Foodies Clan

How chefs in Mexico are combining local culinary traditions with Japanese flavors

The son of a baker and a pastry chef, Ricardo Arellano has been cooking with staple ingredients of his home state of Oaxaca his entire life. Yet at his restaurant, Crudo, a tiny six-seat bar in Oaxaca City, he’s preparing dishes that add something new. His nightly tasting menu could feature chilacayote ramen, with translucent noodles made out of the Mexican pumpkin and served in a seaweed broth and topped with edible flowers. Or a kampachi fish-belly taco, which, resembling a nori taco but with the taste of al pastor, is marinated in an adobe extract, wrapped in Mexican pepper leaf, and accompanied by an avocado and cactus salad. Or bluefin tuna sashimi, prepared with grasshopper chile paste and a dash of black beans.

Arellano’s sophisticated and surprising menu should be considered part of a wave of Mexican chefs combining local culinary traditions with distinctly Japanese flavors. Like Arellano, these chefs are borrowing from the first wave of Japanese immigrants who, arriving in Mexico as early as the 1930s, owned and operated restaurants that served their community. Although Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates there are only around 30,000 Japanese people or people of Japanese descent living in the country today, their influence on local palates was enormous.

“What surprised me was how many similarities exist between Japanese and Oaxacan cuisines,” says Arellano. He believes the resemblances can be found in the “textures, flavors, preparation,” and use of the ingredients, especially notable in the prominence of herbal flavors in both cuisines. “If you close your eyes and taste miso and mole, you will perceive similar flavors.”

Perhaps the best example of the Mexican Japanese culinary relationship is the beloved cacahuate japones. Literally the “Japanese peanut,” cacahuates japoneses “forever changed the Mexican palate,” says Eduardo Nakatani, whose grandparents, Yoshigei Nakatani and Ema Ávila Espinoza, invented the snack in 1945.

Lightly battered in flour, baked to golden in the oven, and then submerged in soy sauce, the peanuts were an early harbinger of the Japanese food obsession that would eventually take over Mexico; cacahuates japoneses are ubiquitous in the country’s snack shops and convenience stores. Two generations later, Yoshigei and Ema’s grandson, Eduardo, owns Fideo Gordo (which means “fat noodle” in Spanish), an udon bar in the Roma neighborhood. Designed to emulate his grandparents’ kitschy living room, Fideo Gordo is a prime example of how these two culinary traditions are being brought together to produce a third set of flavors: Some bowls are more traditional Japanese; others feature lamb and consomé de barbacoa.

Nakatani also serves as the literal face of his own line of Iki-brand sauces, which, coming in flavors like chipotle and umami, experiment with fermentation techniques, soy sauce, and Mexican peppers. The sauces, he says, are designed to “give your quesadilla, nopales, and carnitas more punch.” He also develops recipes and teaches cooking courses in which he prepares fresh ramen with salsa verde and bass with somen noodles, lime dashi, and jalapenos.

Aki Kawakami, a member of Mexico City’s Japanese community and also the former manager of Mog, a popular Japanese restaurant, believes that the combination of culinary practices is symbolic of the affinity between the two countries. “If you look closely, you’ll see little connections everywhere,” she says about the prevalence of Japanese culture in Mexico. The city’s famous jacaranda trees that bloom in early spring, she notes, were originally planted by Tatsugoro Matsumoto, a Japanese immigrant who opened a landscaping business, and are viewed by locals as an emblem of the relationship between the two cultures. Meanwhile, Japan is the world’s second-largest market for Mexican food and seafood exports (after the United States).

That’s noteworthy, not just because Japan and Mexico are so far away from each other, but also because Mexican cuisine inside Mexico was not as susceptible to outside influence before NAFTA was signed into effect in 1994. Up to that point, imports were relatively rare, and the Mexican diet consisted almost exclusively of domestic produce and proteins. Although researchers have documented how the saturation of Coca-Cola and Nestlé products severely compromises the traditional milpa diet (that consisted largely of fresh corn, beans and vegetables), NAFTA’s opening of borders and the newfound arrival of ingredients previously available exclusively through informal channels also challenged the impenetrability of the Mexican diet — and allowed it to reflect the diversity of the population in previously unseen ways.

“There’s so much history in each civilization, so much that is old and rich. For me, that’s why there’s so much chemistry,” explains Eduardo Ríos, the head chef at Paradero Todos Santos. Ríos’s menu combines traditional Japanese ingredients with those local to Baja, taking particular advantage of the region’s fresh seafood. Mackerel, fished at Punta Lobos in Todos Santos that same day, is cured in kombu; the Baja Peninsula’s famous raw chocolate clams are prepared in a miso paste with a dash of soy sauce. Ríos makes a tostada with raw longfin yellowtail on one side, and on the other side, the same fish cured overnight in salt and sugar, dipped in a koji habanero diluted in rice vinegar, and served with grilled avocado and mayo.

In Ríos’s opinion, the flavors fundamental to each cuisine are “chiles, fish, soy, and rice vinegar” — soy sauce is believed to have come to Mexico in the mid-19th century from a wave of Chinese immigrants. The Japanese “respect” and “love ingredients,” as much as Mexican chefs, Rio says. “Honestly, sharing our table is just more rico,” meaning rich.

That minimalist, Japanese Mexican hybrid approach to cooking has taken off in Baja California, where the Mediterranean-like climate grants chefs access to fresh seafood and vegetables. About 45 minutes north of Los Cabos in Pescadero is Noah, a sushi restaurant that puts its own twist on Mexican Japanese food. Its menu includes an albahaca roll stuffed with teriyaki chicken and pineapple and wrapped in a basil leaf, which is widely grown on the Baja Peninsula, and a tuna panko roll, prepared with locally sourced tuna ceviche and a cilantro emulsion.

Japanese cooking has been interpreted by different styles of regional cooking in Mexico, and is still being reimagined. “I make Oaxacan food, not Japanese food,” Arellano of Crudo says, crediting his time at Enrique Olvera’s Oaxaca restaurant Criollo as the place where he learned to experiment with flavors and styles. “I didn’t invent this — I am simply inspired by these flavors that I’ve personally liked and found really interesting. I want locals to taste these too.”

As Arellano’s words signal, the emergence of this new cuisine is not without controversy, and its growing popularity draws many opportunities for bastardization. Witnessing the huge explosion of Japanese food in Mexico over the last few years, Kawakami sometimes feels protective over the cuisine, and is concerned about entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on a trend without any knowledge of the principles of Japanese food — or even respect for its heritage. What she’s worried about are “those places that have guys dressed up as samurais with chopsticks in their hair,” she says, recalling a few bad experiences. “As if you would ever put a fork and knife in your hair.”

Kawakami is wary of the gimmicky, dime-a-dozen Japanese-inspired restaurants that open to make a quick dollar. Especially for immigrants or the children of immigrants, who face additional barriers to achieving financial stability and are often considered outsiders within the city, watching those who once mocked their culture now profit off it looks too much like cultural appropriation. Modifications can overlook critical traditions, while cartoonish cliches — like chopsticks as hair accessories — can feed into racist stereotypes.

But it’s not that Kawakami thinks fusion and conservation are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, she’s proud of the niche cultural intersection she belongs to, and she’s a big fan of some of the most popular Japanese Mexican hybrid foods, like avocado tempura and edamames preparados, grilled edamame lightly battered in lime and chile, which are a staple of fast-casual Japanese restaurants in the country.

