Your weekly dispatch from the ‘Add to Cart’ newsletter
This post originally appeared on October 29, 2019, in Add to Cart — the weekly newsletter for people who love shopping (almost) as much as they love eating.Subscribe now.
Equal Parts, the newish direct-to-consumer cookware line from Pattern, the company that used to be cool-kid marketing agency Gin Lane, is getting some fresh buzz this week, thanks to a weighty feature in BuzzFeed.
Anne Helen Petersen’s take on the brand is an (unsurprisingly) thoughtful one, smartly tying the Equal Parts pitch — a cookware company that provides simple, pleasant-to-use products along with judgment-free guidance about making the everyday experience of cooking an enjoyable one — to the concept of millennial burnout. The brand is “raising awareness of burnout caused by work culture [and] the attention economy,” said Gin Lane (and now Pattern) founder Emmett Shine. As Petersen first skeptically reads it, Equal Parts is basically trying to solve the ills of 21st-century capitalism with more capitalism. (By the end, she comes around just a little.)
My initial read on the brand several weeks ago wasn’t so philosophical (I’m no AHP); I mused about where it fits in the growing class of DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands, and wondered how it would compete with more fashion-forward cookware startups like Great Jones or restaurant industry-linked startups like Made In and Material. But the question of how the brand will be received in an increasingly competitive market leads me to Petersen’s argument about the brand being about a lot more than just pots and pans. These days, maybe that’s a baseline requirement for getting shoppers to buy what you’re selling: You can’t just sell a product; you have to sell a visionary solution to a societal problem. (See: the entire “self-care” industry.)
Things to buy
If you, like me, own dishware in various shades of gray and white, these Dusen Dusen cloth napkins — part of the Brooklyn-based brand’s new kitchen line — are a low-stakes, noncommittal way to brighten things up every so often.
Amazon just made AmazonFresh even more competitive by dropping the $15 monthly fee that Prime members previously paid on top of the $119 annual Prime fee, Vox reports. This can’t bode well for InstaCart, much less FreshDirect.
The world of liquor brand ambassadors is fascinating and a little troubling: “One issue is how brand ambassadorship can essentially mean that brands can pay for bar placement… [which] calls into question which ingredients bartenders are choosing because of quality and which they’re choosing to get paid.”
I absolutely must meet the shoppers who caused this beer-can purse with a four-figure price tag to sell out.
Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see ourethics policy.
Even at coffee companies with a progressive sheen, baristas say they’re underpaid. A new worker-led movement is trying to change that.
As a veteran of the coffee industry, Kevin Leal, an educator at a Manhattan coffee shop that he declined to name, believes that a fair hourly wage for barista jobs should start at $16 minimum, before tips. A few weeks ago, however, a barista gave Leal insight into New York’s labor market: an anonymous Google survey and corresponding spreadsheet, with row after row of coffee shops and workers’ wages, tips, years of experience, and benefits, as well as other details.
Among the shops listed was a previous employer, but what Leal saw dispirited him: One entry claimed a barista was earning $14 per hour, a full dollar less than what Leal made during his tenure there.
“I was pretty disgusted,” Leal says, adding that seeing hourly wages below $16 plus tips “is completely unfair.”
After viewing the New York spreadsheet, Leal felt the need to ensure that his colleagues at coffee shops around the city were aware of how much their bosses were paying them and their coworkers. And he’s not alone.
Beginning this past September, after an anonymous barista in Philadelphia shared a Google survey and an accompanying spreadsheet on social media and job boards in the hopes of crowdsourcing information about local coffee industry employees’ job titles, wages, estimated tips, and other benefits, hundreds of workers in the coffee industry have shared their own (often low) wages. For many workers, the hope is that in making this information communal knowledge, conversations might emerge about how careers in the coffee industry can finally become well-paid and viable means of employment.
The stereotype of the part-time student pulling espresso shots might persist for some, but specialty coffee has evolved into a full-fledged industry where workers can theoretically pursue lifelong careers. Still, many workers’ wages don’t reflect their professional experience, nor would they likely be considered livable: Nationwide, baristas make on average only $11.17 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“There’s been a tipping point in general in the industry in terms of talking about pay and power imbalances in the last three years,” says Jenn Chen, vice president of the Bay Area Coffee Community and creator of the Bay Area survey. Following waves of union organizing and strikes, she says, pay transparency is “the logical next step.”
Over 100 entries poured in for the Philadelphia survey within two weeks of its publication; shortly after the Philadelphia Inquirer and other organizations shared the news about workers taking action to address working conditions and foster unity, current and former coffee shop employees began copying the template and creating their own spreadsheets in cities across the country. As of publication, at least 15 surveys and spreadsheets, covering regions from Portland, Oregon, to New Haven, Connecticut, reveal a partial picture of the coffee labor market in their areas. Some surveys now also include questions about whether workers are members of marginalized communities.
“We’re just working for healthier work environments and a healthy relationship between employees, management, and ownership, and how they can support their employees,” says Felix Tran, a barista and co-founder of the industry organization Coffee at Large, which published the Seattle survey.
This moment of clarity is especially revealing for the third-wave coffee movement. For years, once-upstart companies like La Colombe and long-time specialty coffee devotees have projected an air of cultural superiority to coffee corporations like Starbucks. The third-wave edge, however, is proving blunt in terms of paying employees.
The Philadelphia survey creator, who wishes to remain anonymous and who worked at a La Colombe shop for two years, says that customers coming into the store “had the idea that we made a lot more money than we did, and that was frustrating, because we were really reliant on tips.
“A lot of people went there because they thought it was a progressive company that paid employees well,” they add.
La Colombe’s co-founder and CEO, Todd Carmichael, has championed a $15-an-hour minimum wage, even writing in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed in 2017 that “unless you pay your employees a nonpredatory living wage that keeps people and their families above the poverty line, you don’t deserve to be in business.” La Colombe starts baristas in Philadelphia at $9 an hour before tips, according to the Inquirer. (Representatives for La Colombe declined to comment for this article.)
“We’ve been an industry that’s been aimed at Starbucks, and we haven’t matched them on a lot of things while we’re trying to dethrone them,” says Eater Young Gun Sumi Ali (’18), co-founder of the direct-to-consumer coffee company Yes Plz and a longtime barista. According to Glassdoor, Starbucks baristas make, on average, $8 per hour on the low end for their base pay, but full- and part-time employees receive benefits that include health coverage, 401K matching, tuition reimbursement, and paid time off. “Starbucks really takes care of their employees,” Ali says. “No one can argue that.” (Recently, a petition was created to encourage Starbucks to raise its barista wages to a minimum of $12 an hour “to improve the customer experience, employees’ livelihood, and the overall morale of the business.”)
Wanting management to share the books goes far beyond coffee. The original survey creator said that they were inspired by a Philadelphia art museum curator who helped create an anonymous Google spreadsheet that crowdsourced thousands of museum employees’ salaries nationwide. Journalists have been compiling freelance rates of various publications for years, and adjunct professors share their salaries through the Adjunct Project. Also, there’s Glassdoor.
