful cupcakes that you buy in Flatiron, is on TikTok making the most vibrant, colorful, finely diced salads and dressings. She furiously dices every vegetable into cubes and talks to you like you’re her absolute favorite assistant. It’s comforting and motivating all at once.

@alexisnikole

Alexis forages for things in nature and then makes incredible things out of them. She also teaches you how to do it yourself. Could you have ever imagined you could make Puffball Meringues, Dandelion Pudding, or Forest Nuggets after a quick stroll through a nearby park?

While we may not trust ourselves to not accidentally pick something poisonous, it’s incredibly fun imagining what treats are living on trees near you. Here’s her video on how to eat pine cones.

Matt Harkins and Viviana Olen are the curators of the THNK1994 Museum (@THNK1994). They support Heidi Montag in eating raw liver if that is what she chooses to do.
Marylu E. Herrera is a Chicago-based artist with a focus on print media and collage.
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

How the Bravo reality show redefined fame and success for professional chefs

Top Chef has had an inordinate effect on my life in that it pretty much launched my career, such as it is. When the show first started airing on Bravo way back in 2006, I was working at Gawker as something called an After Hours Editor. This was a confusing title since I worked normal business hours but wrote about things that happened at night. Among those nocturnal happenings were both going to restaurants and watching Top Chef, a new type of reality cooking competition spearheaded by sartorial predecessor Project Runway. As I had for that fashion design competition, I would watch Top Chef and then spend all night writing a recap in a cocaine-fueled high. It was both the beginning and the peak of my career.

But it was hard not to write voluminously and inspiredly about Top Chef. The show was a Midasian muse. It not only captured contestants in extremis, held taut between intense stress and baser human instincts like its predecessors, but it also embodied tremendous skill, artistic expression, and a lofty impulse toward high-end cuisine. Ambition, talent, frailty, jealousy, flaws, and the occasional burst of genius were served on one plate under the jurisprudential gaze of a panel of judges. It was brilliant: Every level, every note, every muse was addressed. The patron saints of tragedy, comedy, law, love, and food left the hour sated.

Sixteen years later, that Gawker is gone, sued out of existence by a deranged billionaire over a wrestler’s sex tape. I am older, too, body sagging and knees bad. My youth has spiraled down the drain of time into the gummed-up pipes of the universe. But Top Chef? Top Chef is still extant, arriving every year like a field of zinnias and sunflowers. It has become part of the pop culture firmament — permaculture, if you will — a landscape-altering feature. The ebb and flow of Padma Lakshmi’s Quickfire challenges, Tom Colicchio’s elimination, and finally the judges’ tables, wherein the full panel meets like Clotho (Lakshmi), Lachesis (Gail Simmons), and Atropos (Colicchio). These have become our own cultural circadian rhythms.

Over the arc of the 19 seasons, time is divided into two eras: BMH, before Marcel’s head was shaved, and afterward, AMH. Secret societies are still devoted to solving the mystery of Ed’s missing Pea Puree of Season 7. There are two camps, generally, among Top Chef aficionados: those who prefer the raw human drama of the earlier season, up to and including Season 10 in Seattle, and those who prefer the later seasons, in which personal drama has faded and culinary prowess has increased. I am a Venal Top Chef kinda guy myself, but I’m not proud of it. Either way, over the course of nearly 300 episodes, Top Chef has indisputably had a substantive effect on the culinary world. The question is: What is the nature of this effect? This is stickier. By what metric should one measure the impact of Top Chef?

By the show’s own logic, the most salient metric should be the number of restaurants opened by Top Chef alumni, which the show posits as the ultimate achievement for a chef. An acclaimed, award-winning restaurant is the grand prize, what it’s all about, the whole kit and caboodle, the megillah. The hierarchy can be deduced from the reward system, which culminates in a grand prize of $100,000 (later bumped to $250,000), given to a winner in order to “fulfill [their] culinary dreams,” and from the overarching narrative of a young and callow chef, beholden to an industry name, yearning for the freedom to “cook their own food” in a restaurant of their own.

There are too many restaurants opened by Top Chef contestants to even mention. Some are very good. But of the seasons’ 18 winners, 12 currently have restaurants open. Many are modest affairs in the fast-casual mode. Ilan Hall, the winner of Season 2, runs a vegan ramen place, Ramen Hood, in Los Angeles. Mei Lin, winner of Season 12, opened a fried chicken counter called Daybird, also in Los Angeles, though COVID-19 unfortunately shuttered her fine-dining affair, Nightshade. There have, of course, also been some real large-scale ambitious successes, too: Stephanie Izard, who emerged triumphant from Season 4, was the owner of a group of very successful Chicago restaurants, as is Brooke Williamson in Los Angeles. And there may have been only 18 winners, but there have been 290 contestants. Like Abrahams, the descendants of Top Chef have been as numerous as stars in the sky and stretch from places like Folk in Detroit to Folktable in Sonoma, California. By this point, there are so many restaurants run by former Top Chef contestants, it has ceased to be notable.

But Top Chef did change something bigger than restaurants. It changed what it means to be a successful chef in America by unmooring chefs from restaurants. Hitherto, restaurants had long been the prized underlying asset of chefdom. It was the foundation on which all other fame and renown was built. That seawall began to crack a little with a small cadre of celebrity chefs lionized by the Food Network beginning in the mid-1990s, but still, those chefs built their brands on brick-and-mortar establishments. Certainly in 2006, when Top Chef premiered, the apotheosis of a chef’s career was having a successful restaurant — or perhaps many successful restaurants — where they were cooking their own food. As late as 2012, this was the goal. Writing about an obscure Top Chef spin-off, Life After Top Chef, The Atlantic’s Ken Gordon wrote, “Must a Top Chef contestant open up a restaurant? The answer is: No. But to watch LATC, it’s clear that everyone sees restaurant ownership as the only possible step after five minutes of quick-fire fame.”

But in 2022, that’s no longer the case. The success of Top Chef awoke the industry — those already in it and those just entering — to the idea that restaurants aren’t really the prize, or maybe a consolation prize at best. After all, what kind of prize is a labor-intensive, stressful, life-and-money leeching, overhead-heavy endeavor with a terrible success rate, razor-thin margins, and ever-increasing costs? A Pyrrhic one indeed.

No wonder chefs, winning and nonwinning alike, have used the platforms afforded them by Top Chef to, well, build additional platforms. Many have become authors. (Hell, I even co-wrote two books with one.) Some, like Camille Becerra, are free-floating “storytellers.” Others have gone down the direct-to-consumer route with hot sauces and lager. Melissa King, one of the most talented and compelling contestants, now curates culinary experiences and brand collaborations. A surprising number of chefs have been sucked into the television world themselves. The most successful of these have become hosts. Carla Hall, for instance, or Kristen Kish, who hosted 36 Hours on the Travel Channel and on TruTV. Others have become serial contestants. Michael Voltaggio got his own show (Breaking Borders), and after that ended, he became a regular on myriad shows, including Guy’s Grocery Games. In recent seasons, Top Chef has started to devour its own young, as alumni are summoned to appear again on Top Chef to judge and crown new Top Chefs. And, of course, this platform leads to brand collaborations and sponsorship deals, the revenue from which outstrips the margins of even a successful restaurant with far less work.

For someone who eats at restaurants for a living, I think this is a bummer, but I get it. You can’t help but love food more after watching Top Chef. As a nation of tasters, Top Chef was our civics course. Had the show not become canonical, would the public be as conversant in genres of restaurants from fine dining to fast casual? Would we know what a knife roll was or that to pack those knives and go meant ignominious defeat? Without the molasses delivery of Padma Lakshmi, the Torontonian cheer of Gail Simmons, and the Union County-twang of Tom Colicchio to guide us, would everyday Americans be quite as savvy to ras el hanout, aware of the dangers of searing wet meat, or terrified of the sin of serving warm cod ceviche? Certainly not. As the years flowed by, the show built on its popularity and its increasingly educated populace to really celebrate food over drama. The narrative climaxes were no longer interpersonal bullying or backstabbing but the zing and tensions of flavors expertly balanced, feats of culinary bravado executed under extreme pressure. Ironically, as the show progressed and the food got better and better, the contestants became increasingly disinterested in feeding the public directly. And yet, could there be any different outcome?

To be grumpy about this is unwise, for there is no alternative. Restaurants make restaurant chefs. Television shows make television chefs. And really, who can blame a chef for bypassing the increasingly untenable business of running a restaurant in the first place? By decoupling chefs from the ball and chain of restaurant kitchens, they’ve been able to slip into our houses, hearts, and wallets in myriad embodiments: books, pans, reels, knives, lives, knickknacks, TikToks, cans of beer, jars of hot sauce. Into the etheric realm of influencing, chefs have burst, leveraging their restaurant bona fides into empires of personal brands. And it was Top Chef, unrivaled as a launchpad for these aspiring human trademarks, that gave them the momentum. Well, good for them, of course. For all the sanctimonious shit we talk about how hard it is to work as a chef in a restaurant kitchen, how could we do anything but give snaps to a chef who wisely says fuck it? But still, I do fret.

Why? Basically, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. An analog to this decoupling of underlying assets with value can be found in derivative or futures trading in the financial markets. The practice of trading futures stretches back to ancient Greece — it started with olive oil futures in 600 BCE — and has proliferated since. The idea is simple: Instead of simply trading stocks or mortgages or olive oil or soybeans, the derivatives market allows traders to profit from secondary or “derivative” assets like futures, forwards, swaps, and options. While a normie trader might exchange shares in a bank, a derivative trader trades in tranches of debt owed to that bank. A commodities trader might trade in aluminum, but a derivatives trader trades in the future price of aluminum. All of a sudden the underlying commodity is just the beginning of moneymaking, not the end. Sounds great, right?

No one can argue that derivative trading didn’t make a buttload of money for many people for many years. (Many of those people are the ones who have supported fine dining for years.) But one needs only to think about the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 to 2009 to realize the danger and fragility of the entire scheme. (For a quick primer, here’s Margot Robbie in a bathtub.) When the value of the derivative becomes unmoored from the value of the underlying asset, we’re headed for trouble. Similarly, when the value of a chef becomes a product of some sort of free-floating brand extension, decoupled from any sort of actual kitchen work, we’re headed for a crash.

Top Chef has turned cooking into entertainment and chefs into entertainers. But as opposed to an actor or a vaudevillian, a chef’s primary means of expression and area of competency is cooking. There is no substitute for enjoying cooking better than eating it and no more accessible place for the public to eat than a restaurant. As a jobbing writer, I shall forevermore be indebted to Top Chef for the sheer volume of material its 19 seasons have proffered. As a viewer, I could ask for no better companions with which to transition from callow youth into middle age. But as an eater, a restaurant freak, and a new-menu obsessive, I can’t help but wish more chefs would simply just pack their knives and go… open a restaurant.

Joshua David Stein is an editor and author. He has co-written many cookbooks including My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef, with Kwame Onwuachi; The Nom Wah Cook Book, with Wilson Tang; Il Buco: Stories & Recipes, with Donna Lennard, and Vino: The Essential Guide to Real Italian Wine, with Joe Campanale. He is a frequent contributor to Esquire, Eater, Hemispheres, and New York magazine and the author of many children’s books.
Marylu E. Herrera is a Chicago-based artist with a focus on print media and collage.
Fact checked by Dawn Mobley
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein