Foodies Clan

When it’s too hot to cook, it’s time to raid your fridge for condiments, grab a loaf of bread, and go to town with these recommended sandwich recipes 

It’s hot. Just the thought of turning on the stove creates a light sheen of sweat on your upper brow, nevermind the idea of pulling on a pair of dish gloves, turning the faucet to hot, and scrubbing a sauce-slicked pot clean. Did we mention that it’s hot? In other words, it’s Sandwich Season — and to break out of any potential PB&J ruts, find some inspiration below.

Sabich: I had my first sabich probably a decade ago, and have been chasing this deeply perfect creation ever since. A pita stuffed with fried eggplant, hard-boiled egg, Israeli salad, various condiments, and a drizzle of tahini sauce, the sandwich is widely credited to Iraqi Jews who came to Israel as refugees in the 1940s and ’50s. In this country, it’s typically found in falafel shops, though not nearly often enough. To bite into one is to experience the kind of intense pleasure often denied to vegetarians at sandwich shops, and to understand that eggplant, when it’s prepared correctly, can be the stuff of decadence. Given this, and the relative dearth of places that sell sabich, I’m grateful for Adeena Sussman’s recipe, which is particularly good now, when eggplant season is in high gear. — Rebecca Flint Marx, senior editor

Stonefruit Sandwich: If it’s too hot to cook, it’s likely also the perfect season for stone fruit. I’m a loyal member of team nectarine (I like my foods fuzz-free, thank you), but when at their peak, peaches, apricots, cherries, pluots and the like are all exceptional, and I consider it my civic duty to consume as many of each as possible every day. Enter this sweet/savory lunchtime stack: A sturdy bread — think a ciabatta roll or hefty sourdough — is the vehicle for a thick slather of full-fat ricotta, layers of sliced stone fruits, some fresh herbs (I’m partial to tarragon here), chunky salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. As a sandwich, it’s an “eat over the sink” kind of event, as any good stone fruit should be. — Lesley Suter, travel editor

Strogie Hoagies: I have to be upfront about something: Rachael Ray calls these sandwiches “strogie hoagies,” which is a crime that probably should result in elimination from this list. But here’s the thing, after having made these sandwiches regularly for the past dozen years or so: A) These sandwiches are delicious. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them for a blistering summer day, but the combination of saucy stroganoff, fresh and peppery watercress, and a fluffy baguette is enjoyable enough that I’m surprised more restaurants haven’t attempted a mash-up like this. Plus the recipe for the stroganoff itself stands alone as a solid, quick-hit version of the classic. B) Ray’s inspired my husband to mockingly first call these Stro Hos, and later Stroganoff Hoganoffs, so the general ridiculousness surrounding the name means you, too, can invent dumb inside jokes with your significant other about these sandwiches. It’s a win/win, really. — Missy Frederick, cities director

Veggie Sandwich With Sprouts and Hummus: I’m a big fan of lighter veggie sandwiches — if I’m going to have something meaty or fishy, it will probably be an open-faced deal. My standard is alfalfa sprouts, hummus, and mashed avocado, optionally upgraded with leafy greens, pickled vegetables, hard-boiled egg, and/or seasonings (za’atar, tajín, etc) depending on what I have on hand. With the double spreads it’s definitely in the realm of gooey sandwiches a la PB&J, but very texturally satisfying with the crunch of the sprouts. — Nick Mancall-Bitel, associate editor

Turkey and Seasoned Cream Cheese Sandwich: I have a special place in my heart for a turkey and cream cheese sandwich, because it reminds me of “tea” parties (read: orange-soda-in-teacup parties) from when I was a kid, usually spent with my grandmother and a who’s who of my stuffed animals. As an adult, I give it a little upgrade: Mixing any seasoning blend or condiment into cream cheese makes it feel a little fancier. These days, I’ve been making a spread with equal parts harissa and cream cheese, pairing it with turkey, sliced cucumber and radish, and just a swipe of dijon. It comes together in a few minutes, and it’s super, super tasty. You can also do this with things like sambal, everything but the bagel seasoning, or pomegranate molasses. — Brooke Jackson-Glidden, Eater PDX editor

Instant Pot Italian Beef Sandwich: This recipe from Pinch of Yum calls for beef chuck, garlic, onion, beef broth, and Italian seasoning to be thrown right into the pressure cooker, but I tweaked it a bit by sauteing the garlic and onions using the machine’s saute function before adding everything else. I also subbed jarred pepperoncini for the Giardiniera, and added an extra cup of beef broth than the recipe called for to ensure there was plenty of rich jus to dunk these babies in after the rolls were toasted, cheese melted, and the sandwiches were stuffed with as much tender, juicy meat as they could hold. A bonus I didn’t anticipate: The leftovers made for excellent next-day work-from-home lunches. — Terri Ciccone, Eater audience development manager

Cheddar and Mayo Sandwich: The name of this sandwich pretty much says it all, but let me try to explain: This is a cherished family recipe. Or, it is something my dad ate when I was little, and that I thought was really disgusting at the time. But reader, it turns out there is nothing better than a slice of whole grain soft bread slathered with mayonnaise (Hellmann’s please, this is no time to get fancy!!), stacked with thick-ish slices of mild-to-medium cheddar cheese (my dad would use sharp, but I hate it), and smooshed shut with another slice of mayo-slicked bread. I was wrong, my dad was right, and we should be eating this perfectly simple sandwich all summer. Really, we should be eating it all year, since it doesn’t call for a single fresh vegetable. Genius. — Elazar Sontag, staff writer

‘Dan Does’ host Daniel Geneen takes a tour of the company’s massive factory in Tennessee

Cast iron pans are essential pieces of cookware and one of the most popular, widely available, and affordable brands comes from Lodge Cast Iron. On this episode of Dan Does, host Daniel Geneen takes a tour of the company’s massive factory in South Pittsburg, Tennessee to see how the over 100-year-old brand creates one of the most consistent and widely loved cast iron pans in American history.

Geneen’s first stop is a giant pile of metallic rubbish. These scraps of pig iron, steel, and rejected cast iron pans get picked up with an enormous magnet and dropped into a furnace to melt down at a temperature of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. A robot then “slags” the molten metal, which means it removes all of the impurities such as rust and sand that has floated to the top. From there, a robot transfers the molten metal to what is essentially a giant ladle which will transport it to the next stage of the process.

While all of this is happening, molds for pans are being made out of fine, pliable sand that’s compressed in massive machines. The ladles pour the molten metal into these molds. Once the metal is poured and cooled, the sand molds get placed into a shake-out machine that shakes the sand away from the pan, and then into an enormous drum to shake off the rest. The pans are finally put on a giant conveyor belt to be sorted and inspected. Any pans that are not up to muster get thrown back into the original scrap heap to be melted down again and remade into another pan.

Once the pans are deemed worthy, they’re blasted with stainless steel pellets in a giant tub along with soap and water to clean and burnish them. Then the seasoning process begins. Pans are hung on hooks and sprayed down with soybean oil and baked in high temperatures.

“If you think about what we’re doing here,” says Lodge’s operations manager, Larry Raydo. “We’re taking these raw materials that were nothing when they came into Lodge, and in a matter of a couple of hours, we’re making a brand new product that someone is going to take out of the box and cook a meal in for their family that night. That’s what drives a lot of us here. ”

Sixteen months after the onset of the pandemic, the five boroughs are experiencing a “restaurant renaissance,” but opening numbers are still down from 2019

In the ’90s, fine dining chef Andrew Selvaggio was tasked with creating a burger that would appeal to sophisticated palates. The problem was no one wanted it.