In addition to baristas employing these surveys as possible bargaining tools for higher hourly wages or using entries to elucidate wage discrimination for marginalized communities, Ali believes that removing the secrecy of salaries makes it clear to workers what their earnings may look like as they progress in the coffee industry, both at their current company and when at a new one. “As a barista coming up through the ranks, you’re always looking for the next thing,” he recalls. “I made less money becoming a roaster, and that was really hard for me to square.”
Bailey Arnold created the New York survey. Currently a market development manager at Oatly for the Northeast, Arnold worked as a barista and then as a coffee shop store manager for three and a half years. One of her goals is to empower workers to provide management with new ideas for how money should be allocated within the company. She says that if companies introduce pay transparency in the workplace, and later add further transparency, like insight into business expenses, higher-ups might learn from workers that “nobody cares about this one [cost] that an employer is focused on, and they could use that money to pay them differently.”
Although baristas and members of the coffee community have rallied around this online push for transparency, Arnold recognizes one possible downside to these lists. Employers, she says, might suspect that some of their employees have posted their wages online and may attempt to oust those workers. (Although it has been legal for private-sector workers to discuss wages openly according since 1935, per the National Labor Relations Act, a recent survey found that 25 percent of private-sector workers fear retribution for sharing their wages.)
Nick Cho, the co-founder of Wrecking Ball in San Francisco, says he recognizes that these documents are “an outcry from the community that they’re not satisfied, and it’s not enough.” However, he admits that he has some hesitancy about providing wage transparency to his employees, noting that it would likely make it harder to profit while running a business. “Historically, companies don’t like too much transparency, especially with lower paid workers,” Cho says, “because it takes control away from the employer to see their business as levers and wheels.”
For now, however, many baristas see these surveys and spreadsheets as a stepping stone in the discussion around transforming shops into healthier and more equitable workplaces. Shortly after Leal learned about the New York spreadsheet, he shared the document with baristas who suspected they were paid less than men doing the same job at the same coffee shop in Brooklyn.
The hope, he says, is that they can use the spreadsheet to call out the discriminatory practices and argue for higher wages.
“I think the more people are able to see the wage transparency sheets,” Leal says, “the more they will be able to see their worth and know that they’re worth way more than they’re being paid.”
Bubbles may feel special, but sparkling wine shouldn’t only be for celebrations
Ariel Arce, the founder of Air’s Champagne Parlor in Greenwich Village, among othertrendy spots, wants people to take bubbles seriously, but she doesn’t put them on a pedestal, either. That means she doesn’t reserve Champagne for special events. “I don’t really like to classify Champagne as celebratory anymore,” she says. “We have a real revelation with people drinking sparkling wine for every and all occasions. Yes, there is something special about bubbles in anything — sparkling water is more festive than still water — but it’s a well-thought-out and produced wine.”
Back when Louis XIV glugged Champagne, it was not bubbly (“non mousseux”); bubbles then were considered a defect. “Champagne and Burgundy were always at odds, competing to be the preemptive still region for red wine in France,” Arce says. In the mid-17th century, in an effort to carve out its place in the market, Champagne figured out how to make white wine and began focusing on fizz. Over the centuries, things devolved into a gory territory dispute and, in 1927, France passed a law declaring who had exclusive rights to the name Champagne with a capital C: five districts, each known for a particular grape. “There’s 200 years worth of marketing we have to pull back,” Arce says. “People tend to think it’s elite. It’s expensive because of the very restrictive rules and regulations to produce it.”
Bubbles are little experiments with destiny: Sparkling wine begins its life in stillness, waiting to bubble up; at the end, like bodies, bubbles become weak with age. Arce, who is writing a book on sparkling wine, explains that bubbles were a function of geography. “Because of how northern Champagne is,” the local climate was prime for bubbling. “The cold weather would cause the fermentation in-bottle to halt and the cold temperature would essentially put the wine to sleep,” she says. “Once the weather turned warm again, the fermentation process would start back up” — spring delivered effervescence. Today, producers commonly add liqueur de tirage (wine combined with yeast and sugar) for the second fermentation.
Drinkers will notice that bubbles come in different forms. They may be lighter, like a silky white ocean at low tide, or sharper, like bombs on your tongue, crackling. “There are no small or big bubbles; rather, [there are] different atmospheric pressures in a bottle and an amount of sugar that exists in the wine,” Arce explained. “Champagne has five atmospheres of pressure in the bottle, which creates a higher effervescence. Prosecco or semi-sparklers can have less, which can make for less effervescence, a softer mousse, but also a feeling of a larger bubble. Sugar gives weight to Champagne and can sometimes make the wine feel heavier and the bubbles softer. Of course, the longer a bottle of Champagne ages, letting the sugar eat away at it, the more the bubbles will change.”
Still Champagne is like bubbly in its underwear — not fully dressed for the day, but also revealing: Bubbles may only be air, but it turns out they’re important. For one thing, Arce said, “It takes substantially more grapes to produce still red or still white than it does to produce sparkling.” Beyond that, they’re character building; they elevate with that particular, fizzy high. Maybe it’s kid bubble nostalgia.
Air’s is inside a converted townhouse on Macdougal Street with brightly colored gemstone wallpaper, decorative feathers, mirrors, and neon lights that cast a dreamy pink glow over the room. The other night, under bubble lights, a server set out wine glasses for her customers — not flutes. “Champagne flutes were really created as a marketing tool, to set it apart,” she said. “In this glass, you lose some of the bubble. But it allows you to experience the aroma.” The bubbles rested atop of the pour like a lid of tiny, sparkling beads. Nobody in sight was swirling or sniffing; they sipped contentedly and snacked on oysters and grilled cheese with lavender honey.
There are some — only about 15 percent of customers — who order something still, Arce says. Given the setting — the menu lists Champagne facts, with a bubble motif, too — that seems almost an act of defiance. Why resist? With a whiff of incredulity, she says: “Not everybody likes bubbly wine.”
Betsy Moraisis the managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. She previously worked at the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Atlantic. Bárbara Malagoliis a multidisciplinary artist based in London.
The recent wave of zero-waste stores — think Brooklyn’s Precycle and Austin’s (now-closed) In.gredients — may be well-designed, airy, and Instagram-worthy, but their novelty belies an important truth. While there’s no doubt that it’s time to reduce the quantity of plastic and other packaging waste that comes home with us from the grocery stores, shoppers don’t need to seek out stores made only of bins and jars to reduce their impact.
In fact, more and more mainstream grocery stores are turning to good old bulk bins — an age-old staple of the hippie co-op — to help shoppers cut their waste. And it’s about time.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, containers and packaging make up 30 percent of what we dispose of annually. What doesn’t get recycled — and it’s a lot — ends up in ever-expanding landfills, air polluting incinerators, or accumulates en masse in the oceans. Pollution from single-use packaging has become a global crisis. And scientists predict that the amount of plastic will increase four times by 2050.
Although bulk groceries are emerging as a low-tech solution to our garbage crisis, a great deal of obstacles remain on the path to success. Laws surrounding food safety increasingly encourage single-use materials over reusable containers. And confusion among shoppers who have long been encouraged to grab-and-go makes shopping in bulk an intimidating affair. To truly reduce waste, advocates believe bulk must be more than just an aisle in the store — it must become a deliberate system that starts at home and continues seamlessly into the supermarket.
The End of Recycling and the Rise of Bulk
Today, reducing unnecessary packaging waste is no longer a fanciful environmental ambition. For the first time since the introduction of cheap plastics into the supply chain, it no longer makes economic sense to use a material once and throw it away.
“Long term, I’ve seen a pull away from doing a good job of sorting our materials and instead, moving towards single stream, where everything’s going into one bin. That’s destroyed the value of the materials, and our recycling markets have kind of fallen apart,” explains Kirstie Pecci, a senior fellow at the Conservation Law Foundation, who has been leading the Zero Waste Project since 2017. “Short term, I think people are paying attention to the waste system way more because the markets have collapsed abroad.”
In 2018, China implemented a new policy severely limiting U.S. imports of recyclable materials. Since then, the conversation about waste management has changed. According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, close to 30 percent of the market for U.S. recyclables dried up nearly overnight. Municipal recycling costs have skyrocketed. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, there has been a 1,400 percent increase in cost, from $5 a few years ago to $70 per ton this year, says the city’s Recycling Director, Michael Orr.
While well-to-do cities including Cambridge can afford the increased costs relatively unscathed, many others can’t. According to the Recycling Partnership, 66 towns and municipalities across the country have cut their curbside recycling programs. Among the latest large municipalities to do so is Jackson, Mississippi, home to 165,000 people.
In response, public opinion on plastic in all its forms is changing rapidly. “Only in the last two years have people really begun to wake up to how plastic is interacting with our environment — land pollution, river pollution, ocean pollution — and how plastic is appearing now in our bodies,” explains Pecci. “People have started to recognize how dangerous and unsustainable it is.”
Melissa Renwick/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Trader Joe’s has been criticized for its liberal use of plastic packaging
Some supermarkets, responsible for ordering, distributing, and commissioning countless packaged goods, have taken preparatory action. In December 2018, Trader Joe’s — a chain criticized in a petition for selling customers “as much trash as food” — announced its goals to eliminate a million pounds of plastic in its stores in 2019. Halfway through the year, the chain announced that it was implementing changes, including biodegradable bags for flowers and recyclable trays for meat, that would eliminate 4 million pounds of plastic per year. Walmart followed Trader Joe’s lead in 2019, unveiling an initiative to swap out its private brand’s packaging with “material that is recyclable, reusable or industrially compostable.”
But both of these cases mark less of a shift away from packaging, and more of a gravitation to a different kind of packaging. For many consumers, who are concerned about the dangers of plastic pollution and remain skeptical about the headlong rise of single-use biodegradables, it’s a few steps too short.
Even the chains most leading the charge are some distance from eliminating plastic waste. The Colorado-based supermarket Sprouts — which now has more than 300 locations in 22 states — says bulk foods make up 30 percent of their stores. In January, the company started selling reusable glass jars and cloth bags to encourage a culture of refilling, and Bonnie Meyer, Bulk Category Manager at the chain says the company has already sold 125,000.
Yet even at Sprouts, promotional videos designed to introduce customers to the novelties of the bulk section demonstrate scooping and filling in disposable plastic bags — to the distress of nearly every single YouTube commenter on the video. Recent PR images show informational zero waste signage hanging, ironically, above almonds swaddled in plastic packaging — an entirely commonplace yet completely mixed message.
Bulk shopping has emerged an unwilling hero of sustainability: A hero because those rows of refillable gravity dispensers are the centerpiece of every zero waste store in the world. But unwilling, because outside of the small world of zero waste shopping, buying bulk to reduce consumer packaging is almost never encouraged by American businesses, and a good chunk of the time, it is even prohibited.
Bulk Food Safety Concerns, Real or Imaginary
Last June, Whole Foods opened a new location in the beach town of Malibu, California, just north of Los Angeles. The press release promoting the store’s grand opening touted all its newsworthy features: an extensive prepared foods section, hundreds of local brands, a bakery, and even a juice bar. But the release entirely omitted the store’s exemplary — and no doubt expensive — bulk aisle, home to hundreds of bulk offerings ranging from grains and nuts to flours and beans.
Jeff Wells, a journalist and editor who follows trends in the grocery industry at Grocery Dive, has observed this phenomenon. In a lot of stores, he says, “[bulk sections] are just kind of there. No one is talking about it. There are no press releases going out [in the grocery industry], saying things like ‘We’re bulking up on bulk!’”
For large chains like Whole Foods, bulk is a liability that even its environmental virtues cannot outweigh. For years, the company has insisted that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) food code forbids customers from refilling their own containers in the bulk aisle to avoid cross contamination. (The FDA, on the other hand, describes the food code as more of a suggestion; a “model… offered for adoption” for local and state governments.)
Fears of food-safety violations keep bulk in the background of many mainstream retail stores. But small, independent natural foods stores have made bulk a mainstay. At the Good Food Store, an independent grocery store in Missoula, Montana, bulk has long attracted customers both for its affordability, healthier, less-processed options, and buy-only-what-you-need appeal.
Far from discouraging customers from bringing their own refillable containers, The Good Food Store has for 20 years recycled and reused them them, too: Two large black bins stationed at the store’s entrance contain shoppers’ old glass and plastic jars, which employees collect, sanitize, and place on store shelves for customers to use.
The system made quite an impression on Matt Gray, a former employee of the store who now runs his own small grocery business, Neighborhood Produce in Somerville, Massachusetts. While he worked there, he said Good Food was home to the largest bulk section west of the Mississippi River. “At that time in Montana, we didn’t have glass recycling,” recalls Grey, “So that was a way to recycle glass and fill that need.”
The Good Food Store’s container recycling system wasn’t built overnight, emphasizes Layne Rolston, the store’s current communications director. It required extensive back-and-forth communication with the city’s local health department, and today, they still get regular check-ins from officials to ensure everything’s up to snuff.
“Ideally, I would like to think that as we discover the benefits of reducing packaging, health departments and government entities will adjust their thinking and use a process like ours as an example for what can be done safely and effectively. And maybe incorporate those guidelines to allow others to do the same,” says Rolston. However as regulations seem to grow stricter each year, he suspects that were staff to pitch the bottle-return program to regulators tomorrow, he’s not sure if it would fly.
When and Where Bulk Works
While the U.S. embeds disposability into its regulatory, economic, and cultural fabric, countries in Europe have recently made headway on normalizing a culture of refill and reuse. In many cases, it’s supermarkets taking the leap.
After six years of running a small, package-free grocery store in downtown London, Catherine Conway launched a consulting agency in 2013 to help businesses large and small develop fully integrated bulk sections. She has developed branded, packaging-free sections for Planet Organic and Waitrose — which Conway likens to the U.K.’s version of Whole Foods, which launched Waitrose Unpacked in June.
Minimizing packaging waste is an explicit goal in Conway’s work. “I think the difference between a zero waste bulk section and a supermarket one tends to be that in a supermarket, you’re offered a disposable paper or plastic bag and told to fill up as much as you want and take it away,” she says. “A lot of people think zero waste is like the emperor’s new clothes, like, ‘What’s new here? We’ve seen bulk sections for years!’ And I always say, ‘Yeah, but what packaging did they give you?’”
Often, when bulk sections fail to attract a refillable audience, it is because the supermarket in question has not allotted the proper resources — supervision, marketing, maintenance, employee training, and sometimes special infrastructure. Conway sees it as her challenge to convince stores and their customers that efficient refill stations are not just doable, they’re necessary. Making them work just needs a little creativity.
She trains stores to consider the logic of what they put in bulk. She offers chickpeas as an example: “I always ask them, ‘Well, how many chickpeas do you actually sell? How many people still take dried chickpeas home, soak them overnight, cook them for 40 minutes, and then blitz them up into hummus? And how many people just take your pots of hummus off the shelf?” In this scenario, supermarkets should not be filling gravity containers with chickpeas, she argues, but cut out the steps in between, and offer refillable hummus.
Conway says Waitrose, her biggest client thus far, has invested heavily in the design and messaging of bulk throughout the entire store. “Unless you’re into the world of zero waste, people won’t look for a section, and they won’t know what to do,” she says. “Also, you spent the last 30, 40 years telling them all they should care about is convenience and price, so currently all they care about is convenience and price.”
In a literal sense, retailers need to drive the point home. “You need the customer engaging with this concept [outside the store], because they’ve got to remember to bring the right containers.”
There currently aren’t quantitative analytics to determine just how many tons of garbage could be eliminated by shifting to a bulk-refill model of shopping. Supermarkets don’t even monitor this information, though Conway says that through some of her projects, comprehensive data may soon be available.
Despite the many challenges to widespread zero-waste shopping — and the urgent need for it to scale up — Conway remains hopeful. “I always tell people that the kids in school now that are being taught to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ are your employees and your consumers of the future,” she says. “And they cannot go through all of this schooling … and come out of it wanting to live how we currently live. So we are going to have to change how we do things. And those that do survive in the packaging industry will realize that they have to go with it.”
Lloyd Taco faces backlash from all sides of the political aisle after choosing to park outside an ICE detention facility. | Photo: funkyfrogstock / Shutterstock
Plus, American-made cheese wins big at the World Cheese Awards, and more news to start your day
Buffalo taco truck forced to apologize for apologizing for serving ICE agents
A local taco truck has found itself stuck in the middle of an incendiary culture war that has resulted in an apology, an apology for the apology, and between ongoing social media criticism and a loss of business, no clear end in sight.
The ordeal began on October 23, when Lloyd Taco, a Buffalo-based company that owns four food trucks and two brick-and-mortar restaurants, tweeted that one of its food trucks would be parked outside the Department of Homeland Security in Batavia, also known as the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, which is run by ICE — a fact that some Twitter users picked up on, leading to critical responses, with some pointing out the irony of offering tacos outside a federal agency that detains immigrants, some of them from Mexico.
The next day, Lloyd tweeted an apology and promised to donate all of the sales from October 23 to an organization supporting migrant rights. “There is no excuse for what happened and we have already begun to update our internal procedures to ensure future taco truck stops and events align with our company’s values,” the company wrote in a statement.
Then an even bigger backlash to the original backlash started: some people, including Republican office-holders and ICE itself, interpreted the apology as “a slap against police and law enforcement,” Buffalo News reports. At a news conference held on October 28, Lloyd co-founder Pete Cimino apologized for the initial apology, calling that decision “hastily made” and overly reactive to criticism.
“We make tacos, not war,” Cimino said at the news conference. “We serve all communities. We go to all neighborhoods. We are not political. Why would we be? How can any business choose sides in our politically divided country and ever succeed?”
According to Cimino, Lloyd has received more than 5,000 Facebook comments — 95 percent of them negative, and judging from a quick scan of comments left on recent posts, many of them in support of law enforcement — and three canceled truck visits, WIVB reports. The double-reverse apology doesn’t seem to have helped alleviate the situation; if anything, now it seems that people are angry that Lloyd is trying to remain politically neutral in a time when few can afford to take that stance.
And in other news…
For the first time ever, an American-made cheese took home the top prize in the World Cheese Awards (France, meanwhile, didn’t even make the top five). [MSN]
The Impossible Burger has proven a big hit at Burger King, driving the chain’s strongest growth since 2015. [Restaurant Dive]
Denny’s has joined the plant-based wagon with a Beyond Burger. [Food Business News]
For the first time since 2014, Starbucks isn’t doing a special Halloween drink. [The Takeout]
Amazon Prime members will now get Amazon Fresh, the grocery delivery service, for free (with some caveats). [The Verge]
A McDonald’s in Massachusetts had to apologize and remove a Halloween decoration that included someone hanging from a tree. [NY Post]
Earlier this year, a Singapore restaurant was found using a claw machine game in which you catch your (still living) lobster dinner. [Straits Times]
A case for not calling vegan meat and cheese “fake.” [Tenderly]
Looks like yesterday’s Air Force One meal got into the Halloween spirit, with a mystery food item in the top-left corner, to boot:
Jasmine Moy went from server to miserable law firm associate to one of the go-to lawyers in the restaurant world
InHow I Got My Job, folks from across the food and restaurant industry answer Eater’s questions about, well, how they got their job. Today’s installment: Jasmine Moy.
There’s enough to worry about when you’re building a restaurant or food business, let alone navigating its legalities. Instead of tackling it on their own, many chefs and restaurateurs turn to Jasmine Moy to untangle it all. Moy is a business attorney who specializes in the hospitality industry, meaning she knows the ins and outs of funding start-ups, forming a business, negotiating for real estate, and more. She’s worked with the likes of Kwame Onwuachi, Kristen Kish, and Andrea Reusing ― and she’s offered smart insight on Eater on subjects from tip pooling to getting a good cookbook deal.
But while Moy has become one of the biggest names in her field, it took her awhile to discover that this perfect marriage of her interests ― hospitality law ― even existed. In the following Q&A, Moy explains how she went from a “miserable” corporate lawyer saddled with debt to running her own practice that allows her to spend time with her favorite people in the world: those in the service industry.
Eater: What does your job involve?
Jasmine Moy: Mostly drafting and negotiating all the contracts you need to start, run, and grow a successful hospitality company, with some business advising and hospitality consulting tossed in for good measure.
What did you originally want to do when you started your career?
I mostly went to law school because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and thought it would be smart to buy myself a few more years to decide. The thing about law school is that the debt it often puts you in quite limits the type of work you can afford to take afterward.
Student loansare such a part of the conversation around higher education right now. Has your career trajectory been impacted by debt in any way?
