Celebrating the Great American Road Trip

This post originally appeared in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of her favorite food and restaurant stories — both on and off Eater — each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

Road trips: I love them, you love them, my entire editorial staff loves them. This week on Eater to mark the approaching start of summer (and the record low price of gas), we’re celebrating the American road trip. We kicked off by asking five incredibly talented writers to write personal essays about recent regional rides. If you read only one — but really, you should read them all — please, please read Gustavo Arellano’s meditation on border cuisine along the Mexican Mother road. It's beautiful.

Meanwhile, we have some sweet road trip #content for you no matter where you are. Just a sampling: everything to eat at Buc-ee’s in Texas; Wisconsin’s road trip destination is a cheese castle; a burger you can eat at a brothel on the way to Vegas; every rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, ranked; a pie crawl through Texas Hill Country; a green chile crawl through Santa Fe; where to eat along PCH and I-5 between SF and LA; and where to eat in the Florida Keys. Plus: why highway rest stop food is so bad (and our editors’ tricks for dining at them).

Gary He

Opening of the Week: Cecconi’s

Who is behind it?: Nick Jones, the guy behind private club chain Soho House.

What is it?: It’s the Brooklyn location of an Italian restaurant that has other iterations in Miami, LA, London, Istanbul, Barcelona, and Berlin. As you might expect, it has a menu of standard pastas, pizzas, salads, and the like. Also important to know: It is an objectively beautiful restaurant with plenty of outdoor seating.

Where is it?: Right near Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

When did it open?: June 13.

Why should I care?: These photos make it look pretty damn sexy. Also, Bill Murray crashed the opening party. Is it the Restaurant of Summer 2017 in New York? I’m not sure, but you will definitely find me there eating pasta and drinking spritzes and looking out at the Brooklyn Bridge all summer.

On Eater

• Intel: Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion; Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi shuttered the uptown Oakland location of Locol (but claim they were planning that all along); the team behind Brooklyn favorite Olmsted is plotting a new French spot; the first Wawa in D.C. will open this winter; modern-day salad chain Sweetgreen is raising prices to cover benefits and wages; London’s Borough Market reopened after last week’s terror attack; and Texas chef Tim Love will soon have food in gas stations across the state.
• Vespertine, the restaurant from another dimension out in LA, is my favorite upcoming restaurant opening in a Very. Long. Time. It has everything: a bonkers-looking building, an out-of-his-mind chef, and so much over-the-top earnestness and pretentiousness that it’s actually, somehow… endearing. I must go to this restaurant and eat this space food as soon as it opens later this summer.
• Pitmaster John Lewis brought Tex-Mex to Charleston.
• How a tiny barbecue joint draws fans to the center of California’s wildlands.
• Whenever life gets you down, just remember the good people at Wendy’s and Pure Water Ice & Tea Company in Lubbock, TX are waging a hilarious sign war against one another and making the world a better place.
• Bill Addison finally(!) made it to Mexico City.
• Ryan Sutton somehow found a way to enrage fried chicken lovers across the political spectrum with his Chick-fil-A review.
• Some takeaways from the first-ever FAB Conference (which, disclosure, I spoke at) in Charleston.

Off Eater

• Anytime you order an offal taco at Empellon, you’re flagged as a VIP. [Empellon]
• Craft beer's big impact on small towns and forgotten neighborhoods. [Curbed]
• This big profile of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey just got a hell of a lot more timely. [Texas Monthly]
• A company called Blue Star can help restaurants accurately measure their carbon footprints and that of their supply chain. [Fast Co]
• From Lindy West: my day at the Goop festival. [The Guardian]

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