These examples evidence that intercultural amalgamations have the potential to be positive innovations, if done thoughtfully and with respect. One way that chefs can do that is by ensuring that what they serve is done well, bringing joy to members of the communities being borrowed from. Which is important because, for most eaters, the proof is in the pudding. “If the miso is good and the rice is sticky — by all means, go ahead,” Kawakami says, making a thumbs up. “Just make sure it’s on point.”

Nili Blanck is a writer based in Mexico City.

How to watch, what to expect, and which restaurant will be named number 1

After a one-year pause in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the World’s 50 Best is once again back to attempt the entire globe’s culinary output. This year’s ceremony is taking place in London; the organization announced plans to relocate the event from Moscow to London back in February. (While they did not say it outright at the time, the decision came shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, and as the EU, U.S., and NATO allies were imposing economic sanctions.

What to expect from the World’s 50 Best 2022:

There will be a new No. 1 restaurant. In 2019, the organization announced a rule change that stipulated that previously No. 1 restaurant, which took that year’s winner, Mirazur, out of contention. Last year, in 2021, Noma won top honors; even though Noma had been number one before, the organization considered New Noma — which exists in a different Copenhagen space with a different menu — eligible. But not so this year.

The new No. 1 may well be another Copenhagen restaurant. Last year’s No. 2 slot went to Geranium, an acclaimed tasting menu restaurant in Copenhagen.

There are a few other restaurants to watch for when it comes to the top spot. Central in Lima was No. 6 in 2019 and No. 4 in 2021; Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo, Spain has been in the No. 3 slot for the past two lists; Mugaritz, also in Spain is frequently in the top 10 but has yet to clinch No. 1, likewise Disfrutar (Spain) and Maido (Peru). Other possibilities include Pujol in Mexico (No. 9 in 2021), Sweden’s Frantzén (No. 6 last year), as well as Odette in Singapore (No. 8 in 2021), and the Chairman in Hong Kong (No. 10 in 2021).

There might, finally, be more restaurants from the Middle East and Africa on the list. This year marked the first 50 Best list for the Middle East and North Africa; as noted in the Family Meal, Dubai did particularly well on that list, comprising nearly a third of the winners. It’s quite possible that there will be at least one restaurant from Dubai on the world’s list. Last year’s list did not have any restaurants from India, while the only restaurant from the entire African continent was a South African seafood spot run by chef Kobus van der Merwe.

When is the World’s 50 Best 2022?

This year, the red-carpet event will be happening in London on Monday, July 18 starting at 7:30 p.m. GMT. For those following along from the U.S., that’s 2:30 p.m. ET and 11:30 a.m. PT. — with the No. 1 slot expected to be revealed two hours later.

How to watch the World’s 50 Best 2022:

The event will be live-streamed on the World’s 50 Best Facebook page and YouTube channel, the YouTube stream is embedded below.

Chef Jeff Miller tops the tamago with caviar and maple syrup.

At NYC’s sushi restaurant Rosella, chef Jeff Miller’s menu features a familiar Japanese dish: a rolled tamago omelette, a slightly sweet but savory staple of sushi counters in Japan. But here, it comes with a twist: It’s firmly a dessert, a sweet-salty final course that’s flavored with maple syrup and dollop of caviar.

To make the dish, Miller begins by pouring soy oil into a copper, rectangular pan used specifically for making tamago. “The 90-degree angles are really bizarre at first to work with,” says Miller. “But once you get a feel for the technique it’s very helpful. It’s useless for anything else.”

After the pan heats for a bit, he pours the egg in, looking for a slight sizzle to judge whether or not the pan is hot enough. “If it’s too cool, the egg doesn’t start sizzling right when you drop it, there’s a good chance it’s going to stick, then you’re in trouble,” says Miller.

As the egg is cooking in the pan, Miller is constantly flipping it onto itself until it’s several layers thick and on one side of the pan to give it a rectangular shape. Once it’s cooked, he flips the pan over with a wooden board to keep the tamago intact. He then warms it in a pan with butter to brown the sides, and once it’s ready to serve tops it with maple syrup and caviar.

Miller learned the dish from the first chef who hired him, and he feels as if that chef is watching him every time he cooks it. But for most diners, the dish recalls something very different — a decidedly Western brunch favorite. “People, night after night, compare the tamago to French toast,” says Miller. “Which makes sense; it’s eggs and butter and maple syrup.” French toast, of course, usually doesn’t come with Sterling caviar on top — or a $55 price tag — but for the perfect combination of sweet-and-salty for dessert, it’s worth it.

“Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend” mirrors its Food Network predecessor but brings a deeper understanding of how a chef’s culture influences their food

Ask anyone who enjoys TV cooking competitions what show’s their favorite, and they’ll likely have a different answer: It could be the stalwarts, Chopped and Top Chef; new school streaming shows like Is It Cake? and Baker’s Dozen; or, of course, twee sensation The Great British Bake Off. But the mother of all cooking shows is, and will always be, Iron Chef. Launched in 1993 in Japan, the original version, hosted by the regal Chairman Kaga, was deadly serious in its exuberant quest for culinary excellence, an attitude flipped on its head with the campy, hilarious dubbing that followed when the Food Network began airing it in the U.S. in 1999.

Iron Chef, in all its splendor, threw both its esteemed Iron Chefs and ambitious challengers into a grand arena — “Kitchen Stadium” — a spectacle unlike any other on television. The show was the progenitor of cooking as sport, challenging two chefs to cook the better meal using a shared theme ingredient, and it enthroned chefs as heroes. In turning cooking into storylines akin to pro wrestling drama, the original Iron Chef reinforced the notion of chefs as auteurs, or chefs as icons worthy of veneration. The opening monologue dubbed the Iron Chefs “the invincible men of culinary skills,” playing up the idea that if “ever a challenger wins over the Iron Chef, he or she will gain the people’s ovation and fame forever.”

But as reckonings within the restaurant industry have peeled back some of the long-standing reverence for chefs, the rebooted Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, which premiered on Netflix, raises the question of why we should still care about elevating chefs into this level of admiration. (Food Network’s long-running version, Iron Chef America, which ran from 2004 to 2018, now seems like a relic of a prior era, with the now-disgraced Mario Batali one of its early Iron Chefs.) Quest for an Iron Legend addresses the “why care?” question much like the original does: by selling us on who these competitors are, and why their stories should matter to us. The show’s dramatic music, quick zoom-ins, and slow-motion victory poses feel ham-fisted compared to the more stoic Japanese vision, but overall, the formula continues to work.

Netflix’s reboot brings back the original Food Network duo Alton Brown as host with actor Mark Dacascos as Chairman Kaga’s “nephew.” But with an entirely new set of judges, challengers, and Iron Chefs, the show doesn’t have time to develop the names of its in-house heroes, so they instead come with years or even decades of prior culinary success and recognition: think Curtis Stone, Marcus Samuelsson, Ming Tsai, Dominique Crenn, and Gabriela Cámara. There’s also a diverse cast of competitors: Mason Hereford of New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf, Esther Choi of New York City’s Mokbar, Curtis Duffy of Chicago’s Ever, Claudette Zepeda of San Diego’s Vaga, Yia Vang of Minneapolis’s Union Hmong Kitchen, Mei Lin of LA’s Daybird, and Gregory Gourdet of Portland’s Kann. There’s no lack of culinary ability here, and these chefs come with as much acclaim as the Iron Chefs, though with fewer years of experience, certainly.