Oh God, yes, 100 percent. I had to take corporate jobs at a series of big firms in litigation just because that’s what was available, and I think my initial loan repayment amounts were like $1,700 a month. That’s a second rent for someone in their early 20s. So I took these jobs I didn’t want, doing work I hated doing, working 100 hours a week, losing my friends and social life, and did that for about eight years until I thought I might have a mental breakdown when I turned 30.
What was your first job? What did it involve?
My very first job was as a hostess at a suburban California Pizza Kitchen (where I also was a food runner and then a server when I was old enough to serve wine), and honestly, it’s where I fell in love with restaurants and the camaraderie and work ethic of the hospitality industry. I continued to wait tables all through college (at various Lettuce Entertain You restaurants in Chicago) and law school (at the Soho House in New York). There are literally two kinds of people in the world ― those who have worked in the service industry and those who haven’t ― and I really only ever want to hang with the former.
How did you get involved with restaurant industry law?
I was miserable practicing corporate litigation, had dreams of quitting my job and traveling the world, and so signed up for a travel writing class at New York University taught by David Farley. Farley taught me how to pitch stories, but the only things I knew anything about were food trends and chefs because I was eating out so often. So I started pitching stories and writing about food for the Wall Street Journal Off Duty section, Esquire.com’s food vertical, and Time Out New York, and doing some advertorial work for print magazines. I was interviewing a lot of chefs and eventually one of them suggested that I should be a lawyer for chefs. It turns out that’s an actual job I had no idea existed.
So I started looking for local attorneys who were practicing law in the restaurant space. I interviewed with one small prominent restaurant law firm in the city that said they’d hire me if I sent them clients. So I sent them clients, and then they (I wish I were kidding, but this is not a joke) said they didn’t have a job to offer me, but they wanted me to write company newsletters for them as a marketing intern. After I “HARD PASS”-ed those bros, I was introduced to Tom Colicchio’s first cousin who was representing a lot of chefs at the time. He luckily had just had an employee quit and needed an extra hand. I’ll always be thankful that he had the patience to take in someone without relevant experience ― it was definitely the break I needed. I worked with him for a few years before going out on my own, and now I run my own practice.
What’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in that field?
Honestly, going out on my own was really scary. It meant not knowing how many clients would come with me or whether I was going to be able to find enough clients to keep my bills paid. It meant finding the confidence that I could do the best work for my people without having the safety net of more experienced attorneys around me when I needed it. Thankfully, I was living in an incredibly affordable, rent-stabilized fifth floor walk-up in Washington Heights and had gotten my loans down to a more reasonable $900 per month so I didn’t need much income to support myself and was able to manage it all without being too uncomfortable.
When was the first time you felt successful?
I was quoted in the New York Times once for a story and, while it may not seem like much, it was exceptionally legitimizing at a time when I needed it. It’s also really nice when a notable chef I’ve never met hunts me down to say they’ve heard I do good work and hires me.
Did you have any setbacks? What were they?
I’m a pretty typical Virgo. I plan ahead and am risk averse, so I fortunately haven’t had any major blows. (Yet!) But I get emotionally invested in my clients so it always feels like a setback to not get certain things I want in deal-making, or when a client’s restaurant isn’t doing as well as they’d hoped, or a Department of Health inspection doesn’t go well, or a treasured space falls through ― even if this is all part of the regular course of business.
Limone Creative
Jasmine Moy, center, speaks on a panel.
What were the most important skills that got you where you are now?
I like people, and I think (hope!) people generally like me in return. That goes a long way in finding clients, earning a client’s trust, and working successfully and communicating amicably with opposing counsel. I’m not sure this is a skill, per se, but because the work I do is in such a niche field, I have a particularly good sense of what market rates are for hospitality contracts (for chefs or food and beverage companies or restaurant groups), and that empowers me to ask for things for my clients and to feel justified that my asks are reasonable ones. So it makes me a superior negotiator to someone who isn’t primarily working in this field.
Do you have, or did you ever have, a mentor in your field? How has that made a difference?
I have a dear friend, Richard, who is an attorney (he’s older and has been a partner at firms and argued in front of the Supreme Court) and so he’s always offered priceless and grounding guidance as to how to get out of the job I hated, how to get paid better at the job I took next, and how to function as a solo legal practitioner.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
The first time I got a client a very significant increase in pay on a consulting contract. I made $75,000 appear overnight for this woman where it previously had not existed, and I was like, “This is why I do this job!” It just feels so good. Probably not as good as having an extra $75,000 feels, but I’ll take what I can get.
What would surprise people, or what is something you didn’t know going into your job?
I never cease to be surprised that I can make a nice living off of doing such a limited range of work, but I think generally people might be surprised to learn about how much of my time is spent trying to convince people of their own worth ― being a life counselor as much as I’m a business counselor. Business partners need to have really hard conversations about life, death, disagreements, etcetera, when they start new ventures, and it’s my job to facilitate those difficult conversations. Attorneys are meant to be trusted advisers, but I sometimes find myself in the seat of a therapist, especially when partnerships or businesses are going awry.
What’s one of the coolest things you’ve gotten to do?
Generally, I love industry gossip, so it’s fun to know about certain exciting projects/deals for months and months before they are announced to the general public. I once got invited to one of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s food salon parties. I was by miles the least famous person in that room which was equal parts thrilling and embarrassing! Getting to chat with David Byrne and Wyatt Cenac and to also meet industry folks like Edouardo Jordan was a perfect night for me and I’ll treasure it. Lastly, knowing enough people to get last-minute reservations at places like Red Hook Tavern or whatever are decent perks as well, if I’m honest.
How are you making change in your industry?
I’m actively searching out underrepresented folks (of all kinds ― race, gender, sexual orientation) and recommending them to hotel clients and developers for projects for which they’d be a great fit. It’s mostly still white men making the final choices at the end of the day, but I’m trying to get a more diverse group of talent into these gigs since I’m now finally :insert musical notes emoji: in the room where it happens.
What would you have done differently in your career?
I obviously wish I’d figured out sooner that there was a career for me that married my law degree to my actual interests. It would have saved me so much anguish in my late 20s!
What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve been given?
Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want ― the worst that can happen is that they say no.
What advice would you give someone who wants your job?
Provided they’ve learned the foundations of corporate legal practice (which they could do at any firm that was appropriately supporting their attorneys), the best way to thrive in the legal industry (whether with a firm or solo practice) is to always have work. The way to always have work is to be generous with your time and your favors, earn as much goodwill as you can, make friends in the industry you’d like to represent (though it honestly helps to be someone who will make friends anywhere ― you never know who will know your next client), and do good work. Referrals will follow!
Amy McKeeveris a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Jasmine Moy. Illustrations from the Noun Project: camera by Dhika Hernandita; covered dish by Made by Made; wine by Made by Made; lightbulb by Maxim Kulikov; hand writing by Pongsakorn.
