Overlooking the patio at Optimism Brewing in Seattle | Suzi Pratt/Eater Seattle
Regulations around capacity, food, and to-go cocktails are just a few of the bar industry’s challenges
When the novel coronavirus picked up steam in March and blew through every industry imaginable, restaurants were a very visible victim: Dining rooms were forced to close, takeout became the new norm, and the ripple effects across the food chain were immediate.
But bars were also impacted immediately too — and without a ready pivot in sight. From the dive bars to the upscale cocktail lounges, owners and bartenders have gotten creative; but their challenges, as they navigate changing consumer habits, ever-shifting liquor laws, and reopening guidelines that differ vastly from restaurants’, have been acute.
Beth McKibben of Eater Atlanta, Eve Batey of Eater San Francisco, and Ashok Selvam of Eater Chicago came together for our Eater Talks event series, to discuss the state of bars and drinking in the U.S. right now. Below are lightly edited excerpts from their conversation, moderated by Eater staff writer Jaya Saxena, as well as a full video recording of the talk.
It’s pretty hard to argue that bars should operate normally right now.
Eve Batey, editor of Eater San Francisco: “The Newsom administration in California says that bars provide particular threats, and those threats are also inherent to bar culture and what we love about bars — which is that you hang out and you talk to people. That when you drink, you speak more loudly — which I think we have all experienced — and then when people get loud, you get louder and everyone gets louder, and the louder you speak, the more droplets you’re sending out so the more everyone is bring exposed. And anyone who’s been to college who’s made a bad sexual decision knows that alcohol lowers your inhibitions and you’re less likely to wear masks.”
Certain regulations and legislation can help bars adapt to survive the pandemic.
Ashok Selvam, editor of Eater Chicago: “Before this whole pandemic, Chicago bars weren’t allowed to set up on sidewalk patios... so that’s some emergency relief.”
Beth McKibben, editor of Eater Atlanta: “Right now, the city of Atlanta has a temporary order in place that allows restaurants and bars to allow to-go beer and wine, but that does not include cocktails. It hasn’t stopped restaurants and bars from doing that, but I also think the city is just kind of looking the other way regarding that, because they know this industry has been hit so hard that they’re not going to try and police that.
We also just had a bill that was passed in the General Assembly and the governor just signed it, but it was actually in the works prior to the pandemic, that’s going to eventually allow restaurants, bars, certain convenience stores, liquor stores, grocery stores to deliver beer, wine, and liquor to homes. So that will be a big boost for the restaurant and bar industry, because they’ll be able to deliver those things without concern.”
... but other regulations (or lack thereof) seem to be making it difficult.
Batey: “In California, the Alcohol Beverage Control, or the ABC, has a lot of rules that are very difficult to understand, very difficult to parse. I’ll use the example of the food issue, of ‘bona fide food’ [the term used by the ABC]. It’s this vague thing — what constitutes a real meal? Before this panel, Jaya was mentioning that there’s a bar she goes [in NYC] that will give you popcorn with your [drink]. Well you know what, I had popcorn for dinner last night — it’s a real meal! But according to the ABC, it’s not, probably.”
Selvam: “The food component is a particularly troublesome one in Chicago, because lawmakers over the decades have done their best to dismantle food truck culture, because a lot of restaurant owners or lobbyists had powerful clout positions and saw food trucks as a threat. So they’d be natural partners with bars that do not have kitchens to have a food partner, [but they aren’t there].
During this pandemic, lawmakers have been particularly flat-footed. To-go cocktails — they’ve been lobbying for this since March, and it took local government and state government until June to approve them, and they touted it as a lifeline to really help bars. But that’s a couple months of profits down the drain...
Similarly, permitting is so slow to secure a patio — and who’s going to advocate for you?
All of this just adds up; you can’t just look at the surface, you gotta look at the roots. In Chicago, for example, it’s illegal to have infusions in liquor, for some health code reason. Imagine if a bar could sell their version of, say, maple syrup-infused bourbon, or anything with fruit, for example. That’s something they could make a profit on. We had cocktail kits before, which sold the individual components like a bottle of liquor and mixtures, to create a cocktail. Well, compare that to an actual cocktail — I think the profit margins is like five times more than with a to-go drink. All these mechanisms were never in place, and it’s just sort of been a dismissal of something that’s really important cultural-wise.”
Are bars being unfairly targeted when it comes to regulations?
Batey: “Many bar owners that I’ve spoken to have said, ‘San Francisco is being particularly conservative when it comes to bars,’ or ‘Our health officer is retweeting things from anti-liquor groups’ and things like that. And I am very sympathetic to that. But at the same time, I will tell you that if you spoke to people who own gyms or people who own hair salons or people who own tattoo shops, they are also saying they’re singled out.”
Selvam: “Bars traditionally have been villainized. We can talk about Prohibition, we can talk about the Temperance movement. You mention the health clubs and how you feel like they’re being singled out — but there’s not that same history as with bars, as sinister spaces where [people] are up to no good. It kind of ignores the whole ‘third place’ mentality: Bars can be safe spaces if they have the right leadership, if they have the right ownership. It’s important to know that not all owners are created equal, not all bars are the same; the dive bar, the cocktail bar, the spring break bacchanalia — they’re going to have all different standards, you go there for different reasons and they’re going to have different responsibilities.
I think the food requirement is... a barrier to prevent more bars from opening, because finding the connections — the food trucks, finding the restaurant down the street — that takes time. It’s not easy just to call someone up. So there are fewer bars that have the capacity, the actual ability, to do that on short notice.”
McKibben: “Atlanta is a different situation, since we’ve always had bars and food together. That’s just how it’s been down here.... But what has really been striking is the identity crisis that the Atlanta bar scene is going through right now, that food has become such an important factor in surviving. Because they can’t do takeout cocktails legally here, and that’s what the bars are known for: cocktails, and the creativity that comes with that. That’s why people go and you sit and you have a drink and chill out and talk with your friends — and that’s just not happening here anymore. So food has become an absolute necessity. It’s an identity crisis: ‘Am I a bar or a restaurant? What am I?’ They don’t know.”
Selvam: “I don’t think anyone who is sane is arguing that bars shouldn’t be closed — because you linger more at a bar, you’re much more inclined to ignore social distancing rules. That’s not really an argument. But the ‘fairness’ is: Why weren’t we prepared? And why are we still continuing to take our time on things that that could be of assistance to the bar industry?”
Ultimately, regulations and relief that help bars stay closed may be the most helpful.
McKibben: “I asked one bar owner this weekend how do they feel about young people coming in, that may be coming in a group of 5 or 6 people, and they’re inebriated already from hopping down the BeltLine, which is our pedestrian trail in Atlanta. And he said, ‘It’s terrifying. A lot of them are coming in, they’re not wearing masks at all, and even though we’re telling them to wear a mask, they’re just not doing it. And so my staff is scared, I’m scared, patrons in the bar are scared. So we’ve had people leave since they don’t want to be around those folks.’”
Selvam: “A lot of bars are operating on egg shells; they’re terrified of inspectors shutting them down, there’s a lot of reluctance to open... There is a lot of caution and there’s a lot of worry that they’re going to be covered in the media and kind of perceived by the rest of the industry as messing it up for the rest of their colleagues.”
Batey: “There isn’t a ‘fair’ here. Everyone can get infected. So I understand why regulators are saying, ‘This is the line we’re drawing on what is reopening right now.’ And it breaks my heart, because I love bars and I love gyms, and my friends own gyms and they might lose everything, and my friends own bars and they may lose everything... But I also think that we can’t say, ‘Well these guys get to be open and these guys don’t, so we should be open and we should all be open,”’ because then we’re all gonna die.
So how do we make that work? The only solution is that we have specific legislation that supports bars and supports businesses that aren’t being allowed to reopen now. Are we going to get that? I don’t know. Does the state of California have that money? We’re just trying to make sure that people who unemployed have that money.
But what we’re really talking about with ‘fair’ is making sure the banks play ball to take care of landlords, so landlords can play ball and take care of bars, and at the federal level and the local level, we find ways to specifically support these businesses. So we don’t have to worry about ‘fair’ and who can open and who can’t, so we aren’t making people go out and work and feed me a cocktail while I’m sitting there and I infect them and everybody dies.”
Ken Chan, the executive chef of Taipei’s three-starred Le Palais. | Sam Yeh/Getty Images
New stars were awarded in Taipei, plus the city of Taichung got its own guide
On Monday, Michelin released its guide to Taiwan. The highly coveted star ratings were granted to and maintained by 30 restaurants in the country, which has managed to keep COVID-19 cases to a minimum throughout the pandemic.
This marks the third edition of Michelin’s Taipei guide, as well as its first ever guide to restaurants in the city of Taichung. Of the 30 restaurants awarded stars, four are in the new Taichung guide, while 26 are in Taipei.
In Taipei, four restaurants were awarded new ratings, and Cantonese restaurant Le Palais remained the city’s only restaurant with three Michelin stars, the highest possible rating. According to Focus Taiwan, Taipei is now home to six two-star restaurants, and 19 one-star restaurants, three of which were newly named this year. In Taichung, the Singaporean restaurant JL Studios, helmed by chef Jimmy Lim Tyan Yaw, debuted at two stars. The three other restaurants in Taichung debuted with one star each.