The year is 1996. Charles and Diana are divorcing, Jerry Maguire tops the box office, a Finn Dorset sheep named Dolly makes a friend made from her own mammary gland, and America’s favorite sitcom is a show about nothing in which four neurotic New Yorkers debate life’s finer points. Such sophisticated times, McDonald’s had determined, called for a sophisticated sandwich, one that would appeal to the urbane, discerning, and diet-conscious tastes of Gen X: the Arch Deluxe.

It was bold and upscale, featuring spices like pepper (ooh) and mustard (not yellow, but the stoneground kind — quelle magnifique). It was also the biggest marketing flop in McDonald’s history, with the brand spending an estimated $200 million to advertise a sandwich that very few people — especially not sophisticated urbanites — wanted to order.

Where McDonald’s went wrong has been covered at length. Mistakes include marketing to a new, disinterested demographic, while neglecting the brand’s core audience, overpricing the sandwich itself, some ad firm dram, and sweeping disinterest or disdain from franchisees. In 1996, the New York Times reported on a memo from the company’s then-president Edward H. Rensi, in which Rensi “tried to marshal market-research data in a defense of the Arch Deluxe to the franchisees, writing in summary: ‘Only those who expected a miracle were disappointed.’”

Rensi was underselling McDonald’s high hopes for the burger, which — per the New York Times — was originally projected to bring in $1 billion to the company. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable to expect miracles because on paper, the Arch Deluxe is one hell of a burger: crisp lettuce, mustard-mayo sauce, peppered bacon, tomato, and beef on a bakery-style potato roll. It was the creation of Andrew Selvaggio, a fine dining chef from Chicago’s legendary Pump Room. With all the talent and bona fides a McDonald’s head chef required and then some, Selvaggio spent months coming up with what he now describes as “something unique and different [to] set us apart from everybody. The Arch Deluxe was supposed to be the first entry into a better burger — premium burger — experience for McDonald’s.”

Selvaggio was hired as McDonald’s head chef in 1994 and flourished in the role. He reveled in the impromptu lessons in food technology, food science, and process technology from what felt like the control center of the fast-food industry. Two years into the job, he was approached about creating a burger with a distinctly adult taste to shift the perception of McDonald’s from a place for families to a place for anyone, childless grownups included. While this had actually been the case among working-class adults for some time, McDonald’s was now pursuing high-earners and young professionals.

For about a year, Selvaggio furiously worked from a glass-encased test kitchen, which looked like a lab out of Jurassic Park. “I tasted at least 30 or more mustards for the Arch Deluxe sauce,” he says. “I worked with the bakers to create potato rolls — not to mention a new salt-to-pepper ratio, and the development of peppered bacon procedures.” Along with recipe development, Selvaggio immersed himself in research, diligently investigating how competitors created and marketed their burgers.

In 1995, the Arch Deluxe debuted in test markets in Canada and in May 1996, it was added to U.S. menus nationwide for the cool price of $2.09 to $2.49. McDonald’s accompanied the release with an expensive marketing campaign that iterated, then reiterated, that this “burger with the grownup taste” was not for childish palates. In one commercial, two tweens, a boy and a girl, sit across from each other at a McDonald’s table; the boy dismantles his sandwich, grossed out by the sophisticated flavors, as the girl observes with distaste. “It’s true,” says the voiceover. “We do mature faster than boys.” In another, Ronald McDonald plays golf as if to say, “See? Even the clown can grow up a little.”

The public’s reaction to the $150 million Arch Deluxe campaign was tepid at best. In addition to its marketing failure, the sandwich struggled to gain support and enthusiasm from McDonald’s franchisees. “It was a new burger that required a new sauce, new buns, new lettuce, seasoning,” says Selvaggio. In the end, they weren’t seeing the return on investment needed to justify the specialty burger. From 1998 to 1999, McDonald’s kept the Arch Deluxe on the menu at select McDonald’s stores before removing it completely on August 18, 2000. “It was sort of hard working on a product so long and [to] see it not go anywhere,” says Selvaggio. “I learned not to get too attached.” He stayed on at McDonald’s for several years before leaving in 2009 and now works as a culinary advisor at Jollibee, the Philippine fried-chicken chain. But he is still proud of the Arch Deluxe and his time at McDonald’s.

The Arch Deluxe was not without its fans; McDonald’s even tested a revamped version of it, dubbed the Archburger, at a cheaper price point in 2018, though it didn’t stick beyond that. When Selvaggio rewatches old Arch Deluxe commercials — many of which he’s featured in — online, he finds himself mostly touched at the reactions from the masses. “You should see some of the comments. Everything from, ‘I really missed this burger’ to ‘this guy probably is just like Jared Fogle.’ But, man, I just start laughing when I read that stuff.” (He is not, he clarifies, anything like Jared Fogle.)

Had the Arch Deluxe debuted in a different time, and with a different marketing gimmick, there’s a chance it could’ve been a hit. Only three years after the burger’s discontinuation, McDonald’s — giving up on the marketing white whale of Gen X — hit gold among millennials with its Justin Timberlake-fronted “I’m lovin’ it” campaign. Younger generations typically don’t approach fast food with the same amount of scorn, and sandwich releases now come with celebrity endorsements and the same level of anticipation as sneaker drops.

Trends are currently geared more toward nostalgia, and reminding consumers what it was like to be a kid rather than highlighting the increasingly limited perks of adulthood (like paying $20 for a burger when you’d rather be ordering off the kids’ menu). Lauded chefs like David Chang are not only less scornful of fast food, but go as far as to celebrate it. But at least one thing is consistent between now and then: The type of person in search of a more sophisticated, elite burger experience probably doesn’t look to McDonald’s. And vice versa, a person craving a McDonald’s burger isn’t asking for the bells and whistles, but the comforts of a classic. In the endless search for hype, the Golden Arches has had better luck repackaging its consistent menu with in-demand celebrities like Travis Scott or BTS than it ever will with a mustard-mayo sauce, no matter how delicious it is.

Jeremy Glass is a freelance writer living in Maine where there are only 58 McDonald’s across the state. He’s on Twitter as @CandyAndPizza. Give him a follow and boost his serotonin levels. Eliot Wyatt is a freelance illustrator based in Bristol, United Kingdom.

Chefs Russell Jackson and Ian Boden struggled to reconcile their visions of fine dining with their communities’ desires. Now, as they forge a sustainable path beyond the pandemic, one of them is ready to double down, and the other is ready to walk away.

Chef Russell Jackson was tired. When his New York City restaurant, Reverence, opened in August 2019, guests could sit at the U-shaped chef’s counter beneath 14-foot ceilings. The buzz of Frederick Douglass Boulevard would hum from the other side of floor-to-ceiling windows, and diners could watch as he and his team swiftly, silently plated courses of locally sourced, California-inspired dishes, like Koda Farms barley and Hudson Valley nukazuke in a pool of vegetable scrap puree, topped with Santa Barbara uni. But this past March, Jackson peered at me through the camera on his laptop, a new $400 air purifier humming behind him. He let out a sigh, rubbing his hands over his face, dusty with five-o’clock shadow. It had been a year since the start of a pandemic that’s killed more than half a million Americans and decimated countless industries — the restaurant industry more than most. “Honestly,” he said, “I’m broken.”