How America’s best bartenders all became liquor brand ambassadors
This past summer, Rebekah Pepler took to the New York Times to declare that the Aperol Spritz, a summer patio favorite, is actually a bad cocktail, due largely to its titular ingredient, Aperol. “Though it contains ingredients like bitter oranges and rhubarb, the bottle skews saccharine at best, with a syruplike finish,” she said of the drink. Though she’s a fan of the bitterness of other amari, Pepler felt that Aperol made for a sad spritz, and its ubiquity over Hot Girl Summer merited a counterpoint. The op-ed inspired loud opinions on either side of the Aper-aisle, but it also cemented the drink’s popularity. The Aperol Spritz is well known enough for a takedown in the paper of record.
Five years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case because most people (outside of Milan, at least) didn’t know what an Aperol Spritz was or that it was something they should have strong feelings over. But the rise of the bitter aperitif cocktail, like many cocktail trends, has been growing steadily. In 2013, Imbibe Magazine partnered with Campari to launch a Negroni Week, which has now “grown from about 120 participating venues to almost 10,000 venues around the world.” Negronis shifted from drinks seasoned bartenders served each other as signifiers of their superior taste to something found on cocktail menus everywhere. Campari, and its sister aperitif Aperol, have become ubiquitous and it’s not simply because the American palate has grown more sophisticated.
Like practically everything, the international success of negronis can be traced back to money. Campari, which owns Aperol, has staged an aggressive marketing campaign for its brands in the U.S., utilizing — in addition to traditional advertising — the relatively new emergence of “brand ambassadors” to get the word out. Whereas liquor reps, essentially door-to-door salespeople of booze, used to be the go-to way to get a brand stocked at a bar, now bartenders will partner with brands directly, travel the world teaching other bartenders how to mix drinks with a specific liquor, or just make sure to use that ingredient in their cocktails. It’s a role Vinepair describes as “someone [usually a bartender] hired to represent a particular spirit or collection of spirits to buyers and consumers.” “The difference is that being an ambassador is living the brand,” says Damon Boelte, co-owner of Grand Army Bar in Brooklyn, who has done consulting work for Brooklyn Gin, and is now the Senior Portfolio Manager for Branca USA. It’s not just about selling more bottles, it’s about personifying the brand, and influencing the associations with the product, whether it’s highbrow or fashionably lowbrow, valuable for its rarity or for its accessibility.
But the “brand ambassador” is a contentious job. As mixology has become the norm, the perception of the bartender has shifted from a job someone takes up to work their way through college, to a craft that requires its own skills and expertise. This, of course, is a good thing for those dedicated to the art of tending bar, but it also means that there are different stakes (and ethics) when it comes to partnerships made for money or other perks. One issue is how brand ambassadorship can essentially mean that brands can pay for bar placement. Pay-to-play is already rampant issue in the industry, but the ambassador model keeps influence one step removed, allowing brands to hide behind the idea that they’re just introducing people to new flavors. Still, larger brands generally have more money to spend, edging out smaller competitors, so the practice calls into question which ingredients bartenders are choosing because of quality and which they’re choosing to get paid.
Bars, with their neon beer signs and branded pint glasses, have never been spaces considered too sacred for advertising. Where high end or high profile restaurants typically face criticism for partnering with brands — as Mission Chinese Food chef Danny Bowien did when he partnered with AriZona Iced Tea last spring — a critic or discerning customer typically won’t think twice of a menu that specifies the use of Tito’s vodka or Four Roses bourbon. Bartenders need to work with outside products, after all — we have yet to see a truly farm-to-table bar where not only all the mixers are homemade, but all the base liquors are too.
But that doesn’t mean we should accept the existence of liquor ambassadors as something harmless or wholesome. There’s still little regulation on how much brand influence is too much behind the bar: Bartenders working with brands typically don’t disclose compensation and the industry must contend with liquor laws that change from state to state, making it difficult to standardize the role. “There are a lot of bars who secretly take money from larger spirit companies for preferred menu placements, and that is just wrong; actually, it’s illegal, but there are ways of getting around it,” says Boelte. “Putting extra money in your pocket for the sake of making money and not really showcasing the partnership just seems sketchy.”
“Pay to play creates a false sense of what bars would really choose to place on their menus, in their wells and on back bars,” Simon Ford, co-founder of the 86 Co., told Liquor.com. “Using the same gin in every gin drink reeks of payola and shows that a bar doesn’t really experiment to find the best gin possible for that particular cocktail.” According Stacey Swenson, a Campari advocate and bartender at Dante, large liquor brands and their brand ambassadors, at their worst, can steamroll the market. “We may feel pressure to use a certain product over another because of a personal relationship or because some brands have more money to spend than others,” she said. “Smaller brands can definitely be hurt by some of the bigger guys with big budgets and expense accounts who will inevitably have more exposure.”
But small brands have also used this system to their benefit, like the elderflower liqueur St-Germain, for example, which exploded onto the market in 2007 and, for a few years, seemed to be the key ingredient in every bar’s specialty cocktail. The sell was that “real bartenders are using it!” As Boelte puts it, “St-Germain was in the forefront of what was to become a roller coaster ride for newer entrepreneurial spirits, and it even spawned a lot of the excavation of other rare and lost spirits from around the world.” It was a small brand that couldn’t have competed with the InBevs and Bacardis of the world — or so was the case in 2007; it’s since been bought by you guessed it, Bacardi. So while big brands have considerable financial sway, brand ambassadors do have an opportunity to champion exciting, lesser known liquors. “I only bring in brands that I feel are timeless, or at least stand the chance to be,” Boelte says of both his bartending and brand ambassador work. “But I also don’t like to carry any of the gigantic brands that you can get everywhere else.”
Mia Mastroianni, Head Bartender at Soho House West Hollywood and a frequent guest on Bar Rescue, clarifies, “I am not financially compensated by the brands that I choose to promote via social media,” and instead attributes “[the popularity of the Negroni] significantly to the inception of Negroni Week in 2013,” when it started as a charity drive among bartenders, but was quickly co-opted by Campari as a way to promote their brand. Prior to Negroni Week’s launch, Mastroianni wasn’t familiar with bitter Italian liqueurs, but became a fan of Campari, Aperol, and other amaros because she appreciated what they brought to her cocktails. Looked at under these circumstances, the concept of the brand ambassador — someone who can introduce not just customers, but also bartenders to exciting ingredients that they’d otherwise never hear about — doesn’t seem quite so insidious.
It’s maybe unnerving to think that the cocktails we’ve come to love in a way that feels spontaneous are actually carefully planned and paid for. Your love of Boulevardiers isn’t organic, but was Inceptioned into your brain. That’s sort of the way of things, and when done right, it at least gives you the opportunity to try something new. Swenson says she hasn’t questioned a bartender’s integrity for partnering with a brand, and that “as long as there’s an appropriate amount of transparency involved it’s okay for food and beverage professionals to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way.” Similarly, Boelte says, “If I were being paid by a company, or if I were a company paying someone, I would expect full transparency and promotion, in both directions.” But that appropriate amount remains up for debate.