In response to the global pandemic still unfolding, two major restaurant award-granting organizations — the James Beard Foundation’s yearly awards, as well as the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list — announced they would not be granting awards or adding names to their lists in 2020. But Michelin, the French tire company that selectively and mysteriously awards highly sought after star ratings, has decided to continue with business more or less as usual.
It’s not entirely clear how Michelin intends to judge a restaurant’s quality during these turbulent times, particularly now that tightened borders and restrictions on dining will inhibit the ability to travel and visit restaurants multiple times, as the guide is known for doing. Nonetheless, Focus Taiwan reports that in a virtual press conference, Michelin’s international director Gwendal Poullennec confirmed that all restaurants awarded Michelin stars in Taiwan were visited more than once, and that the organization has moved to using locally trained inspectors.
In addition to the starred restaurants, Taipei also boasts 54 restaurants with Bib Gourmand awards, granted to “good quality, good value restaurants.” Also in the Taipei guide are 11 street food restaurants housed in the city’s night markets, and awarded a Michelin Plate, which recognizes an establishment serving “good food.”
Starbucks’s PSL is on menus as of today, August 25
Update, August 25: The Pumpkin Spice Latte is officially available on Starbucks menus as of today, three days before the initially rumored August 28 date. Happy autumn, everybody.
The pandemic has forced everyone to re-evaluate what a return to “normal” will mean. When this is all over, what will we bring with us from our quarantine times, and what will we discard from our previous lives? Will we still hug with impunity? Will to-go cocktails endure? Will we keep the momentum on the fight to defund the police? We can’t know. But if you hoped in the chaos that we wouldn’t have to go through the Pumpkin Spice Latte discourse in 2020, sorry, because one Starbucks location just announced the flavor is coming back on August 28. At least we know that the adage “You shouldn’t wear white or write ‘PSL’ in curly Pinterest font before labor day” is no more.
A location in California posted a photo of a liter of “Pumpkin Spice Flavoured Sauce,” which was apparently enough to whip fans into a frenzy, longing to fill their face masks with vaguely nutmeg-y breath. Apparently no one was put off at all by an opaque, apocalypse-surviving-cockroach brown jug of “flavoured sauce” because fandom is weird!
However, Starbucks wouldn’t confirm the official date. “We know that customers are eager for the return of their beloved fall drinks from Starbucks and will keep you looped in on any details,” a Starbucks representative told Business Insider, which also published a graph showing past Pumpkin Spice Latte release dates going back to 2011. The earliest official release was on August 27, 2019.
A post shared by Yosemite & Tozer (@starbucksyosemiteandtozer) on
Drumming up excitement for PSL feels like a remnant from another era. August 28 is fully summer, climate change has made “fall” feel ever less cool and cozy, and the pandemic has made the progression of months and seasons basically meaningless. But Starbucks pushes on, wrenching us back to a time when their biggest problem was Starbucks cups eradicating Christmas. A time when PSL was at first alluring, then basic, and then so ubiquitous is was pointless to hate. The rollout feels like an enticing call back. See? It’s just like it was last year!
Yucking yums helps no one. We all need to take comforts where we can, so go ahead and enjoy it if that’s your thing. But it’s also pretty pointless to crow in excitement about a corporate giant continuing to make a thing they’ve made every year for the past decade. Like, really? You think in a year of economic turmoil, where Starbucks lost half its traffic last quarter, they weren’t going to bring back the moneymaker? The Pumpkin Spice Latte’s return doesn’t mean a return to normalcy, or comfort, or that things are inching toward the way they were. It just means Starbucks wants your money and you have every right to give it to them.
Spicy Chicken McNuggets are debuting in the fall with a hot dipping sauce. | Photo: McDonald’s
Plus, KFC is no longer “finger-lickin’ good” in the time of coronavirus, and more news to start your day
McDonald’s nuggets are getting a spicy makeover
McDonald’s is adding spicy chicken nuggets to the menu starting on September 16, marking the first time the chain has introduced a new McNugget flavor in the U.S. since the menu item debuted in 1983. The nuggets — which have a tempura coating made with cayenne and chile peppers, per a press release — as well as a new hot dipping sauce and a new Chips Ahoy McFlurry flavor, will be available at participating restaurants for a limited time.
With these spicy nuggets (which our Eater London colleagues say are actually “not spicy enough”), McDonald’s is stepping back into the so-called “fast-food chicken wars” that Popeyes kicked off last summer with a direct challenge to Chick-fil-A. In the past year, Wendy’s brought back its spicy chicken nuggets, KFC tested a new chicken sandwich in Florida, Taco Bell tested crispy chicken wings at at least one location, and McDonald’s itself tested two new chicken sandwiches at select locations amid franchisees’ requests for a new crispy sandwich to compete in the race. As Business Insider reports, chicken has emerged as a bright spot for fast-food sales these past few months; it makes perfect sense that the giant of fast-food restaurants wants a bigger piece of that market share.
And in other news…
The Department of Agriculture has declined to let schools serve free meals to all students this fall, despite the rising economic and food insecurity that many families are facing. In explaining the decision, Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue wrote that the scope of this request “would be closer to a universal school meals program,” as if that’s a bad thing? [The Counter]
A class action lawsuit is accusing Chipotle of ripping off its customers by failing to properly provide change to customers paying with cash, in light of the chain’s new policy asking customers to pay with exact change if they use cash due to the national coin shortage. [Business Insider]
KFC is temporarily suspending use of its slogan “It’s Finger Lickin’ Good” in the age of COVID-19. Might I suggest the revised “It’s Finger Lickin’ Good After You’ve Washed Your Hands, Sanitized All Surfaces You Might Touch, and Pulled Your Mask Down to Eat Six Feet Away From Other People, Then Wash Your Hands Again”? [USA Today]
The Great British Bake Off is reportedly returning this year, a feat only able to be accomplished after the entire cast and crew lived in their own big GBBO bubble for the entire duration of filming. [The Takeout]
The craft spirits industry is in dire shape, having lost 41 percent of their sales, or $700 million in revenue, due to the pandemic obliterating on-site sales and tasting rooms. [Food Dive]
Meanwhile, Boston-based Harpoon Brewery has teamed up with Dunkin’ to launch beer brewed from doughnuts. [MassLive]
And Hendrick’s Gin launched a “streaming service” that streams … streams. [Forbes]
With sample stands canceled due to COVID-19, emerging food brands have few options to reach shoppers
Last year, Daniel Maloney could often be found working a sample table at specialty food markets around New York City. From his side of the table, Maloney would tell shoppers about Sol Cacao, the chocolate company he co-founded with his brothers Dominic and Nicholas. He would explain the brothers were brought up in Trinidad and Tobago, where their own great-grandparents once farmed cacao, before going on to found the Bronx’s first chocolate factory, and one of the few Black-owned chocolate businesses in the city. He would talk about the company’s commitment to ethically compensating farmers for cacao beans, as well as its support for environmental preservation and organic farming.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced grocery stores to set new limitations on handing out samples in stores, so shoppers today won’t learn those details that, when added up, make Sol Cacao’s $6 price tag seem fair. Without Maloney there to tell people about it, shoppers might not even know that Sol Cacao exists.
“When we give out samples and we get to talk to the customers, it validates the price,” Maloney says. “People got an opportunity to meet one of the owners, to get really intimate with the brand. When COVID-19 happened, that went out the door, and it was right around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, which is our key season.”
Following industry leaders like Costco and Whole Foods, who nixed in-store samples in March, the vast majority of grocery retailers have canceled sampling during the pandemic. That’s had an impact on brands of all sizes, but especially small and emerging brands, which rely heavily on sample stands to gain exposure and build a customer base. A free taste of chocolate can rouse shoppers from their shopping tunnel vision and help small brands attract attention if they can’t afford pricey product displays.
Rodrigo Salas, president of Molli Sauces, says samples are critical to differentiating his products from thousands of competitors on the shelf. They’re also important for educating people about the brand’s regional Mexican sauces, not only unfamiliar customers but also store employees, who are Molli’s best advocates during everyday business. Without sampling, business has suffered.
“We’ve lost about 30 percent of our sales since we started seeing the effects [of the pandemic] here in America,” he says. Like many business owners, he has pivoted to increase digital sales, but it’s not enough. “Online we’ve been able to recover about 5 percent of those sales,” Salas says. “We haven’t found a way to really compensate for the lack of in-store presence.”
Sam Miller is founder and CEO of Phoodie Marketing, a third-party company that helps brands arrange in-store demos. He explains brands use sampling to establish a “data story,” which is important to establishing a brand’s viability to retailers. Illustrating consumer demand and interest allows brands to win and maintain space on store shelves. That data is also crucial to gaining priority at distribution centers, where distributors decide which products get precious space on delivery trucks.