Reverence is one of hundreds of thousands of independent restaurants across the country maimed by COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, restaurants were in a precarious position, squeezed between ever-increasing rents, food costs, and payrolls. A September 2020 Yelp report found that more than 32,000 restaurants across the country had closed between March and the end of August — 61 percent of them permanently. And that was before the fall and winter surges, which resulted in an exponential rise in virus-related hospitalizations and deaths, followed by new rounds of closures and restrictions. By March 2021, that number had climbed to nearly 80,000 restaurants, while, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as restaurants closed — then reopened and closed again — over the past year, the U.S. shed nearly 4 million industry jobs out of 15.6 million.

“We’re never going back to normal,” Jackson predicted shortly after the pandemic reached New York City in March of last year. At the time, Reverence had been open in Harlem for just over six months, and the city had just closed down dining rooms. Jackson, 57, who’s been cooking in restaurants since he was a teenager and is best known for his pop-up dinner series in San Francisco and appearances on Iron Chef America and Food Network Star, was worried about transitioning from the intricacy and intimacy of dinner service to boxed takeout. But he hoped that a stripped-down version of his offerings — prepped three-course meals with entrees like seafood oil-poached Long Island bonito — would still draw the patronage of people in the neighborhood. Within weeks, as the pandemic began to disproportionately affect Black communities like his own, he wanted to offer something beyond running a takeout program for the well-off, so he partnered with the anti-food-waste certified B Corp Too Good to Go, to donate leftover food. Bento boxes and contactless pickup weren’t quite what Jackson had envisioned for Reverence, but he had bills to pay and a staff to support.

Tom McGovern

Four hundred miles away from Harlem, on a sweaty Saturday last summer, chef Ian Boden, 43, and his sous chef, Zach Weiss, 26, were assembling takeout orders in the kitchen of Boden’s restaurant, the Shack, in Staunton, Virginia. Located about 45 minutes west of Charlottesville, Staunton is the kind of place where the MAGA banners only slightly outnumber the trans pride flags waving from people’s front porches. That day, Boden was focused on finishing a salad of Salanova lettuces and fried Virginia peanuts when his wife, Leslie, walked into the kitchen. She kept her mask up to greet him over the hiss of the grill and the gurgle of fryer oil. Before sealing each to-go box, he spun the requisite twirl of olive oil and finished each with a sprinkling of sea salt, which he buys from a salt miner friend in West Virginia. Leslie watched as Boden gingerly tweezed herbs and an array of pickled vegetables onto the salad. “It’s just going to get smushed in someone’s backseat,” she said. “You don’t have to do all of that.”

Boden stopped and looked up at her. “But... I kind of do.”

For seven years, the Shack has been a tasting-menu-only spot where Boden married his Jewish roots with Southern cooking, relying on locally sourced, Appalachian-grown products. He envisaged it as a way to raise awareness of the vast bounty of mid-Atlantic agriculture, and to boost the local economy by attracting tourists to the area. As the pandemic exploded in early March, Boden shut down. Then, like many chefs, he laid off most of his staff — many had worked with him for years to establish the restaurant’s reputation as destination-worthy — and cobbled together a takeout program of dishes like burgers and pot stickers. Though he struggled to convince locals that the restaurant’s reimagined to-go menu wasn’t just more of the “fancy” stuff he’d offered for years, like heirloom grains and sweetbreads, selling pared-down versions of his food kept him in the kitchen. “Cooking is the only thing I know,” he said. “It keeps me going.”

I was surprised, then, when he told me late last spring that he was going to invest all of his savings into an entirely new business, the Staunton Grocery. The switch to takeout hadn’t been enough to sustain the restaurant: According to Boden, in an average year, the Shack made around $450,000; between late March and early July 2020, he lost $200,000. He hoped that a grocery store selling many of the local products he uses in the kitchen, with events like a cheese tasting with a local goat farmer and an instructional pop-up on shucking Virginia oysters, would attract more customers. “This isn’t what I want to be doing, but it’ll keep the local farmers and suppliers with a steady client, and hopefully I’ll be able to hire more people back and focus on the food again,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, as crazy as it is, we’re done. This is all we have left.”

No restaurants suffered more acutely last year than the independently owned, with businesses run by Black and Asian Americans enduring disproportionate rates of closure — as well as persistent racist attacks throughout the pandemic. The restaurants that stayed afloat — whether by skipping rent payments or winning the lottery with a Paycheck Protection Program loan or through crowdsourced charity — were overwhelmed by the ways they were forced to fundamentally transform their businesses, sometimes more than once. From rolling out new takeout programs seemingly overnight to trying to adhere to constantly shifting public health guidelines issued by warring levels of government to handling mask-averse patrons and facing the growing banality of perpetual trauma, the restaurant industry seemed all but bled out going into 2021.

Tom McGovern

As the restaurants that have survived aim to fully reopen, the labor force that powers them (whether historically underpaid back-of-house staff like porters, line cooks, and dishwashers, or tipped workers like servers and bartenders) is coming off of a year marked by underemployment and a series of reckonings over the racism, sexism, toxicity, and exploitation endemic to the industry. As these workers continue to face both economic uncertainty and risks to their health and safety, it has led many to push back, resulting in a chronic worker shortage that has hampered some restaurants’ abilities to return to full service, re-centering the conversation about the nature of work in the hospitality industry and whether it can ever be equitable or sustainable in anything resembling its current form.

In the realm of fine dining, which is often a bellwether for the entire industry, the usual broadly existential questions about the future of hospitality have become especially pointed, sharpened by a year in which issues of institutionalized racism, gatekeeping, and pervasive workplace violence against people of color were rendered more visible than ever before. I’ve spent much of the past year watching Jackson and Boden attempt to work through some of these questions as they’ve hobbled from one survival strategy to the next. As Jackson tried to dig more deeply into the broader restaurant community — while hoping that fine dining as he knew it would eventually return — Boden, whose restaurant is in a rural town that relied on tourism — an untenable demographic for a global pandemic — was forced to rethink his entire business model, one without fine dining at the heart of it. Now, as reopened restaurants in New York and Virginia find their footing, Jackson and Boden are emerging into a world that promises to be radically different — but also more of the same.

When Reverence debuted in the summer of 2019 as the first Black chef-owned fine dining restaurant in Harlem in more than 30 years, local residents were wary of a fancy new restaurant in the neighborhood. The restaurant’s reservations-only, five-course tasting menu cost $98 per person, with an optional $89 beverage pairing. Even before the pandemic, 40 percent of residents were rent-burdened in the area, according to recent census data. “I like the idea of fine dining, but I can’t afford it,” Sheryl Hallett, a barista at a coffee shop just a few blocks from the restaurant, told me as Reverence prepared to open that summer. “It doesn’t belong here. If you’re trying to build culture, why not make it accessible?”

Still, Jackson, who lives in the neighborhood, saw no reason for his tasting menu restaurant not to exist there. “Building Reverence in an underserved community was important for the improvement of the community and building in a predominately African American community was personally important for me,” he wrote in a blog post last year.

Jackson moved full-time to Harlem in 2014 and soon after began dating his now-wife, Lora, who lived in the area. “I was standing at the corner of West 125th and Adam Clayton Powell, and I had this moment, ‘Why doesn’t Harlem have this?’” he told me, referring to the mass of fine dining restaurants in the richer, whiter parts of Manhattan. “This is the restaurant Harlem deserves.”

Despite opening to warm reviews, Jackson’s lofty vision for a fine dining monument to Californian cuisine in the middle of Harlem still struggled to connect with locals. “I am consistently being asked, ‘What are you doing for the community?’” he said. So when the pandemic hit, he felt determined to do more than just ensure the survival of his restaurant — he wanted to embed more deeply in the neighborhood, albeit from within the tightly circumscribed framework of fine dining.