How America’s best bartenders all became liquor brand ambassadors
This past summer, Rebekah Pepler took to the New York Times to declare that the Aperol Spritz, a summer patio favorite, is actually a bad cocktail, due largely to its titular ingredient, Aperol. “Though it contains ingredients like bitter oranges and rhubarb, the bottle skews saccharine at best, with a syruplike finish,” she said of the drink. Though she’s a fan of the bitterness of other amari, Pepler felt that Aperol made for a sad spritz, and its ubiquity over Hot Girl Summer merited a counterpoint. The op-ed inspired loud opinions on either side of the Aper-aisle, but it also cemented the drink’s popularity. The Aperol Spritz is well known enough for a takedown in the paper of record.
Five years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case because most people (outside of Milan, at least) didn’t know what an Aperol Spritz was or that it was something they should have strong feelings over. But the rise of the bitter aperitif cocktail, like many cocktail trends, has been growing steadily. In 2013, Imbibe Magazine partnered with Campari to launch a Negroni Week, which has now “grown from about 120 participating venues to almost 10,000 venues around the world.” Negronis shifted from drinks seasoned bartenders served each other as signifiers of their superior taste to something found on cocktail menus everywhere. Campari, and its sister aperitif Aperol, have become ubiquitous and it’s not simply because the American palate has grown more sophisticated.
Like practically everything, the international success of negronis can be traced back to money. Campari, which owns Aperol, has staged an aggressive marketing campaign for its brands in the U.S., utilizing — in addition to traditional advertising — the relatively new emergence of “brand ambassadors” to get the word out. Whereas liquor reps, essentially door-to-door salespeople of booze, used to be the go-to way to get a brand stocked at a bar, now bartenders will partner with brands directly, travel the world teaching other bartenders how to mix drinks with a specific liquor, or just make sure to use that ingredient in their cocktails. It’s a role Vinepair describes as “someone [usually a bartender] hired to represent a particular spirit or collection of spirits to buyers and consumers.” “The difference is that being an ambassador is living the brand,” says Damon Boelte, co-owner of Grand Army Bar in Brooklyn, who has done consulting work for Brooklyn Gin, and is now the Senior Portfolio Manager for Branca USA. It’s not just about selling more bottles, it’s about personifying the brand, and influencing the associations with the product, whether it’s highbrow or fashionably lowbrow, valuable for its rarity or for its accessibility.
But the “brand ambassador” is a contentious job. As mixology has become the norm, the perception of the bartender has shifted from a job someone takes up to work their way through college, to a craft that requires its own skills and expertise. This, of course, is a good thing for those dedicated to the art of tending bar, but it also means that there are different stakes (and ethics) when it comes to partnerships made for money or other perks. One issue is how brand ambassadorship can essentially mean that brands can pay for bar placement. Pay-to-play is already rampant issue in the industry, but the ambassador model keeps influence one step removed, allowing brands to hide behind the idea that they’re just introducing people to new flavors. Still, larger brands generally have more money to spend, edging out smaller competitors, so the practice calls into question which ingredients bartenders are choosing because of quality and which they’re choosing to get paid.
Bars, with their neon beer signs and branded pint glasses, have never been spaces considered too sacred for advertising. Where high end or high profile restaurants typically face criticism for partnering with brands — as Mission Chinese Food chef Danny Bowien did when he partnered with AriZona Iced Tea last spring — a critic or discerning customer typically won’t think twice of a menu that specifies the use of Tito’s vodka or Four Roses bourbon. Bartenders need to work with outside products, after all — we have yet to see a truly farm-to-table bar where not only all the mixers are homemade, but all the base liquors are too.
But that doesn’t mean we should accept the existence of liquor ambassadors as something harmless or wholesome. There’s still little regulation on how much brand influence is too much behind the bar: Bartenders working with brands typically don’t disclose compensation and the industry must contend with liquor laws that change from state to state, making it difficult to standardize the role. “There are a lot of bars who secretly take money from larger spirit companies for preferred menu placements, and that is just wrong; actually, it’s illegal, but there are ways of getting around it,” says Boelte. “Putting extra money in your pocket for the sake of making money and not really showcasing the partnership just seems sketchy.”
“Pay to play creates a false sense of what bars would really choose to place on their menus, in their wells and on back bars,” Simon Ford, co-founder of the 86 Co., told Liquor.com. “Using the same gin in every gin drink reeks of payola and shows that a bar doesn’t really experiment to find the best gin possible for that particular cocktail.” According Stacey Swenson, a Campari advocate and bartender at Dante, large liquor brands and their brand ambassadors, at their worst, can steamroll the market. “We may feel pressure to use a certain product over another because of a personal relationship or because some brands have more money to spend than others,” she said. “Smaller brands can definitely be hurt by some of the bigger guys with big budgets and expense accounts who will inevitably have more exposure.”
But small brands have also used this system to their benefit, like the elderflower liqueur St-Germain, for example, which exploded onto the market in 2007 and, for a few years, seemed to be the key ingredient in every bar’s specialty cocktail. The sell was that “real bartenders are using it!” As Boelte puts it, “St-Germain was in the forefront of what was to become a roller coaster ride for newer entrepreneurial spirits, and it even spawned a lot of the excavation of other rare and lost spirits from around the world.” It was a small brand that couldn’t have competed with the InBevs and Bacardis of the world — or so was the case in 2007; it’s since been bought by you guessed it, Bacardi. So while big brands have considerable financial sway, brand ambassadors do have an opportunity to champion exciting, lesser known liquors. “I only bring in brands that I feel are timeless, or at least stand the chance to be,” Boelte says of both his bartending and brand ambassador work. “But I also don’t like to carry any of the gigantic brands that you can get everywhere else.”
Mia Mastroianni, Head Bartender at Soho House West Hollywood and a frequent guest on Bar Rescue, clarifies, “I am not financially compensated by the brands that I choose to promote via social media,” and instead attributes “[the popularity of the Negroni] significantly to the inception of Negroni Week in 2013,” when it started as a charity drive among bartenders, but was quickly co-opted by Campari as a way to promote their brand. Prior to Negroni Week’s launch, Mastroianni wasn’t familiar with bitter Italian liqueurs, but became a fan of Campari, Aperol, and other amaros because she appreciated what they brought to her cocktails. Looked at under these circumstances, the concept of the brand ambassador — someone who can introduce not just customers, but also bartenders to exciting ingredients that they’d otherwise never hear about — doesn’t seem quite so insidious.
It’s maybe unnerving to think that the cocktails we’ve come to love in a way that feels spontaneous are actually carefully planned and paid for. Your love of Boulevardiers isn’t organic, but was Inceptioned into your brain. That’s sort of the way of things, and when done right, it at least gives you the opportunity to try something new. Swenson says she hasn’t questioned a bartender’s integrity for partnering with a brand, and that “as long as there’s an appropriate amount of transparency involved it’s okay for food and beverage professionals to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way.” Similarly, Boelte says, “If I were being paid by a company, or if I were a company paying someone, I would expect full transparency and promotion, in both directions.” But that appropriate amount remains up for debate.