(There are spoilers from this point on)

Patrick Wymore/Netflix

The original Japanese Iron Chef was an overly stylized, dramatic duel of culinary wits, pitting established older male chefs against the often stoic Iron Chefs of Chairman Kaya’s stable (Masaharu Morimoto, one of the Japanese Iron Chefs and a longtime Iron Chef in the American version, makes a key judging appearance in the Netflix reboot). Iron Chef America featured a similar dynamic of intense competition, but with hosts that provided levity. The Netflix version carries most of the tone and approach of Iron Chef America. In the new Kitchen Stadium, human audiences have been replaced by CGI graphics and piped in applause, adding an edge of cheesy, “don’t take this too seriously” attitude. Top Chef alum Kristen Kish is now the sideline reporter along with Brown, who continues his streak of factoids while Kish adds her own extensive cooking knowledge to the commentary.

Cosmetic changes aside, the show argues that the overall goal for the chefs remains the same: the possibility for glory, or winning for the sake of simple pride in one’s work. In the new Iron Legend, there’s a throughline goal that’s supposed to motivate competitors: the highest-scoring competitor who clears their first battle competes in a finale against all five Iron Chefs. If the challenger wins, they are given the title of Iron Legend, receive a plasticky golden chef’s knife as a trophy, and, of course, some ineffable recognition as a next-level master. With pride and glory as the primary motivators, the show wills us to believe that chefs covet the knife-shaped trophy. It feels convincing because of the verisimilitude of the frenetic, high stakes exhibition on TV to the often intense pressure cooker environments of professional kitchens. In all Iron Chef formats, the level of cooking on display — minus the inclusion of two former ill-equipped NFL players in the current series — always seemed to be more rigorous than in other competitions.

Of course, the audience will never get the chance to try any of this food. But the show translates taste and flavor in the backstory and perspective of each chef, which in turn gives viewers a sense of what the judges are eating without a more on-the-nose, post-recording interview typical of other reality shows. For the most part, this works because competitors often lean on their heritage and identity for assembling flavors.

As an example, Choi says her grandmother deserves all the credit for her love of food, but she crafts a menu that weaves in traditional home cooking like a king crab bibimbap to something more polished, like a kimchi butter lobster ramen she might serve at her Brooklyn restaurant. Fighting tears, Choi tells the judges, “every dish we put out there has to do with our culture and who I am.” Banking on heritage is certainly not a new one in Iron Chef, but with the earliest seasons essentially expressions of classical European or East Asian cuisines, and later Iron Chef America menus spanning a more international approach, it’s refreshing to see young chefs not just unafraid of boasting their cultures, but amplifying them without pandering to the perceived standards of French, Italian, Japanese, or Chinese cuisines. And the screen time to put previously lesser known cuisines into the limelight, such as Gourdet’s Haitian, Vang’s Hmong, or Zepeda’s border Baja California flavors, feels like a smart move in 2022.

Cooking competitions are excellent television, but also absurd. Rooting for the competitors or Iron Chefs on Iron Legend feels similar to rooting for superheroes in our age of Marvel and D.C: There’s a sense of futility. On-screen, it’s hard to feel a palpable conflict between competitors, and there’s enough high-fiving and long-hugging to make you wonder if the chefs came onto the show feeling like there was a lot at stake.

But I kept coming back to personal stories that resonate in the food and cooking. Black and white or slow-motion recollection were a regular part of the Japanese Iron Chef, either the Chairman’s own or the competing chef’s nostalgia. It was those moments on Iron Legend that I felt most interested in who was competing and why, such as when Choi recalled her Korean grandmother or when Vang talked about the Hmong flavors he learned after immigrating to the U.S.

Choi, who was one of just two competitors who beat an Iron Chef, earns the highest score and therefore the chance to cook for the Iron Legend in a big season finale that pits her and her brave two sous chefs Ilji Cheung and Jin Jang against all five Iron Chefs. Choi leads the judges through her entire culinary career, undergirded by her Korean heritage. In the end, her team falls short by a mere point, a result that seems suspect to help propel the show into another season. But seeing Choi, with whom I’ve recorded a video at a restaurant named after her grandmother, and someone I see as a future luminary in the modern Korean food scene, felt like someone worth rooting for.

Maybe that’s why references to the real culinary influences — mothers, fathers, grandmothers — convinced me that acknowledging chefs for their cooking skills is a worthy endeavor; that maybe the quest for an Iron Legend is less about the desire for glory, but understanding; that family and cultural roots, nostalgia, and memory are more powerful flavors than technique or prowess; and ultimately, that the battlefield itself is meaningless without knowing why the food matters on the plate. At the beginning of each episode, the original Iron Chef displayed Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s adage, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Maybe the new Netflix edition should say, “Show me how you cook, and you have told me who you are.”

Despite what ‘Bear’ star Jeremy Allen White was told, it’s highly unlikely for a restaurant to have a machine that seamlessly re-seals cans

The final scene of the first season of The Bear — an eight-episode comedy-drama about what it’s like to be a smokin’ hot guy who also inherits a failing but beloved restaurant from your deceased older brother — ends with the entire kitchen staff jubilantly opening dozens of cans of San Merican tomatoes. Inside the sealed cans are wads of Saran-wrapped cash that amount to over 300,000 dollars, a ragtag failsafe system that was set up by Mikey — owner Carmy’s dead brother — to insure that the restaurant would stay afloat financially once Carmy took over. When they discover the cash, Carmy immediately closes the original beloved-yet-flawed-restaurant, which is funny to me, and rebrands as something closer to his dream dining establishment.

But this conclusion left more head-scratching questions than answers — So wait, are they still paying their mafioso uncle Cicero back the $300 grand loan that Mikey borrowed? How did the tomato sauce get splattered all the way onto the back wall ceiling? Why does a restaurant need a 1-to-1 ratio of can openers to kitchen staff? The Beef is just... closed now? But what about the regulars? — but no question has been more puzzling than this: How did Carmy’s brother seal all that cash into all those cans?

In an interview with actor Jeremy Allen White (who plays Carmy), Vulture writer Roxana Hadadi asked this very question. “What I kept wondering about that scene was, ‘How did Mikey reseal the cans?’” White’s response conveniently papered over the plot hole: “There’s a machine that does that in restaurants,” he told Hadadi. “I asked the same question.” Well, I also asked the same question, of my neighbor, who is a chef: “Are there machines at restaurants that reseal already open cans?” I asked. His response: “Not to my knowledge.” Interesting.

I searched for an industrial can resealer online, which led me to House of Cans, a company that sells all things container related. “Whether it’s cans, pails, drums, jugs, jars, bottles or boxes — we have a full line,” the site reads. In a subcategory of container-related products, House of Cans sells “open top can sealers.” I figured — in theory — if you could use this tool to seal a can, it must be able to reseal cans after you’ve shoved $300,000 into them. That had to be what Mikey did — used his industrial can-sealer from House of Cans to reseal the San Merican tomatoes. But when I called House of Cans, the representative on the phone said no, you cannot reseal a metal can once it’s been opened. I asked twice. The answer was no.