Every few weeks, Jackson and his staff implemented a new iteration of takeout, provisions, packages, partnerships, and sponsorships: In March 2020, he launched three-course bento boxes for $35.95; by late summer that year, he had added $125 take-home, five-course tasting menus; grocery items and luxury pantry grabs, bottles of wine, and logo-emblazoned gear. And he strived to make his takeout customers continue to feel like guests: One regular was a huge fan of the chocolate that Reverence sells a la carte, so the beverage director, Kate Chunn, slipped a bar into their bento box as a callback to the days where surprise in-between courses added to the allure of dining at a chef’s counter.

Gary He

Gary He

In August, I spent a day with Jackson as he and his staff prepared takeout meals, which consisted of a choice between the fully prepared three-course bento box or the five-course, DIY tasting menu with follow-along videos of Jackson walking through the preparation. Each week, the menus changed and were based on a favorite music album of Jackson’s or on Black cooking pioneers; that week it was N.E.R.D.’s In Search Of. When I showed up in the morning, the four-person team of Jackson, Chunn, and two sous chefs, Kenya Lacayo and Machel Alleyne, were in full swing. Alleyne pickled cabbage and artichokes; Lacayo made dough for Parker House rolls; Jackson butchered Western Pennsylvania trout, all in preparation for the 15 orders on queue for that evening. The entire time I was there, no one seemed to stop moving. In the middle of the rapid-fire run of his knife through root vegetables and the marinading of black walnut brine onto chickens, Jackson remembered to box up a mush of sweet potatoes for his toddler, Kingston Bowie; tried to figure out what the hell was going on with the inflated water bill, again; and took a call from a credit card company looking to feature him in a Black-owned restaurant initiative.

At 4 p.m., after hours of baking and basting and plating and sanitizing, Jackson trotted out to the front of the restaurant to be ready for the first guests arriving to pick up their dinners. Order pickups were organized into time slots to help maintain social distancing between customers. Each bag or box required personal flourishes for each order, harkening back to the restaurant’s old soigne system, which recorded guests’ allergies or birthdays or the wine they mentioned they liked that one time. Chunn slipped a handwritten, personalized note from Jackson into each order. On one, in black ink, a John Lewis quote read: “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have,” followed by the date and Jackson’s signature in red.

The orders were then set up on a table in front of the restaurant. The first couple grabbed their bags amid bottles of hand sanitizer and Chunn’s watchful eye, and left with a wave from Jackson from the kitchen inside. He jogged out to greet the next customers in the queue by their first names and bumped elbows, eyes squinting with smiles behind face masks. A couple of hours later, as the last to-go box went home with a family from a few blocks away, I asked Jackson how he was still going. He furrowed his brow and shook his head at me before answering, as if what he was about to say was obvious. “I just go,” he said. “This is what I do. I do my best for my family and my crew and the people I feed. And then I go home, get up, and do it again.”

By fall, as sales plateaued with colder weather forcing people back inside, Jackson continued to roll out new ways to bring in business. He begrudgingly began offering delivery to the immediate neighborhood. The fragility of his food — finishing herbs are plucked from plants that rise along the windows of the restaurant — didn’t take well to being driven or biked even a few blocks, and the effort ended within weeks. In late October, he launched Reverence’s Soup Store, offering an a la carte menu and other takeaway items, followed by a virtual cooking class called Reverence Culinary Academy, which built off the video demos for the restaurant’s assemble-at-home tasting menus. Jackson told me that despite his cheery, cheeky posts on Instagram and a steady stream of new programs, it didn’t feel like enough. “I despise the word pivot because that’s not what we’re doing,” he said. “I’m not fucking pivoting. I’m fighting to survive.”

Gary He

Last summer, New York City’s Open Restaurants Program offered a lifeline, allowing thousands of restaurants to open for outdoor dining. Streets throughout the city were transformed into cafe-lined boulevards as countless restaurants rustled up outdoor arrangements, whether elaborate patios or makeshift dining sheds and yurts. Despite “fighting to survive,” Jackson had no interest in following suit, even as restaurants as luxe as the $650-a-head sushi icon Masa opened for outdoor service. He feared exposing his staff or family to the virus, thinking that so-called safety measures, like plexiglass dividers, were entirely theatrical (not to mention a legal minefield). Besides, he said, “This restaurant wasn’t built for that. And if I’m going down, I’m going down on my terms.”

Jackson’s desire to run a restaurant exclusively on his own terms stems in part from his experiences as a Black chef in a predominantly white industry. For years, Black owners of small, independent restaurants struggled more than their white (and more likely to be corporate-backed) counterparts. The pandemic only exacerbated these inequities, both from a financial and a cultural vantage point, while the protests against police brutality and white supremacy that swept the nation threw them into starker relief. As Jackson said in an interview with longtime friend (and the godmother of his son) Dominique Crenn last summer: “Twice in my career, two big-name chefs – who are still cooking today – both hired me sight unseen. The day I walked in to start work, I was fired without ever pulling out a knife… In the majority of the upper-level kitchens I’ve worked in throughout my career, I was usually the only African-American cook.”

In that same interview, Jackson explained that he wanted to open the restaurant in Harlem because of its lack of Black ownership of fine dining. “For me to build a place in Harlem was not just important from the standpoint of being able to do something for the community, but also to realize — and this is the tough part that always chokes me up — that I needed this community more than it needed me,” he said. But one morning in July 2020, he arrived at Reverence to find shit smeared across its towering windows. “If it weren’t for my staff and their love and their ethics and my customers’ support, I was done. You just don’t know how to absorb that kind of hatred,” he told me a few weeks after the vandalism, believing that it was targeted. He still doesn’t know who defaced the restaurant.

As the summer wore on, Jackson continued to realize just how much of his time in restaurants had exposed him to oppressive treatment by bosses and coworkers alike, and how untenable fine dining had become. “We’ve been working in a broken system for a really fucking long time,” he said. “With Reverence, I still want to change that.” Before the pandemic, he had implemented a no-tipping, service charge policy, with his four-person staff pooling tips and working as a team in which everyone could take on every role, from server to cook to dishwasher. He remains adamant, though, that in order to pay restaurant staff a living wage, diners must be amenable to hikes in menu prices and accept the proliferation of service charges across the country. “The era of ‘the customer is always right’ is over,” he said.

But the shift toward better pay and working conditions must extend beyond individual restaurants, he says. As a board member of the One Fair Wage campaign, Jackson has lobbied legislatures throughout the U.S. to pass the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the minimum wage for tipped workers nationally. He also attends weekly Zoom meetings with the Independent Restaurant Coalition, a group of restaurateurs, owners, chefs, and other culinary professionals that came together just days after pandemic closures rolled through the country. After successfully pressuring Congress to pass the Restaurant Revitalization Fund — part of the American Rescue Plan stimulus bill that provides grants to restaurants still trying to break even from the losses of the pandemic — thousands of restaurants across the country, including the Shack, became eligible to receive desperately needed money. Recently, the program came under attack by independent restaurant owners (and a cadre of Trump-adjacent lawyers) in Texas, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania, who claim the Relief Fund’s policy of prioritizing Black- and women-owned restaurants to receive the grants first is “unconstitutional” and “discriminatory.” When Jackson and I spoke recently, he was furious, decrying their actions as not just racist, but as a betrayal of the wider industry.

Gary He

Jackson has perhaps surprisingly little interest in displacing fine dining as the centerpiece of American restaurant culture. He wants to fix it, in part because of his belief — a cliche among chefs, to be sure — in the idea that restaurants like his can bring people together. “The core aspect of why this restaurant exists is that the act of sitting down with someone else, whether you know them or you don’t, and being able to connect with an experience of eating, is in large part what our entire society has been built on,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to live in a society where I couldn’t have restaurants.”

Still, some chefs wonder if it’s possible to reform fine dining into an equitable system, or even argue that the industry’s not worth saving at all, as the chef-provocateur-activist Tunde Wey suggested on his Instagram and then in an interview with the New Yorker. Chef Eric Rivera of Addo in Seattle, who came up at Alinea but is now one of the industry’s most outspoken voices, notes how intransigent fine dining is as a whole. “It’s very classist, it’s very racist,” he told me. “Everybody’s realizing now how non-diverse everything is… but I’ve seen it happening in my eyes forever.”

“I think that we are rushing back to something that was inherently already broken and doing it in a way that is even more harmful than it was before,” chef Irene Li, 31, whose restaurant Mei Mei has earned her multiple James Beard nominations, told me last year as restaurants were beginning to reopen following the first wave of lockdowns. Li’s skepticism is significant, given her approach at Mei Mei, which has been a leader in improving working conditions for its employees — including offering health insurance when few other establishments did, and providing new staff members with professional development on the business side of running a kitchen and dining room. “Is there a future for the restaurant industry where we are not relying on existing power structures and existing pools of resources that people have and where we can really kind of start over?” she asks.

It’s a tall order: Even before the onset of the pandemic and the series of ensuing economic catastrophes, being a successful independent restaurant was next to impossible. With pre-COVID profit margins of 5 to 10 percent in fine dining, operators like Jackson — who’s bled more than double of what he initially invested in the restaurant — have suffered immense losses. Ruefully, he pointed out to me that he’d been open as a takeout restaurant longer than as a sit-down one. “I’ve done what was necessary,” he said. “When you are led by your heart and your convictions, you end up doing a lot of shit that you may not have ever thought that you were going to do.”

By the start of last summer, the takeout concept that Boden hastily put together in the early weeks of the pandemic was just barely covering bills and payroll, even amid a summer surge in tourism. “The Airbnbs are all full, but I’m nowhere near what I used to make,” he said. He was able to rehire his sous chef and a few front-of-house staff members to help with the cooking and delivering of food to parked cars outside, but the more affordable menu of smashburgers and fries, despite selling at a higher volume, simply didn’t bring in the kind of revenue the restaurant used to make. A five-course meal in the Shack’s 400-square-foot dining room cost $80 per person; the takeout pulled pork barbecue sandwich at the grocery store cost $12.

That tension has been part and parcel of the Shack’s entire existence: On one hand, just a few minutes away from the restaurant, there’s an Edison-bulbed coffee shop with craft kombucha on draft; a sleek wine, beer, and cider bar; and a yoga and wellness co-op. On the other, the surrounding county’s median income has hovered between $25,000 and $30,000 for nearly a decade. “It felt like an uphill battle most of the time,” he said. “The community didn’t really get what we were doing when we first opened. I think they thought we were snobs.”

Tom McGovern

Like Jackson, Boden struggled to find a place for his restaurant in fine dining while also fighting to defend its existence to the community — which, also like Jackson, is in his wife’s hometown. While its menu is more rooted in the area than the California-inspired menu at Reverence, with a focus on local farmers, winemakers, foragers, and even ice cream makers, it had a more explicitly outward-facing goal: to put Staunton on the map as a culinary destination that could attract more people — and money — to the small town. In that, Boden has succeeded: Dishes like seared redfish with smoked greens, grilled purple cauliflower, and fried sunchoke chips have earned him loyalty and praise from tourists, as well as nods from the James Beard Foundation and publications including Vogue, Food & Wine, and Forbes. As the pandemic was quietly spreading through the U.S. in the early months of last year, Boden received his long-awaited review from the Washington Post, proclaiming him “a gifted chef whose range you don’t want to miss,” and writing that the food is “complex,” “compelling,” and “made with your eyes in mind.” After the review hit, and mere weeks before he had to shutter the dining room, Boden was feeling optimistic. Months later, its publication felt like lemon juice in a persistently nicked finger. “I had been working so hard, for so long. And then it all just stopped. I had no choice but to close,” he said.

Boden was able to partially reopen for indoor dining at 25 percent capacity last fall, with two turns of service per night, three nights a week. Then a staff member had a COVID scare, and Boden decided it was too dangerous to weather what would become the deadly winter surge of the pandemic. It was a long winter: Come February, his sous chef, Zach Weiss, had resigned, telling Boden he’d be leaving the restaurant industry entirely. The pandemic, he said, made him realize that he needed a change of pace; that his priorities had shifted. (Weiss wasn’t alone in making this exodus.)

The Grocery is the only reason the Shack survived the stretch between October and March, according to Boden. Its goods are not as affordable as grocery-chain versions — organic Appalachian pink-eyed peas; collard greens kimchi and sorghum butter; the pandemic necessities of Virginia-brewed beer and ciders — but they allowed him to engage more closely with customers who came into the store, to talk about where and who he buys from and how it matters to local supply chains and agriculture. He thinks that people were more receptive to the Grocery because they viewed it as more accessible. “It’s easier to sell a couple jars of jam than a whole meal,” he said. “And I don’t mind doing it. I miss cooking how I used to, but until we can get back to full capacity, we’ll just keep going with it.”

And now that the Shack is back to its reservations-only dinners, there is a sort of “pipeline,” as Boden describes it, for tourists to try local foods from the Grocery on a Friday, dine at the Shack on a Saturday, then pick up lunch from the Grocery again on their way out of town.

Tom McGovern

As Staunton has come back to life, Boden remains concerned that fine dining chefs and owners who focus on sustainable agriculture and community engagement are a continually shrinking pool. As we spoke over the past year, I was struck by how Boden was more frustrated with the economic and cultural forces that, in his view, have tainted the core of restaurants in general, than by the prospect of closing his own. “The way that we’ve been operating as chefs… of course it’s not essential… what we do is inherently elitist,” he said. “All the fancy shit, and I do the fancy shit, is really not what this is all about. It’s about connecting to the local ecosystem, the people, your staff. But we’ve lost sight of that. We’re all so driven by ego, and I don’t know if we’ll ever recover from that.

“We’re all hypocrites and realizing that is at least a step in the right direction. But the older I get, the more I realize that the only thing our society listens to is cents and dollars. So for me, the most impactful thing I can do is choose where I spend my money,” he said, referring to his commitment to source the products in the restaurant and the Grocery from as close to Staunton as possible.

For his part, Boden has focused on tending to the immediate needs of his community even as his restaurant’s fate remained in limbo until Virginia lifted all COVID restrictions in May 2021. On the sweaty Saturday back in August when I visited the Shack, a tropical storm tore through Staunton and damaged several local restaurants. The next morning, Boden was out with his wife assessing the destruction and helping to plan a fundraiser. Now that the Shack has opened back up for four- and five-course tasting-menu reservations — thanks in part to a lump sum from the Restaurant Relief Fund — Boden continues to try to link the wellbeing of his business with that of Staunton. He sits on the board of the town’s farmers market, peddling and promoting the same farmers and vendors who’ve also suffered disproportionate losses over the past year. “For locals, we’re definitely still a special-occasion restaurant,” he told me in June, “but we’re able to buy more focused product and support more of our community.”