Chitra Agrawal, owner of Brooklyn Delhi, points out trade shows, which run on sample stands, are also on hold. Pre-COVID, those events were a cost-effective way for small brands without sales teams to meet directly with store buyers. “Not being able to sample at these types of events will definitely take a toll as well,” she says.
With grocery stores under pressure to keep shelves stocked, there’s little chance they’ll go easy on underperforming brands. “A lot of brands think they’re going to be cut some slack because of COVID. It doesn’t seem to be that way. The merchants are still doing their reviews, they’re still consolidating,” says Jesse de Agustin, founder and CEO of demo and retail sales firm EDS Strategy.
That’s clear to Salas too, who says, “I am worried. At the end of the day, you have to prove to retailers that your product is going to sell with or without in-store promotion. You have to prove it’s relevant. They don’t care if you’re sampling or not. They just want to see the sales and volume going up.”
To combat dropping sales, brands and retailers have devised a variety of pivots to maintain contact with consumers, including “dry” versions of in-store demos in which customers receive closed packages of food to enjoy at home, along with the usual brand spiel.
That’s what members will see at some Costco locations, where in-house marketing company Club Demonstration Services has outfitted the usual sample carts with plastic barriers. Just as Costco drove many retailers to pause samples in March, the megaretailer inspired excitement across the industry when it announced the return of samples in late May. A handful of other retailers have begun offering dry samples as well, and a few are even offering standard tastings.
A map of retailers, including grocery stores, shows stores across the country reintroducing demos in some form. According to de Agustin, EDS has had a lot of success with dry demos, comparing them to a QVC pitch in which sales rely more on quality presentations than samples. He argues the pandemic may raise the bar for demoers, ultimately improving standards across the industry.
But the dry format has its own challenges. “Brands either have to give away a full unit because it has to be a prepackaged sample, or they have to figure out a way to make a smaller sample size that they can do in bulk,” says Andrew Therrien, director of business development at demoing company Samplers Inc. “Often packaging is more expensive than the product itself,” he adds. That can be especially hard on smaller brands with limited budgets, but Miller wonders whether even Costco can make dry demos profitable in the COVID-19 era.
Samantha D’Amico, director of operations at Samplers Inc, also addresses how demos might play to an extremely anxious audience of harried grocery shoppers. “Our reps were never aggressive, but they were assertive. We’re training them to dial that back a little bit,” she says. “Obviously they’re there to promote the product and sell, but in this environment you have to handle that more delicately than we did pre-COVID.”
Therrien explains the company has seen success with low-interaction alternatives like drive-thru samples, where someone distributes goody bags from a branded tent as shoppers enter a retailer’s parking lot. Meanwhile, Miller says a lot of brands are pushing coupons, as well as promotions to entice customers with lower prices. He has also seen some brands adding free products to grocery delivery orders, enabling them to reach customers who avoid the store altogether, but he adds that this method is limited to large brands with big budgets.
Before the pandemic, demoing could cost thousands of dollars, making it a big but potent investment for small brands. Therrien says COVID-19 has raised some of those costs, requiring brands to spring for outdoor tents and pay a premium for high-risk labor. The payoff could be bigger too, since customers may find a successful event more impactful, but it’s a risky maneuver.
With many consumers preferring to shop online, some smaller brands are giving up demos entirely and spending resources on digital marketing instead. Molli Sauces and Sol Cacao have both shifted more attention to social media in recent months: Salas has been streaming cooking demonstrations on Facebook Live to show customers how to use Molli products, while Maloney has been leading chocolate tastings through Instagram.
De Agustin believes this is a knee-jerk reaction that may hurt in the long run. Unless brands are prepared to go entirely online, he says, they should be careful about ignoring their retailers, which could cause them to lose regional accounts or cede shelf space.
But Agrawal suggests digital could be a way for smaller brands to overcome the many ways they’re disadvantaged compared to big brands. “There are just a lot of costs associated with selling your product at grocery stores. Going direct-to-consumer, you own all of the information on your customer base. That is so valuable,” she says, adding that there are extra advantages for international brands that may not be deemed “mainstream” by retail buyers.
Maloney believes digital engagement will help Sol Cacao make meaningful contact with consumers. “There’s a lot going on in the news, and I feel like people are looking to social media to see what else is going on in the world. Brands who are able to tell their story effectively during these times, those are going to be brands who people will remember,” he says.
It’s unlikely samples are going to return to normal before a widespread COVID-19 vaccine, and marketing companies are planning to closely track comfort for demos among consumers and retailers for the next year at least. But the pandemic may affect the industry much longer.
“I think it’s going to reshape everything. I think it’s going to make it harder for people to start a food business like this in a traditional way,” Salas says. Even as he predicts dire things for sampling in the future, though, Salas believes there’s opportunity for brands willing to get creative. “I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation, just like any revolution in the past. We can’t rely anymore on this tool, so we need to rethink the whole strategy, to find ways to get people to discover us outside of the store.”
Supporting restaurants right now through takeout is an easy choice. It’s throwing away the resulting containers that’s hard.
In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, my family prepared nearly every meal at home. We took on ambitious kitchen projects, meal-prepped for lazy nights, baked at least two loaves of bread a week, and developed work routines that left plenty of time for cooking each evening. Of course, our collective energy eventually flagged and ambitions shriveled, so my family caved to the temptations of takeout. Meals now end not with the scrubbing of pots and pans, but an existential crisis over what to do with all the containers.
As takeout orders have mounted, so too has waste. Containers of all shapes and materials come swaddled in plastic. Little baggies of utensils arrive unrequested and depart the house unused. Straws occasionally make surprise appearances. To handle this seemingly needless waste, we recycle and reuse as much as possible. We cram the fridge with repurposed plastic deli containers full of leftovers, both from restaurants and homemade meals. Empty ones are washed and stowed in the cupboards. Our reusable cloth napkins gain new bedfellows with stacks of white paper napkins. We squirrel away plastic utensils for socially distanced picnics.
I’ve also formed too many opinions about the ideal container. It should be rectangular, no longer than nine inches, and flat on top (no huge rounded corners). Small containers should be slim enough to fit two side by side on top of large containers. Standard round deli containers are great for stacking. Wider round containers are no good to me, but I store them just in case. (Just in case what? I’m not sure. I guess if I get a new fridge with different proportions.) Containers holding neutral-smelling dishes that don’t leave any residue are easiest to clean, but I’m willing to scrub for an absurdly long time to recuperate a tainted container, sometimes returning to a stubbornly odorous one the next day to give it another shot.
I’ve begun to wonder about the limits of my eco-warrior ambitions. Used containers have slowly annexed several kitchen drawers, displacing Tupperware entirely. Towers of containers lean disconcertingly over the edges of the refrigerator shelves, and extracting an item has become a bit like Jenga — except the penalty for disturbing the fickle pillars of food is an explosion of orange chicken on the floor.
This borderline obsessive behavior doesn’t come from some prepper instinct or fear of shortages at the Container Store. It’s a desire to make something useful and positive out of the detritus kicked up by the pandemic. The ridiculous drama that plays out in my kitchen around these containers, though, shows how COVID frustrates even simple ambitions.
Takeout containers are daily reminders of the ways the pandemic overlaps and escalates ongoing crises: the breakdown of recycling in the food system, the ways people mistreat restaurant workers. They represent a few of the small decisions — from those of us who have the luxury of relative safety at home — that contribute to the momentum of society as a whole. Based on how I’ve fared in the kitchen after only a few months, I’m concerned.
My family offers help, at least when I bully them into helping. We do our best. Still, the trash bin tells no lies. Many containers aren’t recyclable, and many that are recyclable are too soiled with food. Our stomachs can only handle so many leftovers. Our fridge and cupboards can only fit so many deli containers.
My parents, both over 60, aren’t ready to face dining at a restaurant, even outdoors, as cases in California speed past 600,000. Nor am I willing to stop supporting independent food businesses by not ordering takeout. Ultimately, a few plastic containers are small potatoes in the midst of massive cultural, social, and economic upheavals. But let’s hope we emerge from the pandemic with a renewed sense of urgency to tackle the climate crisis on a scale larger than my Tupperware drawer, especially in massively disrupted food systems. In the meantime, I’ll just be here scrubbing plastic containers and cramming the fridge, trying to not feel too guilty one way or the other.
From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week
This post originally appeared on August 22, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week.Read the archivesandsubscribe now.
Due to a glitch, my newsletter last week is lost to the world, and I had no time to recreate it. But I had three important takeaways I’ll summarize here. 1. There were a LOT of openings last week, at least 20 that I found nationally relevant. I’m assuming these are places that just figured “if not now, when?” but it’s interesting to track how they’ve adapted out of the gate to this moment. 2. We launched this How to Help guide last week that should help you route any funds to worthy organizations fighting for restaurant workers and against food insecurity. If you yourself are looking for help, the list of orgs is a great place to start. 3. My fantastic colleague Sonia Chopra put in her last day at Eater last week after an incredible eight-year run and I want to publicly wish her bonne chance on her new journey.