Okay, but maybe there was still a way. Another chef friend suggested that if the can had somehow been opened in an immaculately precise manner, it might be possible to seal with a new lid. “But the contents inside will have been exposed to oxygen,” making the possibility of tomato spoilage incredibly high. (Imagine if they opened all those cans and found not just cash, but mold. Yeesh!) Roger Kissling, the VP of sales and customer management at Iron Heart Canning, backed up the vanishingly small likelihood that the cans could be resealed. In an email, Kissling wrote that, though the company specializes in beverage canning, “I can tell you that cans cannot be resealed once opened because the cans are seamed by folding and compressing the metal of the lid and body of the can.” To open them, Kissling wrote, “the metal is cut so it cannot be resealed.”

Resealing out of the question, this leaves two theories for how all that cash got into all those cans: First, Mikey canned the tomatoes himself and pasted the San Merican labels on. This means he’d definitely have to have one of those industrial can sealers sold by companies like House of Cans, as well as a label printer of some sort and a very steady hand for wrapping paper. Seems like a lot of work for a guy whose restaurant was in shambles, among other things.

Or, Mikey was laundering money through KBL, a shadow company he said he was paying off in the balance ledger at the restaurant. KBL, which was printed on the bottom of the cans, was maybe the company stuffing the cash in the cans pre-seal, adding tomatoes from wherever, sealing the cans, then sending them back to the restaurant sealed. Whether this company was a canning company or a tomato grower or neither doesn’t really matter. At the very least, it was seemingly a family business: As one Reddit user noticed, Carmy’s dad was wearing a KBL jacket in an old photo with their uncle Cicero. Could KBL stand for K. Berzatto Laundering?

We’ll just have to wait until Season 2 to find out.

While Jack and Coke or mojito in a can offers convenience, it also promises mediocrity

Whether walking through the grocery store or scrolling past ads on your Instagram feed, chances are you’ve noticed the canned cocktail boom — everything from palomas to Old Fashioneds premixed and contained in an excruciatingly designed package. The canned drinks, which now include Bacardi Bahama Mamas made with real rum and even boozier libations like the Negroni, offer both incomparable convenience and the assurance that you won’t screw up a whole batch of classic cocktails with human error. But while we may not always have time to juice a bunch of limes for the perfect margarita or tediously muddle mint and sugar for a proper mojito, surely we deserve better than this new outcropping of mediocre cocktails whose only virtue is that they’re served in a fashionable can.

Press releases from the new generation of canned cocktails flood my inbox daily, many of them touting fancy, buzzword ingredients like raw honey, fresh herbs, and adaptogens. These cocktails are now mixed with “real” tequila and rum, not the malt liquor featured in progenitors like Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Zima, and that’s supposed to function as an indicator of quality — and health. “With just 99 calories per can, only 1 gram of total carbohydrates and 0 grams of total sugars, Cantina Ranch Water is not only flavorful and refreshing, but it provides a better-for-you alternative,” reads one release.

These drinks are trying to show consumers that these aren’t your mother’s malt beverage, they’re part of a whole new generation of drinks that promise to bring a bartender’s touch to the convenience of a canned beverage. Unfortunately, though, such quality is rarely found inside the can. It is true that at least some of these canned libations offer more balanced flavors and fewer chemical additives than their predecessors. These are both good things. But canned cocktails didn’t exactly have a high bar to clear — being better than “objectively bad” does not mean that they are good.

Thanks to the explosive growth of the ready-to-drink category, every single libation you can think of is being turned into a canned cocktail, to varying degrees of success. The market is overwhelmed, mostly by drinks that just don’t need to exist in canned form. In June, Coca-Cola announced that it would bring its iconic branding to a whiskey-and-Coke cocktail in partnership with Brown-Forman, the legendary whiskey conglomerate that produces Jack Daniels. This news was the absolute last straw for me. Not only does Coca-Cola want you to pay a little more for each cocktail when you’re headed out to the beach or otherwise looking for a convenient libation, they want to make it worse!

Almost to a one, canned cocktails are unbalanced — always too sweet or too acidic — to really give you the satisfaction you’re looking for when trying to unwind with a cocktail. They also inevitably end up tinged with a metallic taste thanks to the aluminum packaging, and that tinge is especially prevalent when you’re drinking a canned margarita or other cocktail with lots of citrus juice. Many contain artificial sweeteners in an effort to make a “healthier” version of the original ranch water or mai tai — but that just leaves them with a weird, chemical aftertaste.

And ultimately, the beauty of drinking cocktails at home is that you can customize them to your personal tastes, for better and for worse. Don’t like vermouth in your martini? Just leave it out! Prefer to shake your Manhattan instead of stirring? Who cares? Do what you want! But with a canned cocktail, no adjustments can be made if you find the drink too cloying or too boozy, leaving you stuck to either just begrudgingly slurp it down or toss it into the trash.

Perhaps it’s worth a reminder that mixing up your own big batch cocktails — customized to your liking — is exceptionally easy. Just pour your favorite mixers into a pitcher, add booze, and serve when convenient. You can even fill up a Thermos with your concoction, and take it wherever you want. Outside of the fact that it’s going to taste better than any canned cocktail, it’s also more stealth — easy to drink in places where you’re probably not technically allowed to do so, and you have the added bonus of not having a bunch of cans to dispose of when the drinking is over.

To be clear, I am not above a trashy drink or convenience. I have consumed more White Claw than is medically reasonable and, honestly, wouldn’t smack a bright blue bottle of MD 20/20 out of your hands under the right circumstances. Every booze has its time and its place, but the vast majority of canned cocktails feel mostly like a gimmick, promising ease and convenience and delivering both alongside a big dose of disappointment. I also understand why companies would seek to capitalize on a market category that’s grown more than 200 percent in the past five years alone. What I don’t understand, though, is why anyone wants to buy a canned version of their favorite drink. What we gain here in alleged convenience is lost almost entirely in flavor and quality, and with something as simple as a Jack and Coke, it’s just not worth it.

Get ready for more Carmy thirst, and hopefully an answer as to how they got all that money in those cans

This summer’s breakout TV hit is, without question, The Bear. The FX series, starring Jeremy Allen White alongside a stellar cast of restaurant world personalities has been hailed as an authentic portrayal of the chaotic world of running a restaurant, and now it’s coming back for a second season. (Warning: Season 1 spoilers within.)

FX announced on Thursday that it had ordered a second season of the show, which currently boasts a 100 percent Certified Fresh rating on review site Rotten Tomatoes, according to a release from the network. White will return as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, a young-yet-grizzled chef who left the world of fine dining to run his family’s failing sandwich shop after the death of his brother — and launched a million (mostly) horny memes centered around what I call “line cook lust.”

“I haven’t watched The Bear yet but I’m thrilled that people who’ve never worked in a restaurant are being introduced to an exclusive strain of Sexually Competent Dirtbag that only exists in a restaurant kitchen,” reads one viral tweet from Sarah York.

White, who got his big television break playing Philip “Lip” Gallagher on the rowdy Showtime series Shameless, has become a stand-in for all the hot line cooks, sous chefs, and other restaurant workers who, perhaps despite their inability to live a fully emotionally stable life, remain hopelessly attractive to anyone who’s ever spent any time in a restaurant kitchen. If you’ve never crushed on a hot-yet-emotionally-unavailable line cook, did you really even work in a restaurant?

This is also welcome news for fans who thought that The Bear’s eight episodes just weren’t enough to unravel all of the mysteries behind how Carmy managed to save his late brother’s restaurant, the Original Beef of Chicagoland, thanks to a mysterious cache of money-filled cans. Viewers, including many deeply confused Eater staffers, have tons of questions about those cans, chiefly: How did the money get in the cans? Does the Beef have a professional can sealer?

Fortunately, we’ll all be able to find out sooner rather than later. No word yet on when exactly The Bear will make its comeback, but expect season two to arrive sometime in 2023.

Adobo’s long history in Southeast Alaska reflects the history of Filipino migration, the realities of what economies open to the Native Tlingit, and how the two communities came together

“You Filipinos may have invented chicken adobo,” says Chuck Miller, a.k.a. Daanaxh.ils’eikh, the cultural liaison of the Sitka Tribe, “but we Tlingit perfected it.” A professional storyteller, he has deepened his voice to mimic the elder he’s quoting, who said this to a Filipino friend. His tone gives the pronouncement the gravity of gospel.

We’ve met at a cafe near the coast in Sitka to talk about Tlingit food. During the 10,000 years that the Tlingit have lived in Southeast Alaska, they’ve learned to harvest every possible bounty from the diverse landscape. In the maze-like network of waterways that percolate through the Alexander Archipelago, they catch salmon, halibut, and herring. They hunt seals for meat and oil, a tradition they have the right to continue under a co-management plan with the National Marine Fisheries Service, though seal hunting is otherwise prohibited under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. They lay hemlock branches in herrings’ spawning waters to collect their butter-colored eggs. In the mountains of their territory, they collect salmonberries and hunt blacktail deer. Miller tells me about the clearest food memories of his childhood — smoking fish with his grandparents, collecting gumboot chitons and black seaweed on the beaches.

But when he learns that I’m half Filipino, the conversation strays to adobo. It’s one of his favorite foods, he says, and a staple on Tlingit tables both at home and at potlatches, communal feasts often held to honor the dead. During the ceremonial potlatch, families prepare and burn plates of their loved ones’ favorite food. “If anything happens to me, my family better know,” Miller says of his own future funeral potlatch: “They’re going to have the traditional smoked fish and herring eggs on one side, and then on the other side, there better be freaking rice and chicken adobo.”

Miller isn’t alone in his enthusiasm for the Filipino dish, which usually involves meat simmered with soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves, and black pepper. It’s on the dinner rotations of many households in Southeast Alaska, almost as run-of-the-mill as spaghetti and meatballs or baked salmon. It’s also a familiar restaurant and takeout food in Southeast cities, sold everywhere from the longstanding Bernadette’s Fast Food cart on Juneau’s wharf to the deli counters in IGA supermarkets to fine-dining spots with James Beard accolades, alongside other Filipino dishes like lumpia and pancit. After all, Filipinos are the largest immigrant group in Alaska and make up the majority of the state’s Asian population.

Adobo’s ubiquity in Tlingit homes in particular is a legacy of a century of close contact between the Filipino and Alaska Native communities in Southeast. Nearly every family has its own version, and every recipe tells a story — epic tales spanning generations of migration, love, hardship, and adaptation. The dish that results is part of Southeast’s unique regional cuisine, and it only could have been invented here.

An Alaska recipe

There’s a saying in the Philippines that there are as many versions of adobo as there are islands in the country (over 7,100), and there are at least as many in Alaska as there are islands in the state (over 1,800). But the version of adobo you’ll find most often in Southeast, especially in Tlingit homes, has a few defining characteristics that set it apart from its progenitors. Southeast adobo tends to be less tart, sometimes with white or brown sugar to temper the vinegar — usually apple cider vinegar, which replicates the mild acidity of sugarcane or palm varieties, though white vinegar is also used. Chicken is the most common protein, but you’ll also encounter adobo made with salmon or game animals like deer. The sauce is often thickened with cornstarch so that it’s more like a gravy than the sabaw (broth) requisite to a Filipino meal.

In place of black peppercorns and bay leaves, many Alaska cooks will use pickling spice, a blend that’s as common in Southeast cupboards as Old Bay is in Baltimore. Pickling spice contains black pepper and bay leaves, but it can also include cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, ginger, and other warm spices, depending on the brand. This is how Miller makes his adobo, usually with chicken on the bone.

Miller learned the recipe from his mother, who learned it from the Filipino restaurateur Nick Pelayo. Born in Panay, Philippines, Pelayo moved to Juneau in 1924 and ran a string of restaurants there (including New Chinatown Cafe, Tropics Cafe, and Royal Cafe, all now closed), plus restaurants in Sitka, all with his Tlingit wife Mary Howard Pelayo, a.k.a. Kaa T’eix.

Pelayo was one of the Alaskeros, Filipino men who migrated to Southeast in droves to work in the region’s burgeoning salmon canneries and gold mines in the early 20th century, when both the Philippines and Alaska were outposts in the expanding American empire. The canneries depended on the Alaskeros because they could pay them less and give them more menial work than white employees. For similar reasons, canneries hired many local Tlingit workers; men worked on the fishing boats, while women processed the fish.

By the 1920s, Filipino cooking became standard fare at the cannery bunkhouses — then colloquially called “Filipino bunkhouses” — when the provided food met neither the quantity nor quality needed to fuel the grueling work on the slime lines. The bunkhouses were the first place many Tlingit people and other non-Filipinos encountered adobo. It’s also where Filipino men and Tlingit women encountered each other, leading to marriages, a community, and a new generation with a distinct identity and cuisine.

Miller told me that the best place to try adobo like what Pelayo and his mother used to make is the Valley Restaurant in Juneau. “They have just the best food ever,” he says. “Nothing like it.” The Valley is located just downwind of the Mendenhall Glacier, about a mile from the airport; the cozy building is squat and red as an abandoned caboose, and it’s mostly old-timers at the pleather booths, nursing thick-walled mugs of coffee. A wooden flounder hangs below the rafters like a household saint.

I visit the Valley with Marcelo Quinto and Bob Paulo, Tlingit elders and fixtures in the town. Eighty-one and 71 years old, respectively, the two men share a brotherly ease that comes from decades of close friendship. Everyone knows them here — the manager of the restaurant asks Paulo why he hasn’t visited in a while, and a couple stops by the table to congratulate Quinto on finally selling his boat.

We slide into one of the booths and order chicken and pork adobo. After a harbinger of house salad, the adobo arrives, tucked into almond-shaped gratin dishes. The sauce gleams like polished mahogany. In it, sugar and soy have alchemized to the midnight sweetness of molasses. Whole spices bob in its depths: a coriander seed here, a clove there. The combination recalls Christmas — figgy pudding, mulled wine — or Taiwanese lu rou fan more than it does the tart, garlicky adobo my lola used to make.

The two men laugh often as they share stories from their youths, though it soon becomes clear that it wasn’t easy to grow up mixed race in the first half of the 20th century. Quinto and Paulo are among the dozens of people of their generation who identify as mestizo or “Tlingi-pino.” Their fathers were Alaskeros; their mothers were Tlingit women who worked alongside them in the canneries. “My mother always said, you’re Filipino and you’re Tlingit, and don’t you forget it,” says Quinto. His mother, Bessie Quinto (née Jackson), was a prominent leader who helped establish Juneau’s Filipino Community, Inc. with other Tlingit wives so their families would have a place to socialize in the segregated city. The organization still exists and has a community hall in downtown Juneau.

Quinto remembers a method of cooking adobo at the cannery that involved browning meat and making a dark gravy with the drippings — no soy sauce, which only became commonplace in U.S. stores in the 1970s. Garlic, onion, and vinegar helped approximate the flavors of home. (In 1977, Pelayo’s wife Kaa T’eix self-published a Tlingit cookbook that includes a recipe for seal adobo using a similar method, with paprika and Accent-brand MSG for extra umami.)

The canneries’ cast-offs — the heads, spines, fins, and other parts kept out of the cans — became a valuable food source for the camps. Tlingit workers fermented the heads into k’ínk’, a.k.a. stinkheads, a delicacy with the aroma of washed-rind cheese. Filipinos used the fins, spines, and intestines to make their own fermented fish product: bagoong, an indispensable condiment usually made with krill or small fish in the Philippines. Members of each group grew fond of the other’s ferment. Miller remembers stories of his grandmother sneaking off with her Filipino friends to the smokehouse at Todd Cannery to share stinkheads and gossip. “They’d laugh and giggle so much they’d hear them through the camp,” he says.

Though they were hired as seasonal workers, many Alaskeros ended up staying permanently in Alaska, and many entered the food industry. By the 1940s, 70 years before Anthony Bourdain predicted that Filipino food would become America’s next big thing, Filipino restaurants were commonplace in Southeast. In Ketchikan, there was the DeLuxe Cafe, owned by C. Mendoza and Victor Ortaliza; Tenakee Springs had H.J. Floresca’s Blue Moon Cafe & Bakery. The Pelayos owned at least five restaurants in Sitka and Juneau. These restaurants served Filipino food — or as close as they could approximate in the days before Asian supermarkets and barged-in bagoong — but they were also town hangouts that turned out bacon and eggs, steaks, and chops with a side of local gossip.

Other Filipino chefs became known for working in local hotels and on the Alaska Marine Highway, the state-run ferry system, which once featured white-tablecloth dining that rivaled the golden age of ocean liners. One Marine Highway executive chef, Andres Aquino Cadiente, published a cookbook in 1974 that bore the grandiose title “El Mundo Food Almanac” and opened with a preface by former Alaska governor William Egan. It includes a recipe for “Chicken Adobo ala McArthur” (that is, Arthur MacArthur, third military governor of the Philippines) that, like Kaa T’eix’s seal recipe, includes MSG, paprika, and no soy sauce. The cookbook notes that Filipino food has already become familiar to Alaska’s diners: “Many of the Filipino dishes of today have become a welcome variation to western cookery,” Cadiente wrote.

Quinto also spent time working in the Marine Highway’s kitchens and at Juneau’s Baranof Hotel, an employer of hundreds of Filipinos where his father (also named Marcelo Quinto) worked as a bartender for 30 years. Later, the younger Quinto brought his kitchen training to the Alaska Native Brotherhood — he’s been part of the organization since 1951 and was elected Grand President last November, after more than 15 years as president of the Glacier Valley camp. Under his direction, Glacier Valley raised funds by catering for corporate events: Sealaska, the Juneau-based regional Alaska Native corporation, and Goldbelt, the local Alaska Native corporation serving the Juneau area are among their clients. At those Native events, adobo is standard fare.

The next generation of Southeast adobo

Quinto took me to Gajaa Hít, the site of a carving workshop operated by Sealaska Heritage Institute, to meet a man he called his protege, Donald Gregory a.k.a. Héendeí. Officially the facilities and special projects coordinator at Sealaska Heritage, a nonprofit founded by Sealaska that promotes Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida art and culture, Gregory doubles as Quinto’s sous chef. He took a break from carving an eagle mask to talk to me about Filipino food.

Gregory started working for Quinto when he was 18, learning to scale up the flavors he remembered from his Filipino grandfather’s kitchen. At his first job, Quinto scolded him for cutting the chunks of meat for the adobo too big. “He said, ‘Hey, we’re cooking for Goldbelt, cut that four more times!’ Because they always had way too many people show up for their events.”

His “commercial-batch” adobo base is one part vinegar, one part soy sauce, and two parts water; the spices go into a big tea ball that floats like a buoy in the vat-sized pot. “It’s kind of mellowed out, and it doesn’t have the real strong taste to it,” he says. “But a lot of times when we’re cooking for hundreds of people, there’s no time to marinate anything. It’s going in the pot and it’s getting turned on.” On his own time, Gregory likes to make what he calls “Tlingit soul food.” He’s especially proud of his seal ribs, smoked and then simmered with aromatics.

Like many Alaskeros who married Tlingit women, Gregory’s grandfather worked hard to assimilate into his wife’s culture. He was adopted into the Brown Bear clan, learned the complex language, and became known as one of the clan’s best fishermen. He’s technically Gregory’s step-grandfather, but “growing up, I never knew that wasn’t my mom’s real dad,” he says. “One time my mom heard me telling somebody when I was 18 that I was a quarter Filipino, and afterwards she told me, ‘You know, you’re not Filipino.’ I started crying. I was like, ‘How come you never told me?’”

Two generations removed from the Alaskeros, Gregory illustrates how Filipino food and identity became subsumed into the Southeast milieu. He grew up on South Franklin Street, then the “rough downtown” of Juneau where non-whites were relegated by racist housing practices. “There were a lot of Filipinos that lived there and Tlingits, and the Filipino Community was just across the street from the apartment building I lived in,” he says. He remembers all the kids of the neighborhood hanging out at the community hall to watch TV and play pool. Then they might go fishing under the dock or have a BB gun fight. “Some of the kids were Tlingit, some were mestizo, and the rest were full Filipino,” he says. “We were all like brothers.”

His nephew, Raymond Gregory a.k.a Took, is the namesake of his Filipino great-grandfather. A Tlingit carver, singer, and dancer, the younger Gregory travels around the world to share and practice his art and studied sculpture at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He’s also shared his passed-down pork adobo recipe, with pickling spice and apple cider vinegar, with the people he meets in new places. “But it’s nowhere near as good as my uncle’s,” he says.

Raymond Gregory is part of the current generation of Alaska Native youth working to promote and expand upon their cultures, guided by traditional histories and values. Food is a major part of that effort: He takes pride in his knowledge of traditional methods for drying halibut and hopes to learn to harvest kóox, or chocolate lily, a wildflower whose bulbs break into kernels that can be eaten like rice. But adobo will remain on the menu. “Most Natives know how to make adobo, and most families make Filipino food,” he says. “We’re big adobo stans. We just worship it, it’s so good.”

Juneau’s young Filipino chefs are also carrying on the tradition. Rachel Barril, chef de cuisine of In Bocca al Lupo in downtown Juneau (whose chef, Beau Schooler, was a James Beard Awards semifinalist for Best Chef: Northwest in 2019, 2020, and 2022), is descended from Alaskeros on both sides, and the current owners of the Valley Restaurant are her cousins. She uses In Bocca al Lupo’s specials board to test out Filipino-Alaskan fusions: kare kare with foraged mushrooms and beach greens, crispy king salmon collars dressed escabeche-style in sweet-and-sour sauce. “Growing up American, growing up with Filipino culture, growing up Alaskan around all the natural resources that we have — that’s essentially what my specials end up being,” she says.

There’s an adobo loco moco at the Rookery Cafe, the sister restaurant of In Bocca al Lupo, that Barril added to the permanent menu during her tenure there. A mantle of caramelized onions blankets the hamburger patty, and edges of the egg are fried to a lacy frill. The adobo sauce that cascades down the glacial mound of rice may recall demi-glace at first, but a taste betrays a closer cousin. Faintly sweet and pricked with pepper, it’s just thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, like the adobo at the Valley Restaurant or in the Miller or Gregory homes.

Is it authentic adobo, or authentically Filipino? “If I wanted to be authentic, I’d have to go all the way to the Philippines and grow my own rice, kill my own chicken,” Barril says, adding that she doesn’t consider the adobo loco moco to be authentic in the traditional sense. “But it integrates a lot of the influences that I had in my life, or what’s available here. That’s what makes it authentically me.”

Jennifer Fergesen is a writer, editor, and author of The Global Carinderia, an exploration of the Filipino diaspora through food.
Ash Adams is a photojournalist and photo editor based in Alaska, California, and New York.
Copy edited by Paola Banchero

A Native staple and its unexpectedly perfect complement bring Alaska’s many cultures together on the plate

Jillian Moreno is cutting maktak — whale skin and blubber — with an ulu, a curved knife like a handheld half-moon. The maktak has been in the freezer since the end of the spring whaling season, and after sitting out for a few minutes it has barely thawed. The blade passes with the gentle resistance of teeth through an ice cream sandwich. There’s an ice cream note to its appearance, too — black skin and pink fat as clearly delineated as the chocolate and strawberry in a tub of Neapolitan.

Moreno slices the maktak into strips the width of her pinky finger and sprinkles them with salt. “This is how I first had it when I was a kid,” she says, offering me a piece. The skin, smooth and elastic, smells of the sea — the chill, kelp-steeped breeze of the Arctic coast of Alaska. The blubber melts against the tongue like otoro, the fatty belly of bluefin.

“And this is how a lot of people like it these days,” she says, reaching for a plastic tub of kimchi. She spoons some into a bowl, adds the maktak and stirs. I try a red-glossed strip, caught against a sliver of cabbage. The kimchi is fresh, the cabbage crisp as a cymbal crash against the melting whale. Sesame oil and spice slice through the fat. It’s my first time trying this combination, but being half Filipino I recognize the equilibrium of salt, fat, acid and heat — like fried pork belly dipped in spiced vinegar, sisig tossed with chiles and calamansi juice.

“I liked it automatically,” Moreno says of the first time she tried maktak with kimchi about 15 years ago. “Maktak is delicious, kimchi is delicious, and it just works.”

Moreno’s cross-cultural home — she’s Iñupiaq, her husband is Filipino — isn’t the only place you’ll find maktak and kimchi in Utqiagvik (called Barrow from about 1901 to 2016). On many tables in America’s northernmost city, the combination has become as standard as sushi and wasabi. There are tubs of kimchi in many Utqiagvik families’ refrigerators and chest freezers, and gallon pails of it regularly arrive from the city to the more remote villages of the North Slope (the surrounding borough) by air freight. Most of this kimchi comes from Sam and Lee’s Restaurant, the oldest Asian restaurant in town, but supermarkets have responded to the demand by stocking imported brands, and some home cooks have learned to make their own.

Maktak and kimchi is one of the many of hybridizations of niqipiaq (Native foods) that Iñupiat people harvest from the sea and tundra that surround Utqiagvik, a community where a subsistence lifestyle persists despite the supermarkets that now supply barged-in beef, watermelons and Pop Tarts. The dish is an edible synecdoche for the town, a proudly Iñupiaq place that accepts people and influences from elsewhere with open arms.

If you wish to make maktak and kimchi, you must first kill a whale. The Iñupiat are among the only people in the world who have the legal right to do so. Though commercial whaling is now banned in much of the world (with Japan, Iceland and Norway notable exceptions), the Iñupiat subsistence hunt is protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act through a co-management program with the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

In Alaska, subsistence is a legal term defined by federal law as “the customary and traditional uses by rural Alaska residents of wild, renewable resources” for applications including food, shelter, clothing, and tools. It does not have the connotation of bare-minimum survival that one might read in the dictionary definition, especially for Alaska Natives who now apply this word to the practices that they and their ancestors used to build and support complex, thriving societies.

For a few years in the 1970s, it seemed the Iñupiat would lose their right to their most important subsistence practice. In 1977, the International Whaling Commission banned the subsistence hunt out of concern for declining numbers of bowhead whales. The AEWC formed in response and lobbied the IWC to consider their communities’ needs, arguing that they had observed the whale population to be at least twice as large as the census estimated. The IWC allowed a small quota and added acoustic monitoring tools to their census efforts, which revealed that the AEWC was correct — scientists were miscounting whales as they dropped below the ice out of sight of the census station. Today, the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management conducts a regular census of the bowhead whale population, using methods co-developed with the AEWC, to help NOAA and the AEWC set subsistence harvest levels through the IWC. The current strike limit for bowhead whales, set in 2018, is 67 per year.

But against the thousands of years that the Iñupiat and their ancestors have timed to the metronome of the whales’ migration, this interruption barely registers. It is effectively an unbroken tradition, sacred and ancient, if augmented now by modern tools like forklifts and snow machines.

In the fall and spring, as bowhead whales swim to and from their summer feeding grounds in the Beaufort Sea, hunters wait for them on the lace collar of ice that frills Utqiagvik’s beaches in all seasons but high summer. Iñupiat hunters harvest belugas too, among many other marine and terrestrial animals, but none is as important to the patterns of Utqiagvik life as the agviq (bowhead).

Every successful hunt is an impromptu holiday. After the hunters have taken care of the grueling work of killing and bringing home the whale, more crew members join to help break down the animal. They clamber around the carcass with blades mounted on ax handles, their hands growing slippery and stiff in the blood and cold.

Nearly every part of the whale has a purpose. The blood is collected in bags for mikigaq, a tangy ferment dotted with chunks of meat and fat; the membrane of the liver is saved for a drum skin. The maktak makes up a large portion of the harvest, sliced off the sides in thick, curling slabs like rolls of sod. The flippers and tail are also prime cuts. Some crews pack the maktak in the bottom of an ice cellar, then pile the wine-dark meat on top so that the flavor of the blood permeates the fat.

Whale meat is illegal to sell in most of the United States, but Iñupiat people and other Alaska Natives may sell it within Native towns for Native consumption (with the exception of Cook Inlet beluga, which no one may sell). For the most part, though, maktak is given away freely, and anyone lucky enough to receive this gift may legally consume it.

By the end of every season, the crews give away the bulk of their catch. They divvy up the whales into shares: One might include a generous chunk of maktak, some meat from the body and a piece of tail, plus a cup of boiled fruit cocktail and a fresh-baked roll. Often some of the maktak is boiled, at which point it is called uunaalik. Some shares are distributed soon after the hunt, with the rest set aside for season-end celebrations like Nalukataq in June.

For decades, the town’s churches took care of distributing the shares and hosted communal meals in celebration of the harvest. Christianity, especially Presbyterianism, became intertwined with many of Utqiagvik’s traditions after a period of assimilationist missionary presence beginning in the 1890s. Sunday attendance has since dropped off, but the churches still serve as community centers, and some host prayer services for the whalers, despite greater recognition of the cultural paternalism that early missionaries brought to the community.

The pandemic prompted the town to adopt a drive-thru format. Last Thanksgiving, a long line of cars tracked through the snow in Simmons Field downtown to receive their shares from the 16 whales killed that season, piled in sacks on frost-covered plastic tables. Every family in town can receive a share, Iñupiat or otherwise, with larger portions for those who assisted the crews in some way during the season.

The share days coincide with an uptick in kimchi sales at Sam and Lee’s Restaurant, the source of almost all of the kimchi that is consumed with maktak in and around Utqiagvik. “It sells out so fast when people get their servings,” Moreno says. “You have to call ahead if you want it.”

Sam and Lee’s is a Chinese restaurant at the center of Utqiagvik, where three of its main roads converge. A street sign hung on the barn-red siding reads “Sam N Lee’s Pl.”, a token of appreciation from the community.

A plastic table bars the entrance to the dining room, closed due to the pandemic. (I visited last July, but as of July 2022 dine-in remains closed.) Owner Louise Kim stands behind it to take orders. Behind her are framed photographs of her four children, some in graduation caps, some in sports uniforms. “Only kimchi is not good for your stomach,” she says when I ask for it, and insists on giving me cabbage soup and rice for free. Then she notices that I’m only wearing a denim jacket in the 40-degree summer weather. “Come to my house and I’ll give you some warm clothes,” she presses.

I politely decline the latter offer, but a few days later I’m sitting in Sam and Lee’s dining room as Louise and her husband Hyung Kim cover a table with plate after plate of food. Louise brings me more cabbage soup and rice; Hyung goes into the kitchen to make Mongolian beef scattered with chiles. Then they surprise me with a platter of kimchi and uunaalik they received in the last share. “It’s inevitable,” says Cynthia, their 23-year-old daughter, when I protest. “They’re not going to stop feeding you.”

Sam and Lee’s has been feeding Utqiagvik Mongolian beef, kung pao chicken, and other American Chinese standards for more than 50 years. Like many small-town Chinese restaurants of its generation, it also serves steaks, burgers, and diner-style breakfast plates of eggs and hash browns. You can get pizza here too, and $40 king crab platters. The only Korean calling card on the menu is kimchi, listed under the salad section, though the restaurant has been Korean-owned for as long as anyone can remember.

Before the Kims took it over, the restaurant was owned by one of Louise’s cousins, Chong Park. Park’s mother owned another restaurant in Anchorage, where Hyung worked after immigrating to the United States “because of some mishaps in Korea,” Cynthia says. On a trip to Hawaii in the late 1970s, the two men met and hit it off so well that Park decided to give Hyung a job at his restaurant. “They also set up kind of an arranged marriage for my mom and dad,” Cynthia adds.

Hyung moved to Utqiagvik, then called Barrow, in 1979 to wash dishes at the restaurant. He spoke little English but had no trouble making friends. It helped that he always had food to share, and he was happy to try anything offered to him. He quickly took to Iñupiaq foods such as maktak and credits himself for first combining it with kimchi. “Kimchi has the best taste,” he says, explaining that the acidity and spice cloak the slightly fishy scent of the whale. It’s the same principle behind Korean dishes like hoe-muchim, a raw fish and vegetable salad coated with gochujang and sesame oil. “I told people to try it, and now everybody eats it,” he says.

But if Hyung invented the combination, Louise is likely the one who popularized it. She moved to Alaska in the early 1980s, having met and married Hyung on one of his visits to Korea. They bought the restaurant after her cousin started a new job in Anchorage. Prior to the move, she spent most of her life in a small village in South Korea that she describes as a bucolic place in the mountains, with clean water, fresh vegetables, and neighbors as close as family. “Every time you make some special food, you deliver it to everyone in the village,” she says. “In a small village, you help each other.” She wanted to do the same in her new home.

In her first years in Alaska, she would show up at every wedding, funeral or birth in town with a stack of containers of food. One would always contain kimchi — not the tart, fermented mugeun-kimchi she makes for herself, but a fresh version she calibrated to local tastes. “I made it mild, not too spicy, a little sweet, a little sour with vinegar, a little sesame oil,” she says. She recommended trying the kimchi with maktak, standard fare at Iñupiat family gatherings. Over time, families came to associate the dish with some of the most significant meals of their lives.

Louise still takes food to funerals — “Everybody knows, somebody died, Sam and Lee’s coming with food for them,” she says — but for celebrations, locals order kimchi themselves. It has become a common craving among pregnant women. Devotees take caches of kimchi with them when they travel, whether they’re going on vacation to Hawaii or popping down to Anchorage. A two-week trip might call for a gallon order. “Anchorage is a big city, so there’s a lot of Korean food there,” Louise says, “but nobody’s making kimchi like Sam and Lee’s kimchi.”

Not everyone in Utqiagvik approves of the kimchi craze. Miranda Rexford-Brown, Ruling Elder of the Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church, remembers the IWC ban and how close her community came to losing their right to hunt. She believes whale should be eaten with moderation and respect, befitting the work that goes into harvesting it — without any adulterants.

“My son, he’s 25 years old,” she tells me after I visit the church, the oldest one in town, a white-and-green building with its name painted on a bowhead whale scapula outside. “He said he visited a family here, his friends, and they had kimchi from Sam and Lee’s Restaurant at the same time they were eating the frozen maktak. I said, ‘That’s not the way to eat it! I don’t like that, take that away from me!’”

But Jerica Niayuq Leavitt, assistant professor of Iñupiaq Studies at Ilisagvik College in Utqiagvik — the only tribally controlled college in Alaska — says it’s possible to prepare niqipiaq in modern ways while still honoring tradition. For the past five years, she’s taught a class called Traditional and Contemporary Native Foods Preparation at the college that encourages students to do so. “When you have your Native food, there’s a different type of satisfaction,” she says. “It feeds your stomach, but it also feeds your soul.”

Local hunters, fishers and foragers provide raw material for the class, including whale, fish, wildfowl, and edible plants like berries and beach greens. After Ilisagvik went remote due to the pandemic two years ago, the class worked from boxes of ingredients — like Blue Apron for niqipiaq — that Leavitt packages and delivers to students’ homes. The new model means she can now include students living in distant towns like Anchorage and Nome, who receive their ingredient boxes by air freight. The college has resumed in-person classes, but students still have the option of distance learning.

Students prepare a traditional and a modern recipe for every ingredient. With tuttu (caribou), they’ve made aluuttagaaq, a rich traditional stew, as well as jerky spiced with hot red chile. When Jillian Moreno took the class, she used her piece of tuttu to make udon soup. “Trying new things with niqipiaq is exciting,” Leavitt says. “It’s like combining both of our worlds together.”

Kimchi is just one of the accompaniments Iñupiat families have come to enjoy with whale in recent years. Several home cooks make a kind of salad with maktak or uunaalik that involves jalapenos, pickles, onion, and pepperoni — checking the same salt, acid, and heat boxes as Sam and Lee’s kimchi. Stir-fried uunaalik with vegetables is also popular, as is pickled maktak with carrots and peppers. Many swear by sprinkling maktak and uunaalik with Kunniak’s Spices, a line of seasoning blends made by local entrepreneur Kunniak Hopson, instead of the more traditional salt.

Whatever it’s paired with, for the people of Utqiagvik, maktak is more than food. “Whaling isn’t just a one-day thing, and then you suddenly have a block of maktak,” Leavitt says. “It’s a whole-year process, from our hunters preparing to go whaling, to them actually being out there with the whale, to the whaling crews working hard to cut the different edible parts. … It’s coming together with family, it’s bringing the community together, serving the people.”

The Kims and their kimchi, part of Utqiagvik for more than 40 years, have been welcomed into that community. “Barrow is really magic. People love each other,” Louise says. “My hometown is so far away, so these are my people, my village, my family.”

Jennifer Fergesen is a writer, editor, and author of The Global Carinderia, an exploration of the Filipino diaspora through food.
Ash Adams is a photojournalist and photo editor based in Alaska, California, and New York.
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