In April, Reverence fully reopened for the first time in a year. It was a loaded day. “I can’t quantify the emotional toll that this all has taken on me,” Jackson said. He’s offering the same style of tasting menu as he did before the pandemic — locally sourced, story-driven, intimate — with an added semimonthly Sunday supper. Even as reservations slowly pick up for the single seating for up to 12 at his chef’s counter (instead of the pre-pandemic 16) Thursday through Saturday, he still isn’t convinced that “normal” is even close to a proper description of the current industry landscape. Jackson consulted on the Aspen Institute’s “Safety First” COVID-19 protocol guide for restaurants, and Reverence will maintain them — screening, contact tracing, plastic shields for guests to hold up when a staff member approaches them with a drink or dish — through 2022.

Jackson is still in what can be best described as survival mode, hopping from menu to menu, initiative to initiative. “Everyone keeps asking me why I keep saying yes to new things, but that’s just what this year has taught me,” he said. “You can’t stop.” The to-go box tasting menu remains — now limited to once a week.

Tom McGovern

Fine dining is still at the core of what Jackson wants to do, however. “I think more fine dining should exist. And it’s not about the price point… Michelin has shown it can be in a subway station. I want to see more of these types of restaurants here in Harlem. I mean, that’s the reason why I built it here,” he said. At the same time, he remains wary of guests coming back with their pre-pandemic expectations. “Do we want to rebuild a broken, unequitable, highly racist, highly sexist, misogynistic industry? Or do we want to build the industry of the future where people get paid a fair wage, people have opportunity for growth, people aren’t used as a commodity for greed? That’s not what the hospitality industry is supposed to be about,” he said. “We’re at the crossroads.”

After talking with locals who were ready to dine-in again, and after his entire staff and family received the vaccine, Boden reopened the Shack for indoor dining on March 25. The old hum of a restaurant returned — of tinkering glassware and the inescapable beep of the ticket machine in the kitchen — but Boden has no intention of going back to pre-pandemic working conditions. “I can’t go back to how bad it was… beating myself up all the time, criticizing myself for every little thing. I won’t go back,” he said of the 90-hour weeks he used to put in. “As long as my business is sustainable, my staff is happy and the guests are happy, I don’t care.”

Instead of the pre-pandemic six nights of service per week, the Shack is down to three, offering prix fixe menus at $70 for four courses with an optional $70 wine pairing. The lighter schedule gives Boden at least a full day off, which he says has helped his mental health. And the increase in menu prices has allowed Boden to raise the hourly wage for his tipped employees to $6 (in Virginia, the tipped minimum wage remains $2.13 per hour). The Shack’s and the Staunton Grocery’s revenue equations have also flipped: According to Boden, around 75 percent of guests are from out of town, and people inclined to take the scenic drive to Staunton are in search of fine dining, not premade sandwiches.

Yet Boden’s view of the grand return of restaurants is more subdued than one might expect: He remains unconvinced that diners are ready to pay the higher prices necessary to make restaurants fairer and more equitable, and is skeptical of the intentions of many of his fellow chefs. The last time we talked, on an early Wednesday morning en route to inspect a walk-in refrigerator that had fritzed out, he told me, “I think there’s still a lot of lip service. The guys that have been successful are going to keep on doing what they’ve always done… and until the old guard of my generation is gone, and your generation comes up, there’s not gonna be a lot of change.” He paused. “I think that anybody who doesn’t come out of all of this on the other end and hasn’t changed is destined to repeat history.”

Funding for this reporting was provided by the Pulitzer Center.

Sara Sheridan is a Philadelphia-based postgraduate reporting fellow at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and a postgraduate research scholar and editor at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She spent a decade working in the restaurant industry.
Gary He is a James Beard Award-winning photojournalist based in New York.
Tom McGovern is a food and hospitality photographer based in Los Angeles.
Fact checked by Andrea López-Cruzado

The city health department stopped short of mandating masks indoors — but emphasized the importance of masking up to forestall another spike in COVID-19 cases

On Thursday, July 22, Philadelphia officials announced that they now “strongly recommend” everyone — both unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people — wear masks indoors, a little over a month since all COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in the city. Health department spokesperson James Garrow told the Inquirer, “Now is the time to take action. Doing it now will help us head it off before it gets to a point where it really gets bad.”

Since the COVID-19 delta variant began spreading across the U.S., and with children under 12 not currently eligible for the vaccine, city officials are concerned that case numbers and hospitalizations could spike again in Philly. The city has seen a rise in cases recently, registering 64 new cases per day in the past two weeks, compared to an average of 24 cases per day at the end of June. “We are seeing a small but disturbing increase in hospitalizations due to COVID-19 among children in Philadelphia, along with more than a doubling of cases in the city,” Acting Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole said in a statement on Thursday. Currently, about 61 percent of eligible Philadelphians have been fully vaccinated.

Here are the new COVID-19 recommendations from the city Health Department:

The Health Department strongly recommends that everyone, including fully vaccinated people, wear masks in all public indoor places, choose outdoor rather than indoor spaces, avoid crowded indoor spaces, mask while indoors around people you don’t know are vaccinated. For unvaccinated people, consider double masking while in indoor public spaces.

As it pertains to restaurants, city officials seemed to hedge when speaking with the Inquirer about how the new guidance might impact restaurant dining. Garrow said that city officials don’t yet think it’s unsafe for vaccinated people to eat in restaurants, though this new indoor masking recommendation indicates diners should consider masking up in all circumstances except for when eating or drinking.

• Philly Bars and Restaurants Can Fully Reopen on June 11 [EP]
• Philly officials say even fully vaccinated people should again wear masks inside public spaces [Inquirer]

The world of vanilla products is as rich as it is potentially confusing. Here’s how to navigate it.

Vanilla, as a concept, suffers a bad rep: The word alone implies something safe at best, and boring at worst. Basic, basically. But vanilla as an ingredient is a wondrous thing, ambrosial, floral, warm, and sophisticated. In truth, the essence of vanilla is anything but plain.

“It’s an essential ingredient, adding not just flavor, but also body and soul into a dish,” says Francis Ang, a San Francisco-based pastry chef and owner of the pop-up Pinoy Heritage. Vanilla is, of course, integral to countless pastries and desserts, adding a sense of familiarity to everything from ice cream to sugar cookies. And it’s a luxury good in its own right, the result of a wildly time- and labor-intensive harvest that must be done almost entirely by hand.

But for such a frequently used ingredient, vanilla and its subsets can be confusing to understand. With vanilla bean pods, extracts, pastes, sugars, and salts out there, how do you know which version to shop for? Why are some vanillas so much more expensive than others? And how do you make sure you’re not wasting any of the precious stuff if you do invest in a pricier option?

With those questions in mind, we spoke to a panel of experts (including pastry chefs and the author of a vanilla-centric cookbook) to help demystify the wide, wonderful world of vanilla.

Where does vanilla come from?

In a truly neat trick of nature, vanilla pods (the long, thin, stick-like thing you sometimes see sold individually in a tube) are the fruit of a stunning flower known as the vanilla orchid, which is the only orchid to bear edible fruit.

The most commonly used vanilla orchid for culinary purposes is vanilla planifolia, native to Mexico, and grown across the Caribbean, northern South America, Central America, and Madagascar. There’s also vanilla pompona, found in the West Indies, Central America, and South America; and vanilla tahitensis, local to French Polynesia and New Guinea, whose backstory is something of a botanical mystery.

Do different vanillas have different flavors?