A new film from Focus Features, CNN Films, and HBO Max will spotlight the life and legacy of Anthony Bourdain. | Photo: David Scott Holloway/CNN
The film will be available in theaters, on TV, and via streaming
The extraordinary life of chef, writer, and television host Anthony Bourdain will be the subject of an upcoming documentary from Focus Features, CNN Films, and HBO Max. Focus Features, which announced the news on Friday, will release the documentary in theaters first; the film will be available via TV (on CNN) and streaming (on HBO Max) afterward.
Morgan Neville, whose 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom won an Academy Award, will direct and produce the film. “Anthony Bourdain did more to help us understand each other than just about anyone in the history of television. He connected with people not in spite of his flaws, but because of them,” Neville, whose work also includes David Chang’s Ugly Delicious and the Mister Rogers biopic Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, said in a statement. “To have the opportunity to tell his story is humbling.”
Per Focus Features, Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins of Zero Point Zero — the production company behind Bourdain shows like Parts Unknown and No Reservations — will be consulting producers for the film, alongside Bourdain’s agent and literary executor, Kimberly Witherspoon. Bourdain’s estate will provide access to materials such as family photos, home movies, letters, and music.
CNN, home to Parts Unknown, first announced a feature-length documentary about the late chef in August 2018, two months after Bourdain died by suicide while filming an episode of Parts Unknown in France. Bourdain, a charismatic and influential figure beloved by fans and fellow chefs around the world, has been memorialized since his death through multiple books, a biography in the works, a Culinary Institute of America scholarship, and an annual “Bourdain Day,” among other tributes.
Microwaves, hot plates, and toaster ovens can get the job done
Eater Young Gun Lucas Sin (‘19) is something of an expert when it comes to small-space cooking: in college, he ran a multi-course noodle popup in his dorm room, serving up to 250 people a weekend using little more than a microwave and a mini fridge. Thanksgiving was no different: Sin grew up in Hong Kong and didn’t travel back to Asia for the holiday, instead opting to stay on near-empty campus with a crew of other international students, who did a sort of multicultural Thanksgiving their way. Working with limited space and resources, Sin concocted elaborate Asian-American feasts for the holiday. So we figured he was the perfect person to talk to for some tips and tricks on executing a Thanksgiving of your own, dorm room (or tiny apartment!) style:
Basic Small-Space Cooking Equipment
The key assumptions here are that you have access to a microwave, a toaster oven, a hot plate, and an electric kettle or water boiler. “Thanksgiving is all about texture — there’s a time for mushy and a time for crispy, and a successful dinner is all about balancing the two,” says Sin. These tools will give you the ability to do both— the microwave and kettle provide wet heat for softening food, while the toaster oven and hot plate provide dry heat to care of the crisping.
You Don’t Need an Oven to Cook Turkey — Or Chicken, or Duck
Shoving an entire turkey in a toaster oven is challenging. But break a turkey (or, as Sin prefers to make for Thanksgiving, chicken or duck) into smaller parts, and then you have options. “Turkey breasts or chicken thighs can go in the toaster oven,” Sin says. “Or you can use a hot plate to make chicken [or duck] under a brick, which is nice for small spaces because it doesn’t smoke the room up too much.” A third, more Chinese-influenced option is to use the kettle to make a riff off of Hainanese chicken: “Fill the kettle with water, ginger, scallions, garlic, and salt. Bring it to a boil, drop in chicken thighs, then turn the heat off and let it sit for 30 minutes. As the temperature of the water drops, it brings up the temperature of the meat, cooking the chicken thighs gently, almost like sous-vide, so they come out perfectly succulent. If you have a thermometer on hand, you want chicken breasts to reach 145 F and chicken thighs to reach 165 F or even 170 F,” Sin says.
Cook Side Dishes in the Microwave
This is where having that one-two punch of a microwave and toaster oven comes in handy. “One of my favorite things to do with any type of hard root vegetables (carrots, parsnips, brussels sprouts) is to wash them, season heavily with spices and oil, put them in a bowl covered with plastic wrap and zap them for 5 minutes in the microwave. It always produces a perfectly steamed vegetable, because they’re steaming with their own moisture,” says Sin. “Once they’re al dente, I throw them in the toaster oven at the highest temperature to give it a nice char.”
Sweet potatoes can be microwaved whole, “just be sure to poke some holes into the skin or else they’ll explode,” says Sin. He recommends cooking for 8 minutes on low heat, unwrapped, then splitting them open and seasoning. Green bean casseroles are easy to make in the microwave (just steam the green beans first using the technique above), and finished with French’s fried onions. Finally, make your own raw cranberry sauce: “Just blitz up raw cranberries in a NutriBullet with sugar, honey, orange zest, and ginger, and it looks and tastes great,” Sin says. “I love the canned stuff too, but fresh is a revelation.”
Buy a Pie
Store-bought is always a viable option here, or, Sin recommends boxed pudding mix. “All you need is a bowl. Or if you have a freezer, no-bake cheesecakes are great.” And if you do go the store bought route, particularly for pie, Sin has a final tip: “I always microwave premade apple pie, then put ice cream on top of it. It makes it feel fresh out of the oven.”
Jamie Feldmar is a Los Angeles-based writer and cookbook author. See more atjamiefeldmar.comand follow her@jfeldmar.. Juliette Tomais an illustrator based in Los Angeles.
In a video shared on Twitter, the chain highlights the fact that November 3 is a Sunday — the day of the week that rival chicken chain Chick-fil-A is famously closed, in keeping with Chick-fil-A’s religious roots. It’s another callback to the beginning of this sandwich frenzy, when Popeyes and Chick-fil-A sniped at each other on Twitter as fans of the respective chains contributed to the escalating mayhem with memes and jokes that only helped draw publicity to the sandwich.
I’m sure reactions to this reignited rivalry, which is definitely not a manufactured marketing scheme designed to inflame fans’ passion and increase sales at both chains, will be extremely calm and rational.
And in other news…
Two Sonoma wineries were destroyed by California’s Kincade wildfire this weekend. [Wine Spectator]
The drive-thru isn’t dead yet: chains like Chipotle and McDonald’s are betting on high-tech drive-thrus for the future of fast food. [Insider]
Food & Wine profiles Rocco DiSpirito, the star chef best known for making waves at Manhattan’s Union Pacific. [F&W]
Budweiser is facing weak sales in China and in the U.S. [CNN]
Foodgod Jonathan Cheban — a.k.a. Kim Kardashian’s pal who represents the worst of viral Instagram food — has legally changed his name to Foodgod. [TMZ]
Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19328421/492615168.jpg.jpg)
Melissa Renwick/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Lloyd Taco faces backlash from all sides of the political aisle after choosing to park outside an ICE detention facility. | Photo: 
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19320238/limone_monica_conference_1.jpg)
Limone Creative
Alfredo Ravanetti/
A new film from Focus Features, CNN Films, and HBO Max will spotlight the life and legacy of Anthony Bourdain. | Photo: David Scott Holloway/CNN
Popeyes: “The Sandwich is back.” | Photo: Popeyes