Now as for this week, I’d like to point you on this mid-August day to a gorgeous collection of travel stories. As the pandemic hit, we were just about to publish one of our big, splashy, servicey packages focused on dining in Barcelona. And our team was abroad reporting out the following guide, scheduled for a summer launch (and barely made it back in time!). That work is going to have to sit on ice for awhile.
Instead we offer a collection of missives from some favorite writers on pandemic-appropriate getaways (and how they ate their way through them). While there’s no service, per se, no hot tips, no lists or maps, there’s beauty and humor and joy and sadness and it’s also pretty to look at. So please check it out.
— Openings: Etta River North, a second location of a popular brunch and pastry destination, in Chicago; Kimika, a Japanese-Italian restaurant from the owners of a popular Thai restaurant, and Nice Day, a Chinese takeout pop-up inside of restaurant Junzi, in New York; Indigenous Food Lab, an education and training center from chef Sean Sherman, in Minneapolis; Mr. Roni Cups, a pizzeria from the O Ya team, in Boston; Bunny Bunny, a new Chinese restaurant in Detroit; and a reopening of Post House, a Charleston restaurant that got a makeover and new owners after closing in early 2019.
— The James Beard Foundation canceled its 2020 chef and restaurant awards (that were postponed from May to September) and both the media and chef/restaurant awards for 2021. Awards right now will “do little to further the industry in its current uphill battle.”
— High-end restaurant Blue HIll at Stone Barns will not reopen as usual next year, instead launching a series of chef residencies focused on ”a rotating, diverse set of chefs’ voices that interpret the farm and the region through their own cuisines and experiences.”
— High profile D.C. restaurant Emilie’s lost its second chef this year and may close or rebrand.
— A look at the offerings from already-popular and very delicious-sounding Kasama, a Filipino-American bakery and cafe in Chicago.
— Home brewer Shannon Harris is aiming to open the first Black-owned brewery in Austin.
— Last but not least, it’s imperative you read Meghan McCarron’s nuanced look into the allegations against food world editor Peter Meehan. It published just as I was wrapping this note so I can touch upon it more next week.
Off Eater
An oral history of the ‘Steamed Hams’ episode of The Simpsons and the internet’s fascination with it. [Mel Magazine]
Engineer-turned-roaster Candy Schibli uses her Baltimore-based coffee business, Southeastern Roastery, to create opportunities for other female entrepreneurs
Tune in to Instagram Live this Wednesday for a cool demo from the founder of a beloved ice cream brand
For several months now we’ve been bringing you weekly cooking demos, baking tutorials, and wine classes with our favorite food world folks, all broadcast over Instagram Live. We’ve watched Philly chef Chris Cho impress with his kimchi pajeon recipe, Top Chef treasure Eric Adjepong share his lamb burger topped with yassa, and the Great American Baking Show vet Vallery Lomas awe us with her lattice pie handiwork.
This week’s exciting demo: Watch and learn as Natasha Case, co-founder and CEO of beloved ice cream brand Coolhaus (and co-host of Eater’s 2018 podcast Start to Sale), makes tiramisu with a twist: vanilla ice cream and Biscoff cookies. It’s happening on Wednesday, August 26 at 5:00 p.m. ET on Instagram Live.
But, soft! What bacteria through yonder velvety skin breaks? | Photo: fetrinka/Shutterstock
Plus, 7-Eleven is testing vegan pork rinds, and more news to start your day
Peaches hit the recall list due to possible salmonella contamination
Oh cruel summer, is there no end to your punishment? Right on the heels of the Great Onion Recall, the season’s star stone fruit has also been linked to a multi-state outbreak of salmonella. Peaches from California-based supplier Wawona are being recalled as the CDC reports 68 cases of salmonella across nine states, as of August 19. Loose/bulk peaches bought from the following stores and brands from June 1 through August 3, and June 1 through August 19 for bagged, should be thrown out:
Wawona Peaches
Wawona Organic Peaches
Prima Peaches
Organic Marketside Peaches
Aldi
Target
Kroger (including affiliated retailers Jay-C, King Soopers, City Market, Fry’s, Ralphs, Food 4 Less, Foods Co., and Smiths)
Walmart
Sam’s Club
Wegmans (also includes in-store bakery items that contain fresh peaches)
Potentially contaminated surfaces should be thoroughly sanitized. For specific product codes and up-to-date information, see the outbreak announcements on the websites for the FDA and the CDC.
And in other news…
People stuck at home are flocking to good old-fashioned canning, to the point where canning supplies like jars and lids are increasingly harder to find. [WaPo]
Booze delivery company Drizly, enjoying popularity and profitability during the pandemic, raised $50 million in its latest round of funding. [Food Dive]
Black chefs and food writers are landing more cookbook deals in a historically white industry, but challenges still abound. [NYT]
News you can use: Painting cows on a cow’s butt could scare away predators who are fooled into thinking their prey can see them as they sneak up, researchers found. [Modern Farmer]
While some industry heavyweights have chosen to forgo their nomination because of the pandemic, others are doing it for less clear reasons — and, in one case, because of an anonymous abuse allegation
It’s been a turbulent year for the James Beard Foundation and its esteemed namesake awards. As the restaurant industry continues to suffer the combined effects of a pandemic and an economic crisis, the organization has canceled the Chef and Restaurant Awards ceremony for both 2020 and 2021. In a press release, the Foundation’s CEO writes that “considering anyone to have won or lost within the current tumultuous hospitality ecosystem does not in fact feel like the right thing to do.” The many restaurants and chefs named as finalists for the 2020 awards won’t find out whether they might have received the coveted recognition.
Though the awards ceremony is off, and no winners will be named, a small note was quietly added to the list of nominees on the Foundation’s website: “Several nominees have withdrawn their nominations for personal reasons.”
Among those whose names no longer appear are David Kinch of Manresa in Los Gatos, California;, as well as Paul Bartolotta of Milwaukee-based Bartolotta Restaurants group; Kristen Essig and Michael Stoltzfus, of New Orleans’ Coquette; and Rich Landau of Vedge in Philadelphia.
But the foundation’s choice to categorize all of the withdrawals as having to do with “personal reasons” seems misleading or, at the very least, too vague, as not all of the chefs who removed themselves did so with the same motivations.
Reached for comment, Bartolotta, who was a finalist in the Outstanding Restaurateur category, told Eater in an email that he withdrew his name from consideration because of “anonymous accusations directed toward myself and the Bartolotta Restaurants organization that have been sent to the James Beard Foundation.” Bartolotta claims to have received no detailed information about the accusations, and that “no complaints have been filed either internally or with any outside agencies.” Nevertheless, the two-time James Beard-winner and co-owner of a 17-restaurant operation, says a third-party investigation has been launched. “I have decided to withdraw myself and our organization from consideration for this year’s James Beard Awards,” he says.
Eater also reached out to the foundation for comment surrounding allegations concerning Bartolotta’s restaurant group, and the foundation’s PR firm representative echoed the idea that the chef withdrew his name for “personal reasons.”
Also among the names notably absent from an updated list of nominees is that of Jessica Koslow, the owner of Sqirl in Los Angeles, who faced swift backlash and criticism last month for serving moldy jam, allegedly taking credit for other people’s recipes, and hiding an illegal kitchen from the health department, where her staff worked in potentially unsafe conditions. Koslow sent a letter to the Foundation on July 30, asking that she be removed from consideration for the Best Chef: California award, writing that her inclusion would “only serve as a distraction.” She also asked to be removed from a James Beard Foundation voting committee that, earlier this year, chose recipients of the Humanitarian of the Year and Lifetime Achievement awards.
Many of the systemic issues being faced within the restaurant industry have also been identified within the James Beard Foundation itself. In mid-July, a group of Foundation employees sent a letter to the senior leadership team, alleging “pay disparity, inadequate benefits, long hours, and challenging working conditions,” and demanding change. The foundation has been criticized in the past for disproportionality awarding men and white chefs, and has responded with initiatives aimed at lowering the bar to entry and diversifying the awards. But as the foundation works to heighten equity in its award-granting process, it’s apparent not all within the organization feel seen or valued.
Though it’s unclear how the organization is changing internally to meet staff demands, there’s a clear awareness that the foundation must evaluate the way it doles out praise, and who receives it. In the same statement announcing the cancellation of the 2020 and 2021 awards, the foundation notes that the awards committee is working with the broader organization and an outside social justice agency to adjust and develop a new process for naming award recipients. It states that the objectives are to “remove any systemic bias, increase the diversity of the pool of candidates, maintain relevance, and align the Awards more outwardly with the Foundation’s values of equity, equality, sustainability, and excellence for the restaurant industry.”
Eater has reached out for comment to all the other chefs mentioned, and this story will be updated with any new information.
Peter Meehan’s transgressive vision helped redefine food media with the groundbreaking Lucky Peach, and later transformed the LA Times’s food coverage. But that vision came with a toxic management style characterized by intimidation, a barrage of sexualized commentary, and explosive anger, according to two dozen current and former staffers.
On Tuesday, June 30, staffers on the Los Angeles Times food section prepared to log in to Zoom for their weekly 11 a.m. meeting. It had been pushed back 15 minutes — a potentially ominous sign. The day before, writer Tammie Teclemariampublished a lengthy Twitter thread laced with allegations about the section’s editor, Peter Meehan, spanning his time as editor of groundbreaking food magazine Lucky Peach and as head of the Times’s food section. Now, after a day of nonstop texting and immense uncertainty, the team would face each other for the first time.
Sitting in their bedrooms, living rooms, and other makeshift workspaces, the staffers anxiously signed on. Meehan was missing, but as faces from other teams populated their Zoom windows, it looked like it might be business as normal, except for the appearance of Times managing editor Kimi Yoshino, Meehan’s direct boss. At the top of the meeting, she outlined the paper’s response to a few of the assertions in Teclemariam’s thread (Meehan’s salary is not $300,000; he planned coverage of Juneteenth). A discussion about cliquishness broke out after Andrea Chang, the section’s deputy editor, asked staffers to come to her with any concerns; several food staffers, including Chang, apologized for contributing to an atmosphere of insiders versus outsiders that orbited around Meehan.
As the conversation continued, Bill Addison, one of the paper’s two restaurant critics (and formerly Eater’s national critic), worried that it was sidestepping the larger issue raised by the thread, which he describes as “the culture of fear that Peter had been masterful at creating.” Before it could end, Addison spoke up and said, “Even after those tweets, I am right now afraid of retaliation from Peter.” The tone of the room shifted. One by one, staffers spoke out: about waves of panic that hit whenever a Slack or phone call from Meehan arrived, about him belittling their work in public Slack channels, or screaming in all caps about small mistakes. One staffer reminded Yoshino that she had come to Yoshino’s office and wept about Meehan’s behavior. When someone outside the department remarked that the group seemed eerily calm discussing these painful experiences, Ben Mims, a cooking columnist, replied that Meehan was still their boss, and they were afraid of what he would do.
The next day, Yoshino informed Meehan the paper would launch a formal investigation into the allegations raised at the meeting. Meehan offered his resignation and publicly apologized on Twitter, characterizing Teclemariam’s thread as alleging “a number of things I don’t think are true” and describing his failures as those of perfectionism. “In my tunnel-vision commitment to making the best things we could, I lost sight of people and their feelings,” he wrote in a statement.
Later that week, Jenn Harris, a senior writer in the food section and a 10-year veteran of the paper, posted a statement in a locked company Slack channel. Torn up by what she’d heard in the meeting, Harris apologized for not speaking out sooner. She said that she’d been on Meehan’s good side, and she’d been afraid to find out what would happen if she wasn’t. She alleged that Meehan once called her “fuckable” after a work dinner. On another occasion, she alleged, he rested his head on her shoulder and slid his hand up her dress in the back of a car. After she pulled his hand away and said, “no,” Harris said he tried to put his hand up her skirt again. When she demanded to know what he thought he was doing, she alleges that Meehan, who was intoxicated, had mumbled, “Pushing boundaries.”
While Meehan’s resignation occurred after his staff spoke out in a meeting, many of those staffers say without Teclemariam’s Twitter thread, that conversation would never have occurred. Meehan’s departure occurs during a moment of wider agitation at the Timesover the paper’s hiring decisions after its acquisition by the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018, which some staffers say privileged star journalists from the East Coast establishment — overwhelmingly white and male — who were richly rewarded while existing staffers battled in union contract negotiations for fair compensation after years of brutal cuts. Meehan is in some ways the most obvious example of this trend: He never relocated to Los Angeles, instead flying out one week a month from his home in New York.
Meehan may not be a household name, but he is one of the most consequential food journalists of the last decade, whose mentors and compatriots include Mark Bittman, David Chang, Jonathan Gold, and Anthony Bourdain. One of an emerging generation of culture hounds who took food seriously as a badge of cool, Meehan started his career working for Bittman, who helped him land a gig writing the New York Times’s $25 and Under column in 2004, a plum position for an emerging food writer. His real ascendance began when he teamed up with Chang, at the time a brash young chef who sparked a nationwide mania for ramen and pork buns, whose early creative evolution Meehan had chronicled as part of his column. He went on to co-author the Momofuku cookbook, which was as groundbreaking as the restaurant was, and helped establish the irreverent yet maniacal perfectionism of Chang’s star persona.
In 2011, Chang and Meehan joined forces with Chris Ying, then an editor at the San Francisco small press McSweeney’s, to launch the food magazine Lucky Peach. From the first issue, the magazine was a phenomenon, combining McSweeney’s fetish for literary excess and groundbreaking design with Momofuku’s foul-mouthed, ramen-worshiping swagger. Over its six-year run, the magazine racked up critical adoration and industry awards, spun out successful cookbooks, and arguably changed the way food media worked and looked forever. Its abrupt closure in 2017 caught even the magazine’s contributors off guard, and was attributed to irreconcilable differences between Meehan and Chang. (Both signed a legal agreement in 2013 with a robust nondisparagement clause.)
In the summer of 2018, Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic and secular saint of Los Angeles food, died of pancreatic cancer. Gold was a frequent contributor to Lucky Peach, and had already been advocating for Meehan to be recruited to oversee a revival of the Times food section. After Gold’s death, Meehan came to work at the paper, first as a consultant and then as the section’s official editor, overseeing the relaunch of a standalone food section, heavy on illustration and other hip signifiers of the design that had characterized Lucky Peach. With his many, many connections in the food world, he delivered in-depth features on, say, the closing of the world-famous Faviken, and brought talent from all over the world to the paper’s monthlong, revenue-generating Food Bowl. Within months, Meehan developed a reputation across the paper as difficult, but these issues were considered by upper management to be the necessary price of working with a hard-driving auteur.
To Meehan’s expansive roster of friends and allies, he was a generous, brilliant, and genuinely subversive writer and editor. I know this from personal experience: There’s a great deal of professional overlap between Eater and Lucky Peach. A number of its staff and contributors, including many people I spoke to for this story, have contributed to Eater. I’ve attended numerous Lucky Peach parties, contributed a story to the magazine, and have met Meehan on several occasions, finding him to be charming, thoughtful, and sharp.
Behind all of Meehan’s public success, however, were ever-growing ranks of scarred, fearful staffers who worked under him. Interviews with more than two dozen sources, including former Lucky Peach employees, current Los Angeles Times staffers, and freelancers for both publications, allege that Meehan’s management of both these publications veered beyond the realm of a difficult boss in a high-stakes environment, and into a deeper and more disturbing toxicity. They describe a relentless cycle of unrestrained generosity and explosive anger, while his disdain for professionalism, combined with a zeal for perfection, led to workplaces with few boundaries and constant tension. A number of sources for this story spoke anonymously out of a fear of professional retribution from Meehan or their current employer.
Violent tempers, inappropriate jokes and comments, and allegations of sexual misconduct are far from unknown issues in the media world, and they’re a hallmark of the restaurant industry. Lucky Peach got its start in the cradle of the Momofuku restaurant group, making these dynamics even more intertwined. Former Lucky Peach staffers with restaurant experience say it was especially disturbing to see the behavior they associated with hostile kitchens — behavior David Chang has apologized for perpetuating in his own restaurants — replicated in an office.
Former staff, including many media industry veterans, say working under Meehan was shattering in a way they had not experienced under other tough bosses. At Lucky Peach, his over-the-top insults and physical displays of anger — slamming doors, hitting tables, knocking over chairs — created an atmosphere of fear, while female staffers say that Meehan’s sexual jokes and inappropriate comments crossed a line even in their freewheeling and irreverent workplace. At the Los Angeles Times, Meehan’s outbursts were limited to Slack or other written communication, but pushing back, staffers say, led to difficulties around deadlines, feedback, and assignments, while his lack of professional boundaries culminated in one employee finding herself subject to repeated sexual commentary, and, in one incident, unwanted, sexually charged touching.
Meehan declined repeated requests to speak on the record. In a letter sent to Times food staffers and provided to Eater, the paper’s management said, “Employees told us that Meehan created a negative work environment where employees did not feel comfortable raising their concerns. … We have taken a series of actions that reflect the seriousness of the allegations, including imposing, where appropriate, discipline, and insisting that managers receive new counseling and training.”
Marian Bull, who freelanced for Meehan both at Lucky Peach and the Times, says Meehan’s persona, steeped in subversive cultural tropes, could obscure how his behavior reinforced a much blander and more oppressive status quo. “He thought his transgressiveness absolved him,” she says.
Chris Ying met Meehan and David Chang in 2009 while putting together an experimental newspaper, called the San Francisco Panorama, which featured a food section, for McSweeney’s. A year later, the pair approached Ying, who had cooked in restaurants, with an idea for a food magazine. The first issue, exuding pork fat and swagger and bad words to spare, was overseen by Meehan and Ying and put together by McSweeney’s staff, with significant input from Chang. In addition to its restaurant cred, the magazine’s aesthetics and zine-like attitude borrowed from indie rock culture, positioning it as a publication for those left out of the mainstream.
Chasing the unexpected hit led to a fuzzy leadership structure and a bicoastal operation. Ying became the editor-in-chief, heading a small San Francisco office spun off from McSweeney’s, while Meehan worked from New York. While the magazine, especially its early issues, was a true collaboration between Meehan and Ying, Meehan always held a larger share in the company, commanded a higher salary, had more say over the budget, and was more tightly connected to Momofuku and Chang.
In late 2011, Rachel Khong was hired as the magazine’s managing editor and first employee. The first time Khong hung out with Meehan, her new boss, was at an alcohol-fueled dinner at San Francisco’s Mission Chinese, where the small staff of the new food magazine were feted. At the end of the night, she sent an email to her boyfriend when she got home, asking for a ride to the office the next morning and adding, “Peter Meehan kissed me goodbye!” Today, Khong says she no longer remembers this kiss, in part because her time working for Meehan involved a barrage of blurred boundaries. “For many mornings during those years, I would wake up to a Peter phone call and go to sleep after talking to Peter,” Khong says. “It was always there were just never any boundaries.”
As at many indie publications, the work schedule at Lucky Peach was punishing at best, and like many small staffs working closely together to produce an aggressively honed creative product in a pressure-cooker environment with unforgiving standards, a distinct workplace culture emerged that reflected the profane, transgressive high-low spirit of the magazine. The bicoastal offices ran on constant riffing over email and Hipchat, a Slack precursor, and elaborate wordplay and absurdist imagery were the norm. Editors would say they were tickling, massaging, diddling, and piddling a piece; jokes about hot chats and “that’s what she said” were volleyed back and forth. At the San Francisco office, a running prank was to jump out of the closet to scare other employees; deadline stress would devolve into ridiculous fake headlines and photoshopping frogs’ heads onto bodybuilders.
By 2014, Meehan began to staff up the New York office, which was eventually located in its own space at 128 Lafayette Street, in Chinatown. (Disclosure: This space is now the Eater test kitchen.) The giddy, weird energy that pervaded the magazine’s stressful early days — which still reigned in San Francisco — was overlaid with dread in New York. While members of the San Francisco office say they had seen glimpses of Meehan’s temper — Khong recalls seeing him slam a door violently over a video call — on the East Coast, fear of his anger pervaded the office. Several staffers recall a New York editor saying, during one of Meehan’s explosions, “Peter, please don’t make me cry today.”
Priya Krishna, who was hired out of college to do outreach and customer service, says that, at first, getting a job at Lucky Peach was thrilling. She’d devoured the magazine in college, and when she went to events with “Lucky Peach” on her nametag, people were eager to talk to her. Behind the scenes, she says that the work culture was increasingly toxic — the New York office was often tense and silent. She would cry on Sundays because she had to go back the next day. “I was scared to go to work,” she says. “My day was dependent on this man’s mood, whether Peter was going to feel generous that day and buy us all lunch, or whether he’d be angry at something that would set him off.”
Late in her tenure at Lucky Peach, Krishna was called into a meeting over a subscription partnership that was underperforming. “Peter banged his hands on the table really really loudly and the table shook, and [he] yelled ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ at the top of his lungs,” she says. Another employee sent messages to the SF office about the incident over Hipchat. When Krishna took a scheduled call after that meeting, Meehan publicly berated her for not addressing the partnership immediately, and told her to go home for a month and see if she had a job when she came back. She resigned a few days later.
During the photoshoot for the magazine’s last cookbook, All About Eggs, which Khong traveled to New York to oversee, the tension in the office was extraordinarily high, even by Lucky Peach standards. Meehan slammed a door so loudly the staffer who witnessed it was frightened. At one point, a staffer alleges, he grew so angry about the state of the kitchen, which was littered with boxes from new equipment, that he shoved a chair out of the way to charge at her in a manner she found threatening. “He stormed at me physically, and stood over me, raised a fist or his hand,” she says. Then, she says, Meehan seemed to catch himself and back away. “That was the tone and tenor of how things were there,” she says.
Walter Green, who began working at Lucky Peach as a designer in the magazine’s early days, when he was just 20 years old, says Meehan encouraged him to write, and he viewed him as a mentor. “He could be a really, really sweet guy at times,” he says. “He would invite us to get burgers with him in the evening and hang out with his family.” But even though Green, who eventually became one of the magazine’s art directors, was never a target of Meehan’s temper, he understood it as a problem in the office. “I viewed him as a damaged person who would act out,” he says. “Coming from a family where people do sometimes fly off the handle and say mean things or act out, if I’m around Peter, I want to make sure to keep him calm and make sure he doesn’t blow up at people. You feel protective of your coworkers.” Green says that when things got tense, he would take Meehan on walks to calm him down or play silly music to lighten the mood.
While Lucky Peach’s culture was casual and frequently profane, former staffers say that Meehan revelled in his propensity for over-the-top insults and descriptions of violence, which struck a dissonant chord coming from their boss. Of a contributor who wouldn’t translate a piece he reported for the magazine, Meehan wrote in an email in 2016, “I’m gonna mouthbarf seeing that half-bald sweater-wearing pussy’s name printed in my magazine if he’s unwilling to do the basic legwork of the relatively simple fucking task at hand.” Multiple staffers describe Meehan recounting a time he threatened another employee by saying he would shove a “golf umbrella” up his ass and open it. (This former employee says Meehan never said this to him).
Lucky Peach employees often spoke in crude metaphors or riffed on absurdist sexualized scenarios. But multiple staffers say that Meehan crossed the line, indulging in a truly constant barrage of heavily sexualized terminology in casual conservation and at times making quips directed at specific female staffers. In one exchange, when Khong said getting through submissions would be “easier with interns,” Meehan responded, “No, that’s NSA sex.” When she got a space heater for the office, Meehan said he’d always been trying to “heat up her space.”
Coming from her boss, these types of jokes made Khong uncomfortable, but she had no idea how to respond; she felt obliged to either play them off or to laugh. “He was a grown man who was my boss and I felt I had to be deferential to when he made those jokes,” she says. “He felt people were either cool or not cool, and you could be on either side of that.”
Aralyn Beaumont, who was hired as an assistant editor for the magazine before becoming its research director, also remembers Meehan making off-putting comments that objectified her. At a work lunch, Beaumont says that he remarked in front of the entire table, “You might have bluer eyes than Chad Robertson, who I thought had the prettiest eyes.” During that same visit to San Francisco by Meehan, after Beaumont ordered ramen, Meehan asked her if she was bulimic — an inside joke that referenced when Chang ate so much ramen during a trip to Japan that he threw up, an incident recounted in the first issue of Lucky Peach. To the young, junior employee, the comment felt alienating. “Maybe he thought that was a compliment, but I had an eating disorder since I was 13,” she says.
In New York, Meehan’s behavior around one young female staff member in particular made others in the office uncomfortable, even though they were unsure if it bothered her. Staffers recall Meehan giving her shoulder massages and making joking suggestive comments about her. On one occasion, he put his feet in her lap. Staffers brought their concerns to Ying, then the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The group discussed going to HR, but decided against it, in part because the HR team served Momofuku as a whole, not Lucky Peach. Ying opted to discuss the concerns with Meehan in person. “I had a private conversation with him, in which I expressed how disappointed I was both in the fact that his actions were making the staff uncomfortable, as well as disappointed as his business partner that he would jeopardize the business in this way. He was pretty contrite.” Ying did not address the issue with the female employee, since he saw the problem as lying squarely with Meehan, but he says that he now regrets not dealing with the situation more forcefully.
The woman at the center of these accusations told Eater there was never an inappropriate relationship between herself and Meehan, and while she does not recall much of his behavior, she believes this was in part because she did not think she could challenge the culture there, and so she accepted it. In retrospect, she believes that some of his actions toward her were inappropriate — she says that he once repeated a joke he’d heard that touched on her sex life — and undermined her professionally. But she had no idea that a complaint had been lodged by her colleagues; no one at the magazine ever spoke to her about Meehan’s behavior.
By 2016, Meehan and Ying’s partnership began to deteriorate, and Ying became more involved in projects outside the magazine, including the nonprofit he co-founded, Zero Food Print. Ying says that he and Meehan spoke about transitioning to an editor-at-large role, but in time, he felt that he had transitioned into no role at all, where his suggestions and ideas were undermined and disrespected. When Peter began repeatedly asking when he planned to leave entirely, he decided to do it. At the time, Ying was one of the few prominent Asian-American editors in the food world, and his departure marked the end of an era at the magazine. (Several staffers of color observed that by the end of Lucky Peach, the masthead had become almost entirely white.)
In both an editorial context and casual conversation, discussions about race and ethnicity could be frank and involve reappropriating slurs or stereotypes, especially in dialogues between Ying and Meehan. Some of these conversations were genuinely productive for the magazine, but Ying says he now regrets how he spoke about Asianness with Meehan. “I gave him an ‘honorary Asian card.’ That’s my fault and I own that,” Ying says. “I was improving my relationship with Peter by defanging myself. You give other people power by saying, ‘Here, it’s cool, because I’m saying this in front of you.’ It’s self-degrading in so many ways. The damage is it gives him license with other people who aren’t okay with it.”
Meehan did not appear to see (or set) boundaries between how he spoke with his business partners, Ying and Chang, and how he spoke to people who worked for him. For Asian-American staffers who were not partners but employees, his habit of speaking like an insider to Asian-American culture was fraught. Khong recalls that during her time there, Meehan discussed staffers’ ethnicity in a way that felt tokenizing. “It was like he’s calling you a Malaysian person or a Chinese person, [so you should] go get this story, or ‘Chris and Rachel are the Asians, they can do this,’” Khong says. “This casual way of referring to Asians, or to Dave being Korean, felt right on the edge of appropriateness. I think he felt like he was in on the joke.” And while the magazine’s aesthetics often reappropriated or satirized Orientalist tropes, when Meehan was the creative force behind the joke, it took on a different tone; Krishna recalls feeling uncomfortable when Meehan styled one of her mother’s recipes with a statue of a Hindu deity in the Power Vegetables cookbook, for instance.
While Chang was the most famous face associated with Lucky Peach, he claims to have had limited visibility into the work environment, mostly contributing ideas over email and meeting with Meehan or Ying at infrequent work lunches. He was in contact with high-up staffers, including Khong and Ying, but says he did not meet other employees until after the magazine’s closure. His distanced approach, which became more pronounced, several staffers say, as his relationship with Meehan grew more tense, meant that staffers struggling with Meehan’s behavior were unsure who to turn to, while Chang’s own reputation for anger did not encourage people to come forward.
Chang provided the following statement to Eater, in which he says he is bound by a legal agreement not to disclose or disparage Meehan. “First, to the staff of Lucky Peach, I let you down and I’m sorry. Within the first twelve months of the magazine’s start, I largely stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the company. I chose instead to contribute ideas from a distance. I am incredibly proud of the magazine, its contributors, and its staff, but frankly, I wasn’t around for much of its life and I regret it.” Chang notes he has gone on to work with several former Lucky Peach staffers, including Ying and Khong at Majordomo Media, and Krishna on a forthcoming cookbook. The statement further says, “Throughout my career, I have been known — even celebrated by the media — for being an angry bully in the kitchen. I have tried not to hide my shortcomings and I have worked extremely hard to become a better leader and a better person.”
“Had I been better, had I created an environment that was a polar opposite, with no shades of black or gray,” he added later, “I can imagine a scenario where they would have come to me, and that’s what I’ve been wrestling with.”
One veteran of Lucky Peach says that the magazine’s last year, when the San Francisco office consisted only of Aralyn Beaumont and Meehan was fully in control, was less marked by his temper. Ben Mims, now a cooking columnist at the Los Angeles Times, worked for Meehan during the magazine’s final months, and says he had no bad experiences with Meehan then. The magazine’s closure was sudden, unexpected by freelancers or staff, and because neither Chang nor Meehan can or will speak publicly about it, remains a subject of fascination. (One thing everyone agrees on is that Lucky Peach was not profitable.)
Ying says he feels frustrated that over the years, Meehan has become known as the “founder” of Lucky Peach when the first issue was put together over his own kitchen table. He also expressed frustration over how allegations about Meehan’s behavior might erase the work he and other Lucky Peach staffers were proud of. “Rachel worked on every single piece in the magazine,” Ying says.
The magazine’s goodbye letter, written by Meehan, argues that he and Ying got too much credit for the magazine, but does not mention Khong at all, despite her integral role in much of the magazine’s history and development; she became its executive editor in 2015. Khong departed the magazine in 2016, having hit her limit with Meehan’s behavior and frustrated by disparities between her salary and compensation and those of new hires. “I never wanted to leave the job,” Khong told me through tears. “The good parts were so good and he was the biggest bad part of it.”
The environment Meehan stepped into at the Los Angeles Times was markedly different from the scrappy early days of Lucky Peach, and several former Lucky Peach staffers told me they’d hoped the structure of the institution would blunt Meehan’s behavior. In fact, Meehan’s arrival as a consultant was greeted with relief by a paper still reeling from the loss of Gold. As editor of the newly created food section, Meehan frequently battled with other departments at the paper, isolating it from the organization as a whole. Because Meehan never moved to Los Angeles, his interactions with staff mostly occurred in locked Slack rooms or clustered in weeklong visits.
Even though Meehan only flew out for one week a month from New York, his manner over Slack, over email, and in edits was enough to put the whole section on the defensive. Mims, the former Lucky Peach staffer, says that when a story of his went live on the site without following protocols, Meehan exploded at him in a group Slack channel, berating him in all caps over the decision, even though Mims thought Meehan had approved it. The exchange, over what Meehan called, “THE F-ING STORY THAT JUST WENT LIVE,” prompted a conversation with Meehan’s deputy editor, Andrea Chang, in which Mims said no one should speak to their employees like that. After a day of tension, Meehan, who was in the LA office, sent an apology email and gave Mims an awkward hug, according to Mims, saying, “We hurt the people we like the most.” Mims says after this, he believes it became harder to have pitches approved or to get feedback in a timely fashion, resulting in stressful, last-minute rushes to meet deadlines — leading him to conclude that pushing back any harder would make his life even more difficult.
Bill Addison, one of the paper’s two restaurant critics, who had worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Magazine, and Eater before coming to the Times, also says within weeks of joining the paper, he found Meehan’s behavior went beyond tough editing into something that felt like bullying. He admired the editorial eye Meehan brought to the section, Addison says, but within months he found himself demoralized and afraid. He did not speak up beyond going to Yoshino, because he feared both internal retaliation, since he perceived Meehan to be supported by the paper’s leadership, and public castigation, since in the past Meehan had publicly attacked other colleagues at the paper on Twitter.
Patricia Escárcega, the paper’s other restaurant critic, says she also felt shut down by Meehan, despite the fact that he’d fought to bring her to the paper. Other staffers describe the relationship between the two as notably chilly. She felt singled out, and eventually went to Yoshino to complain. In an email to Eater, Escárcega described the meeting: “I told her I felt like I was working for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I told her I was walking on eggshells. I sat in her office and cried. She said he was under a lot of stress.”
Escárcega, the only Latina in the section, says she also felt a “subtle” pressure to write about Mexican food, a subject that she cares about deeply but didn’t want her work reduced to. “It definitely felt like there was more resistance when I wrote about different types of cuisines,” she says. In an initial statement from a company spokesperson, the Los Angeles Times told Eater, “Meehan has been an advocate for more inclusive coverage in the section he helped relaunch, reflective not only of Los Angeles’ vast and diverse food scene, but also of the writers, photographers, designers and illustrators who chronicle it.”
Managing editor Kimi Yoshino, who was Meehan’s direct supervisor, provided a statement to Eater noting Meehan’s talent as an editor should not have come “at the expense of the staff’s well-being.” The statement continues, “It became clear Peter had problems in the way he communicated and collaborated with others. I believed those problems were fixable and worked with him to become a better manager and more diplomatic communicator. I regret not doing even more to fully understand the extent of the staff’s concerns.” Yoshino characterized her own working relationship with Meehan as challenging and says, “I sometimes found his approach to be rude and disrespectful to our colleagues. I had many difficult conversations with him about the changes he needed to make as a manager, though I see now that wasn’t enough.”
One of the issues that employees struggling with Meehan’s behavior point to is that he seemed to create an environment of insiders and outsiders, and that the insiders included deputy food editor Andrea Chang and, to a lesser extent, Yoshino. Chang, senior writer Jenn Harris, and columnist Lucas Peterson (a former Eater contributor) would regularly dine out together, expensing their meals if they were relevant to a story, and posting glossy photos of these nights out to Instagram. Meehan would join during the one week each month that he was in town (there was even an Instagram hashtag: #peteweek). This “cool kids” dynamic (as more than one staffer put it) was in part driven by these posts. Instagram plays a more professional role in the food world than many other sectors of media, as an arena to display dining knowledge and build a profile, and while it’s one thing to know a boss and certain coworkers are friendly it’s another to see evidence of that relationship posted on social media for likes and clout, especially as other staffers were alienated by and fearful of Meehan.
The group was genuinely close, especially Chang, Peterson, and Harris, and the boundaries between managers and writers were blurry, since Peterson and Meehan were high school friends, and Harris had at one point been the interim editor of the food section. The group drank together often, stayed out late, visited each others’ homes, and spoke frankly about personal matters, including their sex lives, smearing the boundaries between personal and professional.
On July 3, 2019, Harris says that Meehan obliterated those boundaries. That night, she went with Meehan, Chang, and Peterson to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a social outing, not a work one, and Chang drove the group. When they left, Harris says Meehan was so drunk he seemed to raise a fist at Peterson when Peterson tried to help him up, and Meehan needed to be led down to the car. “Pete got into the back of the car with me,” Harris says. “Instead of leaving the middle seat open, he slid next to me and put his head on my shoulder. I thought he was going to pass out on my shoulder and fall asleep. As we’re driving, I felt him stick his hand and slide it under my dress on my inner thigh. I picked his hand up, really caught off guard and really embarrassed. I said, ‘No,’ and put his hand back on his own lap and then a couple seconds later he did it again. I took his hand off and put it back and I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ He mumbled, I understood him saying the words, ‘Pushing boundaries.’ So I said, ‘The boundaries are fine where they are, don’t fucking do that.’”
Peterson and Chang say they did not witness what happened in the back of the car. Harris says, and Peterson confirms, that she told both him and Chang about Meehan’s actions later that night. Harris asked them not to report the incident to anyone, and Peterson suggested that he talk to Meehan directly. (Chang declined to comment further for the story.) After such a long friendship, Peterson was shocked and upset by what he had heard. The next day, he confronted Meehan and told him his behavior had been, he says, “violent and inappropriate,” and he says Meehan apologized to him. Peterson told him he needed to speak to Harris and Chang. Harris says he never did speak to her about the incident, even as they continued to socialize. “I don’t know how we all kept hanging out trying to pretend like nothing was wrong,” Peterson says. “I’m honestly still so angry with myself for not doing or saying more. During the past year, Jenn and I have talked over these incidents a lot. And I think we were just really afraid.”
Later that summer, while out at the Chateau Marmont, along with Chang and Peterson, after a review dinner at Chateau Hanare nearby, Harris joined Meehan on the smoking patio. She does not exactly remember what they were discussing, but she believes it was the subject of dating apps and her experiences with them. Harris says that Meehan said, “Jenn Harris, you are fuckable, you’re very fuckable. I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but I would stick your head in a pillow and fuck you.” She says that she did not interpret this as a solicitation so much as an inappropriate attempt to compliment her, but it made her deeply uncomfortable, so she went back to the table. She says she later told Peterson and Chang, as well as several other people, about the comments.
There was one other incident, which Harris did not include in her Slack post after Meehan’s departure. On another night in late summer 2019, Harris, Meehan, and Chang got together at Chang’s apartment, again as a social outing rather than a work one. They ordered in Thai food, and there was drinking — Harris perceived Meehan to be very drunk. She says, “We were sitting on the couch, and I was getting up to leave and he just looked at [her and Chang] and drunkenly said, ‘I could have fucked both of you tonight.’ I started laughing, like, are you fucking delusional? I said, ‘Well, I’m leaving now,’ and I left him there.”
Harris says she was never afraid of Meehan during these interactions, and at times tried to convince herself that these actions and comments had not been a big deal. But she did fear him in the office, and that led her to be afraid to say anything about what happened, or to stop hanging out with Meehan and the rest of the friend group. She saw when Meehan unleashed tirades in public Slack channels, and she recalls once hearing him say he would make a person who had pissed him off “his hobby.” Harris did not ever want to become his hobby. “He can be so nice and charming and supportive of your career,” she says. “I was worthy of being invited to social engagements. I benefited from that. I would think over and over, ‘What happens when he stops liking me?’ I didn’t want to find out.”
Harris also saw how upper management valued Meehan at the paper, and his ability to bulldoze through long-standing barriers and red tape to get what he wanted for the section. During her years at the Times, the food section had long fought to have a dedicated photographer and social media person — under Meehan, they got both. Harris wasn’t sure if this was Meehan’s doing or if management was just finally giving the section the resources it needed, but either way, she did not believe her story would be heard. “He is this beloved person in food media and at work, and I didn’t know if I told someone, if I’d be the one who had to leave,” she says. “If I said something, and he was still my boss after, it would be awkward. I was just scared.” (In her statement to Eater, Yoshino says, “I was shocked and appalled to hear the serious allegations of misconduct, including against one of my longtime friends and colleagues.”)
During her long tenure at the paper, Harris worked closely with Jonathan Gold, and she’s troubled by how often management has said Meehan got the job because he was Gold’s choice, even though Gold wasn’t the person who hired him. The paper spoke to, among other sources, former colleagues at the New York Times to vet Meehan; no one ever contacted anyone at Lucky Peach. Harris says, “I knew Jonathan very well, and I really don’t think that he would have been okay with this behavior, or been aware of it. For people in the building to say, ‘Oh, he was Jonathan’s pick,’ that is skirting responsibly for who hired him, and did or did not properly vet him. That’s a deflection of responsibility on a dead man.”
Following Meehan’s resignation, a wave of posts proliferated across social media by people who had worked with Meehan at Lucky Peach and the Los Angeles Times, who finally felt able to speak out. Aralyn Beaumont described her time at Lucky Peach as “living with a hole that has yet to close.” Chris Ying wrote on Instagram that “it took me a long time — too long — to understand that we weren’t dealing with a run-of-the-mill bad boss.” Rachel Khong wrote about how Twitter could distort the complexities of the situation. “I don’t believe Peter is an evil person. I don’t believe in evil people, full stop,” she wrote. But, she continued, “the harm that was done to us was not one Tweetable instance but was daily, and relentless, and insidious.”
Staffers at the Los Angeles Times, who by then had seen Harris’s allegations about Meehan’s behavior in Slack, were sharper-edged. Ben Mims wrote that the apology posted by Meehan was “an embarrassment,” saying that “‘tunnel vision’ and a ‘management style’ doesn’t begin to describe the culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation that traumatized our whole team.” Lucas Peterson posted a long statement that many other staffers say encapsulated what it was like to work for Meehan, especially where he wrote, “One of my colleagues described it as like being in a house of horrors — we were all in different parts of the house, and had different experiences. But we were all in the house.”
On August 11, the entire food section at the Los Angeles Times sent a letter to management calling for an end to the holding pattern in place since Meehan’s departure. “The continued uncertainty regarding leadership — with no end in sight — is putting the future of the section in peril,” it states. “There has been no communication from upper management since July 6, which has only served to shake our confidence further during an already upsetting and traumatic time.” The letter demands regular updates on the HR investigation launched after the allegations about Meehan’s behavior surfaced on social media and Slack, and the immediate posting of both the food editor and deputy food editor positions, with an eye toward addressing the section’s lack of representation of the demographics of LA. “We at the Food section recognize the work of the Times’ Black and Latino caucuses, and insist that people of color, particularly those underrepresented in the newsroom, be prioritized in any new hiring,” the letter states.
On August 20, management relased the results of an internal HR investigation launched in the wake of Meehan’s departure. The report states, “Employees told us that Meehan created a negative work environment where employees did not feel comfortable raising their concerns. We also found that managers failed to prevent or report behavior they knew or should have known was inappropriate.” Yoshino will no longer oversee the section, and Chang has been reassigned to Column One. Internally, some LAT staffers say they are dissatified with these changes, including Chang’s lateral move into another section.
It’s not a coincidence, or even that singular, that the Los Angeles Times uprising against Meehan happened over Zoom and the reassessment of Lucky Peach happened over social media, all of it sparked by a single, pointed Twitter thread. This is a story shaped by COVID-19 and the mass quarantine of professional workplaces. The pandemic chewing through the tattered American safety net is too gigantic a disaster to contemplate head on for long, but its silent destruction is always unfolding, creating an atmosphere of fear and urgency whose only outlet is the streets, or social media.
Every institution seems to be failing, and failing us. Navigating media jobs over screens during this frightening moment has left workers isolated and exhausted, but also in possession of a strange freedom. As career ladders crumble, many journalists are doubling down on the one thing the job can still offer: a sense of meaning. That meaning grows sour if bosses are cruel or inequities are entrenched, and calling out a famous, perhaps brilliant editor as a bad boss is less intimidating if there’s no newsroom to face them in. The best hope is for a better way of life to rise from America’s disastrous failure, but right now, the pandemic still rages — the worst may just be beginning. Those with professional jobs in cities willing to issue stay-at-home orders, a bleak blessing, are trapped at home with nothing but time to reassess the past’s failures, and enumerate what must be born anew.
The question for the media reckoning underway is: What might truly subvert the old power structures? What comes after the legend of the brilliant, intimidating, perfectionist editor, embodied appetizingly by Meryl Streep in TheDevil Wears Prada (who in reality is most often a white man)? In the recent past, explosive tempers and blurred lines could be excused if the end product were exciting enough. Dismantling that ethos is only a start; it stems from larger inequities in how power and value are accorded in a newsroom, and who gets credit for the work. In an industry where power is nakedly ranked on a masthead, it took the lateral, flattening effect of social media to shake those hierarchies. “I think Peter had a gift for surrounding himself with talented people,” Escárcega wrote in an earlier email. “I hope we get smarter about who we exalt and why.”
Disclosures: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater. The Eater Test Kitchen that housed Lucky Peach was, for a time, sublet from Momofuku. A number of people in this story have contributed to Eater, including Tammie Teclemariam, Marian Bull, Rachel Khong, Lucas Peterson, and Bill Addison.
Overlooking the patio at Optimism Brewing in Seattle | Suzi Pratt/Eater Seattle
Ken Chan, the executive chef of Taipei’s three-starred Le Palais. | Sam Yeh/Getty Images
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Spicy Chicken McNuggets are debuting in the fall with a hot dipping sauce. | Photo: McDonald’s
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But, soft! What bacteria through yonder velvety skin breaks? | Photo: 
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