Madagascar accounts for roughly 80 percent of the world’s supply today, so that’s probably the “traditional” flavor you’re most used to, says Shauna Sever, author of the cookbook Pure Vanilla: Irresistible Recipes and Essential Techniques. Mexican vanilla is a little bolder and slightly smoky, while Tahitian vanilla is more delicate and floral. Some purveyors, like Burlap & Barrel, sell pods from other places, such as Tanzania and the Peruvian Amazon.

Why are vanilla beans so expensive?

In short, because vanilla harvesting is a time- and labor-intensive endeavor that defies automation. “It’s an incredibly long process that can’t be rushed,” Sever says.

To start with, the vanilla orchids only open one day a year, and they must be hand-pollinated because this particular flower has only one natural pollinator — the Melipona bee, which is native to Central America. It takes the pods another eight to nine months to mature, and then they must be hand-picked while green. They still don’t resemble the fragrant, shiny brown-black stems you see in stores. First, the pods must be cured, then wrapped in little blankets and dried, a three-to-six-month process during which they ferment and shrink down by 400 percent.

On top of all that, global vanilla prices have soared in recent years, due in part to increased demand, decreased supply, and a series of natural disasters in growing regions like Madagascar. As the price of vanilla has increased, it has made vanilla in Madagascar the target of thieves, who have attacked and killed farmers for their valuable vanilla crops. On top of that, there’s the COVID-19 pandemic; while it remains to be seen how it will affect the price of vanilla, it probably won’t help matters.

Sophia Pappas

Okay, so let’s say I do shell out for a vanilla bean pod. How do I know if I’m getting a good one?

Brands such as Nielsen-Massey, Heilala, Beanilla, The Vanilla Queen, and Burlap & Barrel are generally reliable. “You can tell if a vanilla bean is really good based on how thick and plump it is — it should almost look a little moist,” says Miller Union pastry chef and Eater Young Gun Claudia Martinez. “I don’t recommend buying pods from big-box grocery stores, because they’re usually dry, thin, and frail — those aren’t worth your money. If it’s all shriveled up, it shows there aren’t a lot of beans inside.”

To store vanilla beans, wrap them tightly in plastic wrap and store in an airtight container (such as a jar) in a cool, dark place for up to six months.

The recipe I’m using says to scrape the vanilla seeds out of the pod. What’s the best way to do that?

There is no one right way — the most common is just to split the pod in half lengthwise with a sharp knife and use the tip of said knife to scrape the tiny beans out — but Martinez has a trick she prefers. “I like to cut the pod in half with clean scissors, then use a little spoon or an offset spatula to scrape the beans,” she says. “I think it’s cleaner, and you have less risk of breaking the pod with a sharp knife.” She also recommends rubbing the pods briskly between your hands for a few seconds to warm them up and loosen the seeds before cutting, which helps relax the pod and makes it easier to scrape out.

What can I do with leftover bean pods after I’ve scraped the seeds?

Plenty! “I like to fill a mason jar with vodka or brandy, then steep the beans in them for a few weeks (or even months), to make my own extract,” says Ang. “Sometimes I even soak the whole pod (not just the leftover shells), so that the seeds inside soften and swell up, and you can remove them just by running your finger along the pod and squeezing the beans out.” You can also add the spent pods to a jar filled with sugar to get vanilla-flavored sugar, and do the same with a flaky finishing salt such as Maldon.

What’s the difference between a vanilla bean pod and vanilla extract? Are they interchangeable in a recipe?

Vanilla extract is by far the most common form of vanilla available today. As its name implies, it’s made by macerating chopped vanilla bean pods in alcohol, which extracts the flavors and fragrances from the bean. Look for pure vanilla extract (more on imitation extract below), which must contain 13.35 ounces of vanilla beans per gallon during extraction and 35 percent alcohol. Beans and extract are interchangeable in most recipes — one whole vanilla bean is equivalent to one tablespoon of extract (see this helpful chart for more conversions).

In terms of brands, most of the same companies that peddle high-quality vanilla bean pods sell high-quality vanilla extract. “As long as it has the word ‘pure’ on it and the label just says vanilla beans and alcohol, you’re in business,” says Sever. In addition to the bean brands listed above, she’s a fan of Costco’s Kirkland vanilla for everyday use, calling it good quality for the price. Vanilla extract keeps at room temperature more or less indefinitely.

How about imitation vanilla extract?

Although many of us grew up with a little bottle of McCormick’s imitation vanilla extract, all of the sources interviewed for this piece beg you not to use it. The reason? It doesn’t have any real vanilla in it. Imitation extract is made primarily of an artificial flavoring called vanillin, which is essentially wood pulp with the flavor of vanilla extracted from it. It has a weaker flavor and aroma than the real stuff, and can leave a bitter aftertaste. If it’s all you have, they suggest limiting its use to baked goods that aren’t particularly vanilla-forward in flavor or appearance, like brownies or a loaf cake with lots of other warm spices.

What about vanilla bean paste? What’s that?

A somewhat specialty item that’s become more available in recent years, vanilla bean paste is a thick, brown, syrupy goo made by blending concentrated vanilla extract and vanilla powder together. Unlike liquid extract, it’s chock-full of visible vanilla seeds (flecks), and has a more intensely ambrosial aroma and flavor than extract alone. “It’s like getting the best of both worlds — huge flavor from the pod, but the convenience of an extract,” says Sever. And because it’s so potent, a little bit goes a long way (one vanilla bean = 2 to 3 teaspoons vanilla paste, per the conversion chart). Nielsen-Massey and the Spice House are two reliable brands; both keep at room temperature for months.

When does it make sense to use vanilla bean pods versus paste versus extract?

• Beans: When vanilla is the star of a dish, or you want to see lots of little flecks in the finished product, it’s worth it to splurge on a whole bean (even if you only use part of it). Vanilla ice cream, blondies, white cakes or cupcakes, and sugar cookies are all places where beans can make a difference, as are desserts heavy on fresh or poached fruit.
• Paste: Nearly as good as and almost interchangeable with beans (and still delivering plenty of flecks), and can be easier to work with when adding to liquids like cream (for whipping or pastry purposes). Plus, it’s generally more affordable than whole bean pods.
• Extract: Save this for desserts where vanilla plays second fiddle in terms of flavor and appearance: Think brownies, chocolate chip cookies, spice cakes, coffee cakes, and the like.

What to make with vanilla

Vanilla shows up in countless desserts and baked goods. In addition to the ones listed above, Ang loves pairing it with coconut milk for a more tropical flavor profile, Martinez adds it to her doughnut dough, and Sever has been known to add it to butter sauces and into spice rubs for seasoning pork.

A final note: “If you’re using vanilla, you should also be using salt, even in a dessert, to help bring the vanilla flavor out from the background and let it shine,” says Ang. “You need to have balance to awaken all your senses.”

Jamie Feldmar is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor, and cookbook author.
Sophia Pappas is a Pittsburgh-based illustrator.

Kena Peay’s cast-iron skillet recipe is crisp on the edges, gooey and chocolatey in the center, and a little bit of a stunt with marshmallows and pretzels on top

For thousands of Dominicans in New York’s Washington Heights, the shores of Lake Harriman State Park are for family, friends, and giant pots of empaguetadas

Before sunrise on summer weekends across the Bronx and Washington Heights, Dominican families pack vans with folding chairs, coolers, and canopies in preparation for a day at New York’s second-largest state park, Harriman, or Los Siete Lagos (the Seven Lakes), as it is often called. When the last lingering cousin is dragged from bed and stuffed in the van, an aunt runs up to the apartment for a final crucial item: an olla (pot) of spaghetti in a homemade criollo red sauce — a dish known as empaguetadas. She grabs it from the stovetop, hops in the passenger seat, slams the door, and off they go, 45 minutes north into the woods.

Twenty years ago Ronald Zorrilla was making a similar trip to the beach, but over dirt roads in the Dominican Republic while seated in the bed of his uncle’s pickup truck. “There would be like 15 of us cousins back there, just holding on to whatever we could,” says Zorrilla, who grew up in New York but spent each summer with family in the Dominican Republic. “One would be telling stories, some were mousy and quiet, one would be holding on to the big aluminum olla of spaghetti. Once, my cousin was goofing off and flew out the back when my uncle hit the gas.”

“Those roads are paved now,” Zorrilla laments. Not just that — roughly 70 percent of the Dominican Republic’s once-public beaches are now owned by resorts with restricted access and more formal food vendors, a hindrance to the throngs of working-class families who traditionally used the beaches for low-cost gatherings over pots of homemade spaghetti. A 2017 article in Remezcla reports that the Dominican tradition of empaguetadas now mostly survives at house parties and other indoor gatherings. But for the hundreds of thousands of Dominican immigrants who’ve settled in the United States, the beach-going ritual of empaguetadas has found a new home. For many, that’s the summertime shores of New York’s Los Siete Lagos.

On a particularly hot day this past June at Lake Welch — one of Harriman State Park’s Siete Lagos — Zorrilla sat under a tent next to an unopened bottle of rum, talking on the phone with family. “We’re at Welch, doing an empaguetada!” he shouted into the receiver. Around him, several-hundred families were set up under canopies across a clearing and up a rocky incline under shade trees, all with a view of the shimmering 216-acre lake surrounded by green hills. There were Honduran flags, Colombian soccer jerseys, lots of dancing, and laughing. In front of Zorrilla’s tent a man heaved a massive red snapper out of a cooler by the tail and slapped it on a grill. A woman walked by selling aguas frescas in small jugs; Mexican cumbias and Puerto Rican reggaeton from competing PA systems bled together, but Dominican music styles — dembow, perico ripiao (a folk style of merengue), classic merengue, and bachata — dominated the soundscape. And almost everywhere there were giant steel pots of spaghetti.

Spaghetti arrived in the Dominican Republic with a wave of Italian migration in the late 19th century, but became ubiquitous in the national diet in the ’50s, after the dictator Rafael Trujillo started the first domestic pasta factory, Molinos Dominicanos, which produced the Milano brand of pasta. “At that time spaghetti became cheaper than rice, plantains, beans, bacalao, herring, meat, everything,” says Ivan Dominguez, director of Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center in Washington Heights. “My whole neighborhood would go on Sundays, maybe 45 of us, in a two-story guagua (bus) from Santo Domingo to Boca Chica and everyone would have their pot of spaghetti.” These gatherings, and the spaghetti itself, both came to be known as empaguetadas.

Dominicans from the Bronx and Washington Heights started coming to Los Siete Lagos in the 1970s, at first on a Hudson River Day Liner from midtown Manhattan. Their presence grew in tandem with their migration to New York, which began in 1961 — after the assassination of Trujillo and subsequent political unrest — and grew exponentially under Joaquín Balaguer, a U.S.-backed authoritarian who ruled for three nonconsecutive terms from 1966 to 1996. The Dominican Republic was undergoing a societal transformation from rural to urban, though urban wages were not always better than farm wages. But, said historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof in a 2009 New York Times Q&A, “it was easy to imagine that it would be easier to achieve a life of modern urban comforts by moving to New York.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the New York Metropolitan area is now home to 641,000 foreign-born Dominicans (about seven times more than the next biggest population center, the Boston area), and far more second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation Dominican-Americans. Zorrilla’s parents grew up in La Romana, DR, a coastal province with beautiful beaches in the island’s southeast, now a popular resort destination. They came to New York in 1982, opened an automotive carburetor repair shop, and started a family. Of Zorrilla’s 13 maternal aunts and uncles, 11 moved to the U.S., mostly to the Dominican-heavy neighborhood of Washington Heights (the same one depicted in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning — and recently HBO Max-streaming — In the Heights).

Regardless of changing trends in the Dominican Republic, for the New York branch of the Zorrillas, empaguetadas remain a key part of any beachside family picnic, and gatherings can include between 60 and 100 extended family members. Related or not, though, all are welcome. “Look, these guys took our chairs without asking and we don’t care,” Zorrilla said, pointing to a party of about 30 strangers who had settled nearby. “People just share.”

While Zorrilla waited for more members of his own family to arrive, the neighboring group began digging into aluminum containers of spaghetti tossed in a creamy sofrito and studded with smoked pork chunks and olives. “We came up here with eight cars today,” said one. “We’re big into spaghetti.” A few steps to his right, younger members of another large family were sharing a hookah while an older woman dished out plates of spaghetti on Styrofoam. Some of them had been in New York for 20 years, they explained, and some just two months. One woman recounted a time in the DR when the whole pot of spaghetti fell in the sand. Everyone tried to pick out the clean noodles before most finally gave up. On the other side of the park, a group of three were gathered around a smaller pot of spaghetti. “Every time we’d go on a day trip with a lot of people to a lake, a beach, or a river,” one of them said of their life back home, “we’d bring spaghetti with bread.”

While the exact contents of each pot varied, most had a few things in common: The pasta itself was broken into small pieces and purposely cooked until soft, not al dente, and tossed in a tomato-based sauce made with garlic, onion, peppers, annatto (achiote), and butter. Some finished their sauce with a can of Carnation evaporated milk; others added a few extra ingredients like olives, smoked pork chops, or chicken. Pan sobao or pan de agua (soft, chewy loaves of bread, about the size of a hoagie roll) accompanied just about every pot, which most families made some attempt to keep warm (though lukewarm empaguetadas is not a deal breaker).

How, exactly, did a pot of hot pasta become de rigueur beach fare for thousands of Dominicans? The phrase I heard repeatedly was, “Es lo que más rinde” (it goes the furthest): spaghetti is the type of meal that can be stretched to feed a crowd on a budget, and for Dominicans at home and abroad, the beach was where crowds came together.

Today, empaguetadas at Lake Welch are just as vital a tradition as they were at Boca Chica. Lidia Marte, an Afro-Dominican cultural anthropologist teaching at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, says these kinds of cultural touchstones are important. “If we do not have certain landmarks that we can invest with memories and new experiences, then we don’t create a sense of belonging and a sense of place. Food is always central,” she goes on. “It is a way to mark your presence in public. Saying, ‘We are here, we are human, we have our dignity, and we have our traditions,’ people can tell and retell their stories of who they are through their food narratives and reinvent the story of who they are becoming in the new place.”

Zorrilla couldn’t agree more. In 2015 he founded the organization Outdoor Promise to confront the issue of American public parks feeling unwelcoming and unsafe for Black and Latinx communities. He encourages youth of color to become stewards of the environment and “outdoor leaders,” by helping them feel as comfortable on hiking trails and in state parks and preserves as they are in their neighborhood. The programming includes a summer trip to Los Siete Lagos for Dominican middle schoolers from Washington Heights, to show that spending time in nature is part of the Dominican experience in New York, too. Last time, Zorrilla brought a Greka percolator and dominoes to help them feel at home, plus a menu of burgers and hot dogs. “But,” says Zorrilla, “we should have done empaguetadas. They would have loved that. Next time.”

Mike Diago is a social worker, writer, and cook based in New York’s Hudson Valley. Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer.