Eater: All Posts by Charlotte Druckmanhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52682/favicon-32x32.png2023-10-19T09:45:00-04:00https://www.eater.com/authors/charlotte-druckman/rss2023-10-19T09:45:00-04:002023-10-19T09:45:00-04:00The Wonderful, Wonkafied World of Vegan Pastry
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<img alt="A counter filled with vegan pastries, including a ceramic swan filled with biscotti and stacks of cookies and cupcakes displayed on cake stands." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/csl_VCOQ4-RZplawT7vVfiAqZV8=/0x0:3000x2250/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72771729/231012_SWEET_MARESAS_EATER_097.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>The pastry counter at Sweet Maresa’s, an entirely vegan bakery in Kingston, New York. </figcaption>
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<p>For peak culinary creativity, look no further than the vegan bakeshop</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="vStHoY">Did you hear? <a href="https://vegnews.com/2023/9/vegan-cronuts-dominique-ansel#:~:text=The%20all%2Dvegan%20version%20of,with%20a%20hand%2Dglazed%20fondant.">Dominique Ansel introduced his first vegan Cronut</a>.</p>
<p class="p-large-text" id="pbniLd">Ansel announced the one-weekend-only special on September 20, the day before its limited drop, in an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxaq4fQOG7B/">Instagram post</a> marked #ad.<em> </em>The <a href="https://youtu.be/D89GXGKD2I8?si=O5axIW1Va1Ei-A6b">Huckleberry Hound-colored rice pudding inside the pastry was brought to us by </a>Upward SW 6239, a hue that paint conglomerate Sherwin-Williams deemed its 2024 Color of the Year. In the words of the paint company’s “director of color marketing,” it represents “<a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sherwin-williams-reveals-2024-color-of-the-year-upward-sw-6239-301932595.html">the gentle forward momentum in all of our lives</a>.” (In official speak, Ansel was “inspired” by this paint — “inspired” being a “gentle forward” way of saying “sponsored.”)</p>
<p id="i0IReQ">Ansel <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxaq4fQOG7B/">wrote</a> that the new placid tone led him to dream a dream of “making the first-ever vegan version of the Cronut®” — 10 years after the trademarked pastry was first introduced. (He used the ® twice in the announcement; once for the Cronut, once for Sherwin-Williams.) “We were so excited at the results and how we could push forward with entirely new techniques, flavors, and ingredients,” he wrote. </p>
<p id="F0yUBD">You would have thought no one had ever tried to make a vegan pastry before. Still, let’s give it up for Dominique Ansel and this major crossover event. When we look back in a few years at the vegan eclairs available at every pastry shop and wonder, <em>When did the VC-funded normalization of vegan pastry start?</em> this might be the answer. Because until rather recently, some might have said vegan pastry was the final culinary frontier, and butterless croissants (or their hybrids) a seeming impossibility — or paradox.</p>
<p id="12UcN5">Try to imagine baking something you love — a cupcake or a babka, maybe — without butter, dairy, or eggs. It probably presents as an unsolvable logic puzzle. It’s not just that those ingredients have defined what we think of as patisserie in the French sense, which is the foundation on which Western pastry is built. It’s that they’ve done so because they provide not only structure for most of our desserts and baked goods, but also what we identify as the flavor or texture. For instance, we describe things as “buttery” or “creamy” or “custardy.”</p>
<p id="dHzrt7">So how could you possibly have a croissant without butter? A panna cotta without milk? A custard tart without eggs? And if you could, would they still count as themselves?</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="MqBJMp"><q>“They’re trying to do the food everyone loves, but better. It is a way to create a cuisine.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="ggggg9">Incredibly enough, in the last two decades, talented chefs have been proving that desserts without dairy indeed not only count, but also measure up and sometimes surpass our ingrained platonic pastry ideals. The practitioners who have dedicated themselves to this micro-discipline may be outliers, but they’re responsible for the most significant culinary advances we’ve seen since people like chef Ferran Adrià and physical chemist Hervé This blew our minds with their studies of cooking on the molecular level, applying knowledge of chemical compounds and reactions to culinary processes.</p>
<p id="fwYDxY">Jen Yee, the founder of <a href="https://instagram.com/bakers.bench?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">Bakers Bench</a> in Los Angeles, who handled all the viennoiserie for Konbi, Craftsmen and Wolves, Bouchon Bakery, and The French Laundry before that, was quoted as saying as much in a story for the<em> </em><a href="https://www.vegetariantimes.com/restaurants/jen-yee-vegan-croissant/">Vegetarian Times</a>: “I would personally argue that since El Bulli [put molecular gastronomy on the map] in the ’90s, and other chefs caught on after they published their book in the early 2000s, food technique hasn’t really changed,” she told the outlet.</p>
<p id="g2Fm9d">Yes, she was talking about vegan cooking in general, but it wouldn’t be so outlandish to say that baking is the most active site of innovation in vegan gastronomy. It’s not like the savory side, where for many cultures around the world pre-colonization, cooking without dairy or eggs was the norm. Pastry as we know it (i.e., the mastered culinary art of confectionery, breads, viennoiserie, and composed desserts) is a Western phenomenon. There isn’t really another precedent to draw on for inspiration when veganizing it. And aside from a handful of cookbooks or trusted blogs geared to the folks at home, there’s not much out there to offer bakers, no universal vegan pastry guide or recipes to work from.</p>
<p id="dfuz6q">There’s an exciting upside to this. Without a standardized rule book to follow, people who want to do vegan pastry get to figure out a lot of stuff for themselves. As Alicia Kennedy, culinary cultural critic and author of <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516589&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fp%2Fbooks%2Fno-meat-required-the-cultural-history-and-culinary-future-of-plant-based-eating-alicia-kennedy%2F19177990&referrer=eater.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eater.com%2F23923061%2Fvegan-desserts-pastry-innovation-tourlami-butter-cronut" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating</em></a>, describes it, “There’s that vibe of, <em>We’re just trying something</em>. I think it’s so essential to vegan food ... they’re trying to do the food everyone loves, but better. It is a way to create a cuisine.”</p>
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<p id="44ycbS">Kennedy points to several places representative of this adventurously experimental ethos. At the vegetarian diner <a href="http://www.superiorityburger.com/">Superiority Burger</a> in New York City, some of the food, like Darcy Spence’s new and already-famous coconut cake, is “accidentally vegan”; at <a href="https://www.pietramalaphl.com/">Pietramala</a> in Philly, Jeremy Hrycko comes up with inventions like his chocolate-adjacent “corn amino.” But it’s at small, local bakeries, from <a href="https://www.sanandwolves.com/">San & Wolves Bakeshop</a> in Long Beach, California, and <a href="https://www.justwhatikneadedbakery.com/">Just What I Kneaded</a> in LA to <a href="https://www.termsofbk.com/">Terms of Endearment</a> in Brooklyn and <a href="https://www.peacefulprovisions.com/">Peaceful Provisions</a> in Beacon, New York, where you’ll find people making strides in areas previously thought impossible.</p>
<p id="hkScjC">“We felt like we could be more creative,” says Jen Evans, lead baker at vegan <a href="https://www.littleloafbakeshop.com/">Little Loaf Bakeshop</a> in Poughkeepsie, New York, where you get the sense that she and her boss, head baker Colleen Orlando, could probably make their peanut butter pretzel croissants or pesto-feta danishes with one hand tied behind their backs. “We could kind of throw the rules out the window. We could, you know, do things our own way.”</p>
<p id="np1t48">Without a codified prescription for getting from point A to point B, when it comes to making, say, an opera cake, everyone comes up with different paths. They use different ingredients, and those ingredients require different techniques. For a practice that relies on ratios, that means not reinventing the wheel but entirely changing the way you build it: You must revamp each step in the construction of a croissant to get a result that still resembles a croissant.</p>
<p id="7GnIw8">This is where molecular gastronomy becomes directly applicable. If you can’t use eggs but you want to achieve the same reaction eggs have in a recipe, you have to ask yourself, <em>What makes an egg an egg?</em> You’re looking at the chemical composition of the most basic ingredients; it’s molecular-level stuff.</p>
<p id="0FUcDe">“I’ve trained myself to think, <em>Salt and fat and sugar make really tasty pastry</em> … and really, pastry is just a combination of those things and sometimes flour,” Hrycko says. He was a savory chef in his past life and still likes “getting weird with goos and textural breakdowns.” He finds the “whole gastro thing” particularly apposite here because, in his opinion, “Vegan pastry requires a lot of that snuck in there, or things don’t work.”</p>
<p id="Zx87YF">Hrycko’s engaging in both the practical (the goos) and theoretical (textural breakdowns) aspects of molecular gastronomy. But for pastry chefs like Yee or Philip Khoury, who oversees the massive pastry department at <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516589&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.harrods.com%2Fen-us%2F&referrer=eater.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eater.com%2F23923061%2Fvegan-desserts-pastry-innovation-tourlami-butter-cronut" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Harrods</a> in London, vegan baking is more about the fundamental principle than it is the style with which we’ve come to associate that type of cuisine. Since writing <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516589&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fp%2Fbooks%2Fa-new-way-to-bake-revolutionary-recipes-for-plant-based-cakes-pastry-and-desserts-philip-khoury%2F19658296&referrer=eater.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eater.com%2F23923061%2Fvegan-desserts-pastry-innovation-tourlami-butter-cronut" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>A New Way to Bake: Re-Imagined Recipes for Plant-Based Cakes, Bakes and Desserts</em></a> for the home cook, Khoury has moved away from the commercial, incidentally plant-based stabilizers or “goos” of Hyrcko’s toolkit toward accessible pantry staples that already happen to be vegan.</p>
<p id="X2zCJy">In that cookbook, Khoury rebuilds recipes to accommodate readily available products. He offers up his pound cake as “one very specific example of unlocking the functionality of ingredients through reformulation” and explains how he reconfigures the rote ratio of the classic recipe, which is 1:1:1:1 — equal parts sugar, eggs, butter, and flour. This is the formula pastry chefs rely on for the traditional spongy texture of most pound cakes. It works because hydrated flour will behave the way it’s inclined to when you cook it: It gels and creates a tough structure, Khoury says. Eggs do something similar. The butter becomes necessary because you need fat “to shorten the texture and make it softer, and tenderize the product,” he says. Jettison the egg, which is mostly water, and the whole thing gets thrown off. There’s no liquid to hydrate your flour, and you lose a gelling agent. The vegan fix would be to replace it with water or a plant-based milk, but when you do that, as Khoury discovered, you have to reduce the fat by 60 percent “to allow the flour to do its thing. Otherwise you’d end up with a texture that either falls apart or is really dense.”</p>
<p id="FsDLHp">In short, he says, “You have to readjust the whole formula,” or, really, come up with a new one.</p>
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<p id="9TAkkQ">Of course, as you remove or replace ingredients, the quality of the ones you rely on becomes of greater import, which was something of a problem up until around 10 years ago. </p>
<p id="PluRqh">“We have easy access to better spices, whether it’s Diaspora or Burlap & Barrel, [and] better flour,” Kennedy says. “Everything that makes everything else better also makes vegan baking better.” And that’s great, but if you’ve got a lousy butter or dairy replacement, especially in recipes like those for Khoury’s pound cake or Yee’s kouign amann, your excellent cinnamon isn’t going to save you.</p>
<p id="3C2vkx">Fortunately, the range and caliber of vegan milks and (to a lesser degree) butter have also shifted for the better, Kennedy notes, because the collective understanding of the composition and optimization of these products has improved. </p>
<p id="r9v33y">“Those are where I’ve seen the big advances,” she says. It’s eggs that continue to elude even the canniest pastry workers.</p>
<p id="Hu9tND">When aquafaba, the cast-off sludge of soaked chickpeas, arrived on the scene, many of them believed it was the second coming. Alas, it’s proven a false prophet. </p>
<p id="OfnCnN">“I hate aquafaba,” Khoury says. “It serves a purpose. But this idea that you can put aquafaba into everything as this magic egg replacer is completely false. It shares absolutely no similarities to eggs or egg whites, except for the fact that it is mysteriously good at helping with emulsions. And it does foam, but it doesn’t gel; it doesn’t have any of the features that we commonly associate with egg whites.”</p>
<p id="ADSq6y">Dissatisfied with the vegan replacements that were available, some bakers opted to make their own from scratch. Khoury has as much distaste for aquafaba as he does for what he refers to as “margarine,” or vegan margarine that is interchangeable with vegan butter. He won’t use it at all. He hated it before he switched over to the plant-based side, so why would he start using them now? Instead, he’s formulated a couple of successful alternatives — one a combination of chia butter, cacao butter, and coconut oil processed at the same temperature but “with better-quality ingredients,” and another with almond paste, a carrot-derived product for coloring and a form of nutritional yeast, that “tasted fantastic.” </p>
<p id="O7QFJ0">Over in Kingston, New York, Maresa Volante has been mixing her own butter since she established her bakery, <a href="https://sweetmaresas.com/">Sweet Maresa’s</a>, in 2011, when options for vegan commercial baking ingredients were still extremely limited and uninspiring. DIY butter was more economically viable and allowed her to create the kinds of desserts that weren’t available to vegans — pistachio-cardamom crumb cakes, Earl Grey shortbread, tarts with frangipane and cherries or chocolate ganache and hazelnuts. </p>
<p id="iOV9f3">“The butter situation is probably the toughest thing,” Volante says, 12 years in. “We make all our own butter for all that. It’s a huge undertaking. We have a machine we use almost exclusively for that. It’s a 10-quart food processor ... and then it’s just somebody’s dedicated job for a whole day a week.”</p>
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<figcaption>Maresa Volante makes her own butter for her vegan baked goods at Sweet Maresa’s.</figcaption>
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<p id="huT582">When Kennedy’s bakery was up and running, she too made her own from-scratch “baking fat,” as she calls it, using a combination of coconut oil and coconut milk. It was cost efficient and gave her more control over her final products. </p>
<p id="FaWzav">“That’s one of the cool things about vegan baking,” Kennedy says. “You get to control things that a traditional baker would never think about controlling because it’s so normal for butter to taste like the flavor of butter. The flavor of butter is the flavor of butter, and you don’t think about it, whereas with vegan baking, you have to.” </p>
<p id="mHDflG">This results in two things that are also pretty cool about vegan baking. The first benefit is that you can showcase your featured ingredients or produce, whether that’s chocolate or fennel pollen or fresh figs in season, because the flavor of butter or eggs or even cow’s milk isn’t getting in the way. The second benefit is that vegan bakers are able to hone truly distinct styles. If each person’s butter is unique, not just in flavor but also in composition, their baked goods are going to taste equally unique; they’ll have notably different crumb structures and textures. People often throw around the word “signature” to describe a person’s cooking or even a standout dish. But nowhere is that term more apt than here.</p>
<p id="8jyARy">Kennedy singles out Volante for exactly this. </p>
<p id="VeFrkI">“When you see someone like Maresa, she’s doing these things,” she says. “They’re replicating something, but she’s using really interesting techniques that no one would have used a while ago. It’s not about nailing a flavor or a texture. It’s about getting somewhere new in terms of what is possible.” </p>
<p id="kBE1ip">Volante doesn’t always go for the obvious comfort baked goods of nostalgic Americana, which has been the tendency of many of her peers. But even when she does her classic chocolate chip walnut cookie or, more recently, a white chocolate macadamia cookie, they taste distinctly like her own. A lot of this has to do with her butter and the way she thought about making it. “It’s pretty flavorful, and it’s salted,” she says.</p>
<p id="bcZBOa">It’s not the only thing that distinguishes the DNA of Sweet Maresa’s products, but it’s a huge part of it. Were she to try making the same things with another vegan butter, one she bought off the shelf or that another baker formulated, it wouldn’t come out the same; they might fail. It happened to Yee. After she switched the brand of vegan butter she uses in her croissants, they started “coming out weird,” she says. The replacement had a different fat content than its predecessor, and it screwed up the entire recipe. But if another baker had developed their recipe using Yee’s alternate choice, their croissants probably wouldn’t come out weird at all — unless they switched brands too.</p>
<p id="P7p8zZ">Although still in a free-for-all state of development, the butter scene has improved significantly since the desultory Earth-Balance-or-bust era when, according to <a href="https://instagram.com/lady.ashton?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">Ashton Warren</a>, who headed up the Fragile Flour bake shop in New York City’s East Village and now operates a custom business, “Vegan butter was all vegetable oil.” (That refined palm oil-based, margarine-like product is still available at supermarkets and often the only option, but its saltiness and bitter aftertaste make it a poor choice for pastry work.) Kennedy mentions Miyoko’s European-style cultured vegan butter and says she only wishes it had existed when she was operating her own vegan bakery 11 years ago. Named for its creator, Miyoko Schinner, it entered the market in 2014 and for a long time was available in limited quantities at specialty stores around the country. Early in 2023, Schinner was <a href="https://vegnews.com/2023/2/miyoko-schinner-removed-vegan-cheese-miyokos-creamery">removed as CEO</a> of her own company, which as of 2021 had received an influx of $52 million in funding and embarked on an ambitious growth plan. Miyoko’s is sold at Target and Walmart these days, a sign of its corporatized success.</p>
<p id="mIKj4N">Warren is a fan of Violife, which also produces a range of products and is available at Target and Walmart. And at Mah-Ze-Dahr, a bakery with locations in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area, founder Umber Ahmad is releasing her first vegan product — a non-dairy adaptation of her “Devil in Ganache” layer cake. She formulated it using Country Crock’s Plant Butter with Olive Oil, which combines palm-derived canola oil and olive oil. </p>
<p id="6BhdaP">“It has a real creaminess to it, and boosts the flavor note of chocolate similar to butter,” Ahmad said in an email. “I started developing this recipe while in Missouri at my uncle’s funeral, so I used what I could find at the supermarket (hence the Country Crock).” She plans to shift to a brand called Flora, which makes a similar product for professional use and is distributed by the company behind Violife, but she’s keeping her options open.</p>
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<figcaption>Maresa Volante at her bakery.</figcaption>
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<p id="i8s0LH">But what if everyone used the same butter from the start? You might begin to see some uniformity. It would certainly allow more pastry chefs, including professionals like Ansel who aren’t steeped in the ways of vegan baking, to produce a wider range of dairy- and egg-free sweets, but it might come at the expense of the individuality that allows people like Volante to do what she does.</p>
<p id="ZMkQge">No matter how exceptional the product may be, things could start to get boring. Recipes could be standardized, a canon or hierarchy of techniques imposed. On the one hand, it would level the playing field. On the other, well, it would level the playing field.</p>
<p id="2bE8YU">We’re not there yet, but we may be on the way. In July, Susannah Schoolman launched <a href="https://www.tourlami.com/">Tourlami</a>, a company that produces premium-quality vegan ingredients for professional pastry chefs and bakers, beginning with butter that, unlike those shunned by Khoury and used by others for lack of alternatives, isn’t made with <a href="https://www.eater.com/22589445/palm-oil-thailand-plantation-spft-jiew-kang-jue-pattana">palm oil</a>. A pastry chef who helped open Belinda Leong’s B. Patisserie and B. on the Go in San Francisco and Richard Hart’s Bageri in Copenhagen, Denmark, among others, Schoolman started noticing a confluence of developments once she adopted a vegan diet seven years ago. First, the “explosion of plant-based foods in grocery stores.” Second, the gap between the reality that roughly 68 percent of the global population are lactose intolerant and what restaurants continue to offer their diners. Third, people “became a lot more mindful of their well-being and what they were eating” during COVID-19, she says. Fourth, the pandemic has also forced restaurants to figure out how to get more people in the door.</p>
<p id="89MV8J">Enter Schoolman and her two vegan butters: the Premium for all your laminating and pie-crust needs, and the All-Purpose for your chocolate chip cookies or the buttercream on your cakes. Her thinking is similar to that of Impossible Meats. Although her butters aren’t born in a lab and are cocoa butter-based (which makes them more stable than their palm oil-based counterparts and, due to their high fat content, removes the need for egg replacements in some recipes), like that fake-meat company, her focus is on restaurants and not vegan restaurants. </p>
<p id="hzWqfg">“I want everybody to use this butter,” Schoolman says. “I think everyone can benefit from having it — any bakery, any restaurant, any hotel. There are so many restaurants that could benefit from having a plant-based dish or two or three on their menu. It also opens up a revenue stream. We don’t want to say it’s about the bottom line, but it is.” And like Team Impossible, Schoolman has venture capital backing to get the job done.</p>
<p id="iKik7z">So far, she’s been making the rounds in New York and Southern California. Early clients include Eleven Madison Park and Win Son, which is planning to put some related items on its menu. Superiority Burger has expressed interest, as well. She isn’t ignoring bakeries; <a href="https://www.nickandsonsbakery.com/">Nick + Sons</a> is on board, for one, as is <a href="https://mamannyc.com/">Maman</a> and, but of course, Ansel, who used Schoolman’s butter in his paint-backed Cronut.</p>
<p id="XhEOHf">Schoolman is approaching vegan bakeries, too. She didn’t do so initially because she assumed they’d already developed their recipes with whatever vegan butter they’d chosen and wouldn’t be so keen on reconfiguring them to accommodate a new product, no matter how good. They’re simply not her primary target.</p>
<p id="7Cuuv7">She’s just getting started, and she may have been first to market, but it’s inevitable that others will follow, manufacturing better or more diversified vegan butters and whatever else at varied price points for professional use and, eventually, home bakers.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="M0UPi3">Today, it’s the Cronut. Tomorrow, a croissant at every Starbucks. Progress — or “gentle forward momentum,” as they say — comes with a price.</p>
<p id="D6YMFI"><small><em>Charlotte Druckman is a New York-based journalist and author. </em></small><br><small><em>Cole Wilson is a photographer residing between Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, New York. He is an enthusiast of all things food and beverage, and owns too many mugs.</em></small></p>
<aside id="jg7ytX"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"eater"}'></div></aside>
https://www.eater.com/23923061/vegan-desserts-pastry-innovation-tourlami-butter-cronutCharlotte Druckman2021-03-04T14:57:35-05:002021-03-04T14:57:35-05:00How to Build a Chinese-American Cookbook
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<figcaption>Pete Lee</figcaption>
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<p>Writer Tienlon Ho talks about collaborating with chef Brandon Jew on their new cookbook, “Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown,” and the challenges of documenting this moment in time in Chinese-American food</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="2GoEOc">In the two pages set aside for acknowledgments in <em>Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown</em>, the cookbook’s chef-author thanks Tienlon Ho “for writing this book with me, for qualifying our ideas and for pouring your heart into enriching these pages with Chinatown’s fascinating history.” His name — Brandon Jew — appears on the cover, as you’d expect. But Ho’s does too, which you might not. Jew is the headliner; it’s his restaurant, his story, his cookbook. But at least we know Ho had something to do with writing it. The ghostwriter, or the named writer whose contribution is never really spelled out or fully credited, might be the most exploited of all the talent in the publishing process. But you rarely read about that: A finished book doesn’t tell you the story of its making, and how hard-won the triumph was (or if it even felt like a triumph at all).</p>
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<p id="ENp6HC">I was thinking about this when I received the pre-publication copy for <em>Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown</em>. It’s a sumptuous, archival book that provides a panoramic portrait of one of America’s most vital, storied communities — but it does so through the eyes of a Chinese-American chef who is part of that community and has synthesized its influences and history into both his cooking and his restaurant. Of course, he couldn’t have done it without Ho, who I became friends with when she contributed an essay to the anthology I edited. She is a deeply and precisely thoughtful person, something you can see in her breathtaking prose and hear in any conversation you have with her. </p>
<p id="huwJ04">So as soon as the galley arrived, I emailed her. She had lots to say, and I asked if we could pick up our phones for a conversation about how cookbooks get made and, more specifically, what that experience is like from a co-writer’s point of view. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="LDH0WJ">
<p class="p-large-text" id="98v7EE"><strong>Eater: We can start with the obvious: How did you come to work on this project?</strong></p>
<p id="Mm3M8K"><strong>Tienlon Ho:</strong> Connecting with Brandon was all thanks to his agent. There were a couple other people who she thought of ... I’m pretty sure I was the only Chinese-American person. And then it turned out our whole team (chef, photographer, recipe developer, and me) ended up being Asian American, which is really rare in cookbooks these days.</p>
<p id="yEN1VQ">What really resonated for me was [Brandon] was one of the first young chefs I’ve talked to who takes this idea of grounding his work in tradition really seriously ... I’m always worried about this idea of trying to present yourself as this pioneer, and that chef-hero thing that’s like, “I’m the first one to ever do this.” In one of those early conversations, he said something like, “I’m part of this really long lineage. I see myself in this long line of history and I want to somehow get people to understand that.”</p>
<p id="YxwRiO">At the same time, one of the things that struck me, that was important to both of us, was this idea that you can be grounded in tradition, but also be really innovative. People who cook haute cuisine, [there’s an idea that] they’re inventing things out of nowhere, leading the way with all these new ideas. In the same way that, as a writer of color, I have to ground everything in a personal story, chefs of color are asked to do that all the time, like, “Oh, this had to come from your grandmother. This is exactly how your mom made it.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="DudhSx"><q>“I’m always worried about this idea of trying to present yourself as this pioneer, and that chef-hero thing that’s like, ‘I’m the first one to ever do this.’”</q></aside></div>
<p id="HPzCMY">I wanted to make sure to protect that aspect of him, which was that he is a creative person, and just because you respect tradition doesn’t mean you’re not thinking of new things and coming up with things that are inspiring and expressive of yourself. </p>
<p id="4O8VIm"><strong>Why do you think he chose you? </strong></p>
<p id="P6RkT3">We connected in terms of this idea of telling the truth about Chinese-American cooking. We struggled with this and debated, “Is it Chinese food still?” which is what Cecilia Chiang insisted it was. Or is it just American food? Because we’re all Americans. Brandon’s a third-generation American. There was a way to make this very Chinese — Chinese Chinese. But what he does isn’t Chinese Chinese. It’s Chinese American, and we wanted to make sure that was clear.</p>
<p id="Bpjp1D">But we wanted to show, in a way that maybe only people who are connected to old countries and very old cultures can understand, that you can be American but know so much more about another culture and have that be so much a part of your identity, as well. </p>
<p id="JEyUxu">What happened with Chinese-American food is that the first people that were able to come here and cook for everyone were mostly from a very teeny, tiny place, Toisan. So what they cooked didn’t represent all of China. In fact, it didn’t even represent all of the province [Guangdong] they were in. </p>
<p id="tEJG9a">When they got here, and when they were cooking their style of food with the equipment that they had and the ingredients that were available, which were very limited, that whole menu became representative of Chinese-American cuisine. It still is today. It was defined by outsiders and they drew these borders where they didn’t need to. It became called “Cantonese” because it was [from] Canton, they said. So Cantonese food came to represent everybody. There was no other way to try other food because so few people were allowed to emigrate from other parts of China for so long because of Chinese exclusionary laws. … Brandon is Toisanese. His background is a mix, but he remembers a lot of his Toisan roots through his family’s cooking. (I’m a mix of southern, like Brandon, and northern in the same way Cecilia Chiang was, and western — so between us, we’re representing a lot of Chinese cultures.)</p>
<p id="IIa1PF">We wanted to make sure we described the diversity [in Chinese food] in the way people look at even the same dishes, how they would approach them very, very differently depending on where they were born in China or in the diaspora. There’s no way to represent 200 dialects and so many regions, and the diaspora and all the creativity that’s happened even within [San Francisco] Chinatown itself. But we want to at least show that reality that there’s so much more than you (and we) ever imagined.</p>
<p id="06eMsn"><strong>What was the initial vision for the book?</strong></p>
<p id="XTsmB7">We wanted to document this moment in time in Chinese-American food. This is the first book out of Chinatown that focuses on San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown in North America. It’s the first book in [almost] 60 years, as far as I can tell.</p>
<p id="F8m8H4"><strong>What was the cookbook that came before it?</strong></p>
<p id="Iyv4jO"><a href="https://vintagecookbook.com/product/eight-immortal-flavors/"><em>Eight Immortal Flavors</em></a>. [It was by] Johnny Kan and his co-writer, Charles L. Leong, a pioneering Chinese-American journalist. Kan was this wonderful chef-entrepreneur who basically revolutionized Chinese-American food as we know it. He died in 1972. He grew up with James Beard, in Portland, but he was a poor Chinese kid, and his mom actually cooked for James Beard, and that’s how he got to know James, [who] wrote his intro to this book.</p>
<p id="2Grc2a">[Kan] came up with the idea of delivery. Before, around Chinatown, the way you would get food delivered is the waiters would carry these heated trays. Kan was like, “You know what, we should take credit cards and have a fleet of cars that are insulated. We’d keep everything warm.” He set up delivery all around San Francisco really early on, so he was the takeout revolutionary. And then, he was the one who said, “We should have kitchens open for people to see with windows,” because, at the time, Chinese food was considered really mysterious and people still made jokes (they still do) about rats’ tails and mystery meats and things that they just didn’t understand. [Kan] said, “Why don’t we just show them how we do a technique, show them how clean we work, show them how much goes into this,” and so his restaurants were the first that had open kitchens.</p>
<p id="y9YFWM"><strong>Wow, that’s so cool!</strong></p>
<p id="dZuNzR">I know, he did so many things ... he also was a huge influence on Cecilia Chiang. His whole thing was about service … people who never would have gone to Chinese restaurants flocked to his restaurant. It was a place to be seen. </p>
<p id="plmMYN">That was something that we wanted to capture: to talk about the heyday of Chinatown, and all the triumphs, because so much of it is about suffering, because there was so much suffering. But there was so much celebration, too, and innovation, and things that aren’t really remembered because of how history gets written down. </p>
<p id="Ndq9PT"><strong>Can you talk a little bit about how you originally planned to structure the book?</strong></p>
<p id="7EBD9Y">Brandon really wanted to have this feeling of understanding where Mister Jiu’s fit into the community of Chinatown. In the proposal, we said we wanted to have all these stories of these people we know, who in some cases did make it into the book.</p>
<p id="GcAZaz"><strong>How much would you say the manuscript resembles what was laid out in the proposal? Is it completely different or is there a through line?</strong></p>
<p id="WWCxBK">The proposal actually was very much unlike how this book turned out. But the through line is there: It is definitely, like, this is a restaurant in Chinatown and it couldn’t have existed anywhere else because it’s inspired by and rooted in the Chinese-American experience, and that’s what Chinatown is all about. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="4ziD28"><q>“That was something that we wanted to capture: to talk about the heyday of Chinatown, and all the triumphs, because so much of it is about suffering.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="XgCwNy"><strong>You basically have three different narrative strains or themes: Chinatown, the restaurant, and Brandon as a chef. How do you make them all fit into a unified whole? </strong></p>
<p id="jddf8P">I was thinking about what I had in front of me and how I could see each dish. It was like, “What is the Chinese-American story behind each dish?” And then, “How did Brandon build on that?” Then I started realizing what it really was, was that he’s a representative of his Chinese-American experience and his Chinese-American food is his own Chinese-American food. That is the individual lens through which to look at this larger story of how Chinese food became American food and how we call him a Chinese-American chef, because people before would have just called him a Chinese chef. But we’re in an age now where people recognize a little bit more, I think, I hope, this difference.</p>
<p id="uthbfM"><strong>Did you receive any pushback from Ten Speed along the way?</strong></p>
<p id="z71ZQ7">The cover. We really didn’t want it to be a dish. We wanted it to be a setting, something that represented the aesthetic of Mister Jiu’s within the context of Chinatown. And we had lots of ideas for that. I mean, what’s more iconic of Chinatown than the window with the barbecue hanging in front of it? … They really wanted a dish. And even then, it was funny. They wanted the fried chicken wings, which is a snack. And it’s a delicious dish, but Brandon was like, “That does not represent in any way.” To him it seemed so cliche and obvious when there were so many other dishes that are slightly more complex. … And chicken wings just wouldn’t cut it. The publishers totally understood that. </p>
<p id="IfA3F4">And we had some pushback on recipes, on how you cover the “greatest hits” of Chinese-American cuisine. The publisher really wanted to make sure we had potstickers and maybe egg rolls and things like that … or other dishes that exist in America but are not cooked by Chinese people, or just wouldn’t be cooked at home. [Brandon] didn’t want to do that either. He wanted to just really represent the food of his restaurant. It might not be stuff that you would normally make at home, but now you can.</p>
<p id="J6uwdR">If you look at what is most ordered around this country, it’s General Tso’s. It’s kung pao chicken. It’s sweet-and-sour chicken and sesame chicken. … [Brandon] doesn’t make General Tso’s chicken. But he makes an orange chicken where he boils the gastrique down for two or three hours and it’s that way in this book. You start with, like, a gallon of it —</p>
<p id="4ITQIK"><strong>Oh my gosh.</strong></p>
<p id="5bahOD">Yeah. At one point I challenged him on it. I said, “This is not for home cooks. This is really intense.” And he’s like, “Well, that’s why it tastes so good.” I couldn’t really argue with that. To cheapen that would be .... like nearly every other book [written in America] about Chinese food and Chinese-American food.</p>
<p id="hTAnBh"><strong>But isn’t this the paradox of every restaurant cookbook that’s ever been written, which is that one of the reasons you go to a restaurant is to eat food that you wouldn’t make at home, or that’s better than it would be at home? And then here’s this restaurant being like, “Hey, here’s the recipe if you want to make it at home.” I get frustrated when a cookbook isn’t cookable, because I think it’s no longer a cookbook, it’s a book about cooking.</strong></p>
<p id="YhyHGK"><strong>I think we talked about this early on, and I remember you being like, “I’m pushing back because so many of these things you wouldn’t cook at home.”</strong></p>
<p id="7smI5S">We decided on a certain percentage. There’s a group, and they’re not labeled this way, but they’re master recipes. He does them at the restaurant exactly [the same way]. ... Some of them take at least 10 days.</p>
<p id="0IPXYM"><strong>Oh my god.</strong></p>
<p id="PPJDMO">Yeah. Well, that’s how long the [roast] duck takes. … I was like, “How should we explain why we’re doing this? Why do you have these master recipes in here?” And he said, “It’s my mission in some ways just to show you the technique that went into this so that there’s an audience for this food in the future.” Because if we all think we can make whatever … you become accustomed to [riffing and taking short cuts], or you find that acceptable, then we lose traditions and what little support we have for artisanship in this country. He’s very much a believer of that.</p>
<p id="C3o6aJ">[Brandon’s] role in this restaurant is to keep minds and palates open. [These techniques] don’t have to be lost because no one finds them useful or palatable or there’s no market for them at all. What he fears for Chinatown in general is that people only expect the greatest hits. And it’s impossible, on these small margins, anyway, for these little restaurants to keep going so that they all just make all the same things. People complain about that. They’re like, “Chinatown is just for tourists.” But it’s the tourists who made it that way.</p>
<p id="o5MKeG"><strong>What’s great about this book is that it shows you there’s more to it than the just-for-tourists part. It’s there, if you want to find it. But there’s stuff in here that doesn’t take days to make, right? It’s not all major-undertaking recipes… </strong></p>
<p id="9b66us">The vast majority [are not] … [there] are things that you can do in 10 minutes. I felt like that was really important. He did start to understand too. Sizzling fish is a really good example of an easy recipe that is totally legit ... it represents Southern Chinese cooking so well, and yet it’s not that complicated, even though some people might find it intimidating, because it’s a whole fish, but that’s what Chinese cooking is. There’s such a beautiful picture of it; [Brandon] wanted to put that on the cover. [But the publishers] were like, “No, one will buy it, because it has a fish.” Is that true? Did you hear that too? </p>
<p id="SDqNAC"><strong>Yep! It’s a thing. I know you guys worked so hard to make sure you were telling a different story from what we usually see in cookbooks and food media, in correcting the narrative of the colonial hero figure who comes swooping in to “save” or “ennoble” a cuisine and reveal its hidden greatness. But then, the emailed PR text that accompanied the PDF of the galley kind of reduced it to exactly that. It literally included the phrase “realizing its untapped potential.” This happens so often, the disconnect between how the publishers market the book and what’s going on in the book itself. Were you able to have any input there? </strong></p>
<p id="Y6viqD">We were asked to review it and I did. And I marked it up, and not all the changes were made so I don’t really know. </p>
<p id="wPUqva"><strong>That seems in keeping with the opacity of the publishing process. There’s a lot authors aren’t privy to, or that isn’t really explained. Related to the marketing stuff, who was your target audience? And how do you imagine people will interact with and use the book? You guys were clearly going for something that isn’t necessarily just like, we want people to take this book home and make all the food in it.</strong></p>
<p id="KsIeAW">Right. No. And I’ve been thinking about your distinction between cookbooks and a book about cooking. And I think some of these recipes fall squarely in the cookbook idea, but you’re right. It is a book about cooking and I’m not really sure that’s a bad thing.</p>
<p id="pF4yGX"><strong>I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. </strong></p>
<p id="MP6DFr">Part of the problem is that there’s so little context for Chinese-American food. People don’t know a lot of this history and why and what the Chinese American experience has been, and by having cookbooks that just have the same recipes over and over and over, it becomes so much easier to have those problems that we are all trying to be so careful about, like cultural appropriation and this whole idea of disconnecting a food from the people who care about it most and disrespecting that connection. I think we have that connection. </p>
<p id="nbA4E2">We wanted to offer a foundation for understanding the food as well as making it. That’s why it was important for [Brandon] to have the complexity, and the things that might not work out the first time but that require attention and experience and detail. </p>
<p id="nyBv5T">At some point, Brandon mentioned some of his chef friends who are extremely skilled but don’t understand Chinese food. And he said, “If they could read this and get something out of it too, I’d be so pleased.” Because he’s tired of having to explain it. And also was just tired of defending it. … He wanted it to be very plain to people who care about what goes into food. To really delight and enlighten at the same time.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="b6IeXr"><q>“For me, it was important to capture this moment in time. And I wanted to write that down from our perspective of being in Chinatown, rather than wait for someone to write about it.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="nyIP6b">Ultimately, we struggled, because … [the publisher wanted] to really try to make this for home cooks. I mean, we did make it for home cooks, but for enthusiastic home cooks who would be the same people who would come to eat at his restaurant. </p>
<p id="t6yLH7"><strong>Something else that you touched on before — there’s the idea that [Brandon] wanted to reach Chinese Americans with the book as much as he wanted to reach people who are not of Chinese heritage, because for a lot of Chinese Americans, a lot of this stuff has been lost. And most of the time, the expectation is that you’re doing a cookbook so that people who aren’t like you can understand your food. So I love this idea that it’s very much for exactly people like him.</strong></p>
<p id="UE2XXZ">Yeah, for posterity, for his children, for people who were disconnected for whatever reason from their past or their roots. There’s a weird thing that happened in Chinatown after the earthquake and the fires: All the records were lost. We usually talk about the records in terms of citizenship papers, but all the newspapers were lost and all the books and all the things that were published in Chinatown. </p>
<p id="W9wV6i">It’s really hard to find records of the early restaurants that aren’t written by outsiders, by English writers, or non-Chinese Americans or Chinese people, because those are the only ones that survived. That was one of the challenges of doing this too: How do you have these histories that are clearly written by outsiders rather than the people who lived in it, and how would it have been different? </p>
<p id="9rBc5e">For me, it was important to capture this moment in time. And I wanted to write that down from our perspective of being in Chinatown, rather than wait for someone to write about it. </p>
<p id="1Dlx4R"><strong>Yes, and it has an added significance now that Chinatown is once again in danger of disappearing. </strong></p>
<p id="oC9uQU">Yeah. Already, last January, Brandon and all the restaurants and businesses there felt a change when people stopped coming to Chinatown. By Chinese New Year, it was very clear that there were no crowds and people were not coming — unless they were Chinese American or lived in the community. And then by March, it was shelter in place. The Chinatowns all over the United States have been <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/covid-19-has-been-a-disaster-for-u-s-chinatowns?sref=AN2927tl">hit</a> much <a href="https://www.womply.com/blog/the-types-of-restaurants-most-impacted-by-covid-19/">harder</a> than any other community in terms of <a href="http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/resources/policyreports/COVID19_Employment_CNK-AASC_072020.pdf">impact</a> on their businesses. Some <a href="https://knowledge.luskin.ucla.edu/2020/07/29/asian-american-labor-force/">233,000</a> Asian-American-owned small businesses closed between February and April, when everything had only just started, at a much higher rate than similar white-owned businesses. </p>
<p id="M6a4zx">But Brandon was really trying to be optimistic. So for a while, he didn’t want to add anything [about the pandemic] to this book. And then as it became clear that there’s a disparate impact on Chinese Americans in Chinatown, and as more anti-Chinese rhetoric came out, we really felt it was even more important to acknowledge the total change that the neighborhood and restaurant were experiencing, in a short note at the end of the book. But it didn’t make sense to write everything. </p>
<p id="LR3NPl"><strong>But that’s okay too, because then it becomes a record of pre-COVID. </strong></p>
<p id="SB6zLQ">Exactly. We were all so glad that we had this snapshot in time ... I mean, his restaurant, the vibe is so energetic. Under normal circumstances, it’s packed. And that’s the whole point of the Chinese banquet meal: to have a big room full of people with lazy Susans, everyone shares these dishes. So, it was a bit of a mourning thing, because [we could] imagine that it could be lost for a long, long time. </p>
<p id="SA5DBg">That’s the problem with all this white supremacist rhetoric: You forget in all the ways that we are connected and how in being connected, the world’s new ideas come out. Chinatown isn’t just Chinese. But it was because there were so many outside influences, people coming in and wanting a certain dish and Chinese chefs adapting and saying, “Oh, I thought you would like this.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="SrtXkg">Can you imagine a world where we didn’t have this connection? And we thought that everything that we did in our own individual silos was good enough? Finishing the book when we did, I thought, this is a record of how great people are when they are together. Not when they’re apart. </p>
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https://www.eater.com/2021/3/4/22307763/mister-jius-in-chinatown-cookbook-chinese-american-food-tienlon-ho-interviewCharlotte Druckman2020-11-11T11:45:45-05:002020-11-11T11:45:45-05:00The True Cost of Keeping a Restaurant Open During a Pandemic
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<figcaption>Pim Techamuanvivit | Nahm</figcaption>
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<p>San Francisco chef and restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit breaks down COVID-19’s effects, and the difficult decisions she’s had to make</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="5RBFui">“This is a time that you look around at the people, the makers, the restaurants you care about and you support them because you want them to be here. It’s a matter of extinction,” the chef and restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit said when we first spoke in August. Outside of her apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, a throat-burning blanket of smoke hovered over the city as wildfires tore through the surrounding region. </p>
<p id="xENiK0">In March, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Bay Area, Techamuanvivit was forced to close the original location of Kin Khao, the critically acclaimed Thai restaurant she had opened in 2015 at the Parc 55 Hotel in Union Square. She kept her second restaurant, Nari, open, turning the six-month-old space in Japantown’s Kabuki Hotel into a takeout operation. </p>
<p id="E5HDgQ">Now, as summer waned and restrictions relaxed enough to allow outdoor dining on sidewalks throughout the city, Techamuanvivit was readying the Kabuki’s driveway to accommodate dinner service and waiting for the go-ahead to launch Kin Khao’s new Dogpatch location. The Union Square address remained on indefinite hiatus while she continued to pay its rent. </p>
<p id="PmBTJv">Techamuanvivit is a friend of mine, and what began as a phone call to catch up turned into a two-part conversation about the true costs of closing versus remaining open during the pandemic. As we spoke, she broke down its effects on her restaurants, explaining how she’d made difficult decisions and their financial and human costs. “I don’t understand why it’s up to me as a small-business owner to search my conscience every month to decide whether or not to support my employees,” she said at one point. “Where is the conscience of this government, of this social system to support people? Where is the conscience of the country?” </p>
<p id="EfG8Rp">The second time we talked, at the beginning of October, she was driving from Kin Khao’s now three-week-old Dogpatch location to Pacific Heights, where Nari had just started serving diners outdoors. “It’s good. It feels good,” she said. “It’s going well, or at least, we’re not making a profit but I know I can make rent.” What follows is a consolidation of our two phone calls, edited and condensed for clarity.</p>
<p id="Vd3Ly2"><strong>Eater: I thought we would start with Kin Khao. Could you tell me how you raised the money for the original location at the Parc 55 hotel?</strong></p>
<p id="5fDvTV"><strong>Pim Techamuanvivit:</strong> Well, because Kin Khao is my first restaurant project, I bootstrapped it; I really just opened with a lot of my own money. I had one partner who I grew up with in Thailand and the two of us got into this together because I had a very clear concept of what I wanted Kin Khao to be, which is really a different kind of Thai restaurant. </p>
<p id="RvSWWh">So instead of going out to raise a lot of money for a big splashy project, I kept looking until I found a space that really wanted us to be there. [The landlord] helped us with a big chunk of the costs of redoing the space. So it was possible to open a restaurant in San Francisco, downtown, including capital and everything, for under $1 million. </p>
<p id="Pq1ga3"><strong>When you closed that space, how much money were you bringing in a year, or how much approximately were you taking in monthly — for example, before the pandemic, maybe January?</strong></p>
<p id="NKepor">Kin Khao does between $4.5 million to $5 million a year as far as sales. It was about $350,000 in January. </p>
<p id="MDgI1d"><strong>Looking at Kin Khao, I want to get a sense of how much it costs to close a restaurant — in terms of money that you have to lay out to close it, but I’m assuming there are also costs that aren’t monetary.</strong></p>
<p id="R3spKi">Well, it’s a lot of things. Almost everything that we buy is on 15- or 30-day revolving credit. So, when we order meat today, we have that many days to pay for it. And the way that things work, even when we have the money to pay for it, we still use that credit because it makes things run smoother. We do pay cash to some vendors at the farmers markets, but that’s about it. So when we had to close, we had basically 30 days of products and costs to pay for.</p>
<p id="5HodNO">Cost of goods on the last couple P&L [profit and loss] periods before the pandemic varied between $80,000 to $100,000; that’s about how much we lost on products and goods when we closed. The financial loss was mostly in the fresh goods from the first month of closure. Another way to look at the damage is it’s that much money every month that we are not spending on or buying from the farmers, purveyors, and companies we do business with. That’s how much the closure of Kin Khao took out of the food economy. And that’s not counting the wages we pay to our staff who then turn around and spend into the economy.</p>
<p id="nq9XZm">When we were first told that we had to close down the dining room, I didn’t let go of my salaried employees. That’s about $50,000 a month, collectively. Nari is a bit less. We were lucky that we were not a hand-to-mouth kind of an operation — up until we closed, we were still doing 200, 250 covers on a Saturday night. We could anticipate what we were bringing in, so we had some money filed away. I didn’t want to let go of my entire team, because if you do that, then when you have to reopen the restaurant, that will cost you a lot too, because a management team, especially one that you build, [has] really valuable corporate memory.</p>
<p id="mZILY6">But also, it’s a bloody pandemic. You can’t let people go without health insurance. At the time, I was assuming we would only be closed for a month, two months, three months. I thought, I can do that, I can take that hit. It was, I believe, between $12,000 to $14,000 a month in benefits for each restaurant that we decided to keep paying our employees’ insurance. That’s 35 employees who were on our insurance plan, for just Kin Khao. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="kD3Qis"><q>It’s a bloody pandemic. You can’t let people go without health insurance.</q></aside></div>
<p id="rNyJ8Q">It was the same with Nari. We kept everyone who was eligible for and had health care through us. That’s 45 people. There were a bunch of people who hadn’t signed up yet and were still eligible or had just become eligible and we made them sign up when we closed so they had health care in this pandemic. </p>
<p id="LRro43">I talked about the importance of the experience and some training for your management staff. The same goes with our hourly employees — our servers, line cooks, prep cooks, butchers. If we’re not open, we don’t have monies to keep employees working, basically. But even carrying their health insurance, it’s a lot of money and we’ve been doing it for six months, and depending on how Kin Khao does, when we open in Dogpatch, we may or may not be able to continue. [<em>Techamuanvivit was able to pay for everyone’s insurance through the end of October, and now covers only those who are working again, including the almost 30 employees she brought back to work at Kin Khao’s Dogpatch location.</em>] </p>
<p id="7nzskk"><strong>Is it the same team that you had before? How many people were you able to retain over the course of the six months you’ve been closed?</strong></p>
<p id="9ULgN2">So, Kin Khao, for the first month after COVID, as I explained, we kept all of the salaried employees, which is eight people. And at Nari we have seven people. We basically merged the operations of Kin Khao and Nari and moved everybody to Nari, because Nari is a much bigger space, much newer build, and a much better HVAC system. We created a safe schedule where not everybody worked altogether at the same time. And we started doing takeout. We opened all afternoon, six days a week. </p>
<p id="JU5lXU">And we did that until the second stay-at-home order <a href="https://sf.gov/news/san-francisco-and-bay-area-extend-stay-home-order-through-end-may">was extended</a> at the end of April and became more restrictive. We decided to close down even more, to only have five people working, down from 13 (two of the original 15 chose not to work for personal reasons). We had one front-of-house person, four people in the kitchen — and then went down to five days. </p>
<p id="hmdvDu">We did that for a while, until things were looking much better in San Francisco. So, we brought back a few employees. We were able to bring back two dishwashers who weren’t getting government assistance and that was great.</p>
<p id="1jbUJQ"><strong>For comparison and a fuller sense of what’s at stake when you close, or when you semi-close, I want to get into the economics of Nari. You invested the profits from the first Kin Khao into Nari, but this time, you also raised outside money. How much did Nari cost all told, and where did that money come from? </strong></p>
<p id="2iSnpc">Nari cost about $5 million to build.</p>
<p id="Tb86EE"><strong>That’s basically more than five times as much as Kin Khao.</strong></p>
<p id="52Jwy2">I wanted to do something that takes a bit more refinement, to do dishes that I couldn’t do at Kin Khao because of the limited space. I felt like I’d sort of proved myself and could run a profitable restaurant. I was confident enough that I could ask people to invest in me. We raised about 30 percent from investors and also received help from the landlord. We were putting a lot more money in, but there’s also much bigger potential here than at the tiny space at Kin Khao. </p>
<p id="yqfSmF"><strong>You opened in August last year and then got all of this critical acclaim. When did you start seeing a profit, or had you gotten to the point where you had? Because the restaurant was just six months old when COVID came.</strong></p>
<p id="aNghnq">It depends on how you look at profits, right? We haven’t really been not-profitable in that we haven’t made back the money that we invested, but we were operating cash positive, basically. That means each month it costs me less [to operate] than my sales. At Kin Khao, truly we were cash positive very quickly, [but] at Nari, it took a bit longer. But by the fourth and fifth months, January and February, we had $75,000 positive cash flow at Nari, which was not bad for a new restaurant. </p>
<p id="DitLMM"><strong>No, not at all.</strong> </p>
<p id="M4OTX4">When we had to close, we still hadn’t finished paying for construction because, of course, we projected construction to cost a certain amount, and it never does cost that. So it was over [budget] on all these things… We’re not done paying for Nari, basically. So it was really scary when the [lockdown] order came down. The problem with Nari is that we didn’t have a lot of cash in the bank before COVID hit. We don’t have any extra cash left at Kin Khao either because we’d use it all to build Nari.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="kxzdGV"><q>The way I’m running both Kin Khao and Nari is to kind of hobble along enough that I can pay to support my teams, keep their jobs, and, you know, keep people eating.</q></aside></div>
<p id="kGzHde">It’s not that we were short. We weren’t running negative, but nobody has enough to basically take a restaurant through six months of closure. We are still trying to find a way. Right now, when we look at numbers, we’re not looking at what returns we need to make, what margins. I’m not thinking in terms of profit. The way I’m running both Kin Khao and Nari is to kind of hobble along enough that I can pay to support my teams, keep their jobs, and, you know, keep people eating, really. And then when we go back to whatever semblance of normal we have at the end of this, I can still have this team and these restaurants.</p>
<p id="CkzMOM"><strong>You told me that keeping the restaurant alive in no matter what capacity, even if you are losing money, is actually an investment in its future success. It’s something that obviously not every restaurant is in the position of doing. But when you have a restaurant you’ve invested that much money in, it actually makes more sense to keep it alive than to close and try to reopen something after the pandemic. I don’t know if I’m getting that right but maybe you can explain it</strong>. </p>
<p id="6me2kb">Well, because a restaurant is not just the building or the tables and chairs and decorations that you put in — it’s not just the stuff in the kitchen, right? A restaurant is a team. It’s all the people that you spend time training and working with so that you can have a functional restaurant with a functional team. And I like keeping people who work well with me for a long time, and creating opportunity and space for them to grow.<em><strong> </strong></em></p>
<p id="8qgyrb">If I close Nari today, it will cost me less than keeping it open. But I’m keeping it open because I need this team when we can open again. And also, these are the people that have worked for me for many years. They need to make a living. So it’s important for me to keep this running so that at least we can keep some of these people employed. </p>
<p id="05GehF"><strong>In terms of doing takeout, do you make any money off of that? </strong></p>
<p id="FeAQPj">No.</p>
<p id="lQRGJo"><strong>Do you lose money doing that?</strong></p>
<p id="rIw7Oy">Week to week, it’s different, but remember I told you we were $75,000 cash positive when we had to close for COVID?</p>
<p id="Yso2X6"><strong>Yeah.</strong></p>
<p id="1MLNrI">We got $220,000 in PPP [Paycheck Protection Program loan], and as of last period, I was $300,000 in the hole, so we’ve lost basically $80,000 in the six months that we’ve stayed open, assuming that we qualify for forgiveness for PPP. And doing takeout alone is not going to do it anymore. Because we used to do maybe $15,000 a week from takeout, which is not a lot. It’s less than what we used to make on a Saturday night.</p>
<p id="Mz52Ca">And we’re not even doing that right now, because there’s a lot more restaurants opening for takeout, and outdoor services, so people are not that interested in taking things home to eat. So we’re going to open outdoors. Luckily we have the driveway, so people won’t be sitting on the streets, and we can make it a little bit nice, [and] space out the tables so it’s so safe for everyone. [<em>Although Techamuanvivit subsequently reopened Nari for limited indoor service and brought back a number of its employees, she has since closed its dining room to comply with San Francisco’s November 13 </em><a href="https://sf.eater.com/2020/11/10/21558821/san-francisco-indoor-dining-shutdown-ban-coronavirus"><em>shutdown</em></a><em> of indoor dining.] </em></p>
<p id="Dt8itd"><strong>You have to spend money on preparing that space, too, right?</strong></p>
<p id="PstgHc">We ended up renting everything — the partitions, the pergolas, and the heaters. The propane heaters alone cost $2,000 a month to rent, and after the fire department told us we could no longer use them, we had to spend $3,000 buying 10 electric heaters. But we saved money by using tables and chairs from the hotel’s breakfast room downstairs that weren’t being used. So we ended up with a really nice space that didn’t cost us a lot. </p>
<p id="LAshDm">We spent money buying a mobile hand-washing station outside our front door so the servers don’t have to run all the way to the back of the restaurant to wash their hands. That was a few hundred dollars. We bought a few trays, to limit touch, so servers can carry plates on those instead of with their hands. We’re lucky because the space is quite minimal.</p>
<p id="wM8e9x">For Kin Khao [in Dogpatch], even though we took over an existing restaurant, we still had some costs for setting up outside: tables and chairs, umbrellas, lights, heaters, lots and lots of compostable takeout containers, which are astonishingly expensive, and we have to use really, really <a href="https://www.ecoproductsstore.com/world-view-containers.html">good ones</a> because a hot curry will destroy anything. For example, for just one order of khao soi, which has so many parts we have to keep separate, I’m in for over $2 in containers. </p>
<p id="7YHVyZ"><strong>It’s so unfair that restaurateurs have been put in the position to figure out what “safe” means — and then have to shoulder all the expenses ensuring that safety, and follow whatever protocol the local government has put in place, which is constantly changing. How much has government assistance actually assisted you in all of this? </strong></p>
<p id="h33C4q">No one is very clear about how PPP works, or no one can exactly tell you that it’s going to be forgiven or not forgiven. So basically, you’re using it thinking you’re still going to owe this money at the end of it, because at this point in time, in 2020, you basically just expect that the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen.</p>
<p id="Ew7er8">I haven’t paid myself from either restaurant this year, period, because at Nari, I’m supposed to be paid quarterly, and the time to pay me was when we had to close, and I’d rather keep that cash to operate the restaurants right now.</p>
<p id="Jpzjp6"><strong>I keep thinking about mom-and-pop restaurants, and how for them, there wasn’t a solid financial infrastructure to begin with, so staying open wasn’t even a possibility — and then all the people who lose jobs and salaries because of that, and it’s no fault of the owner. There’s just not enough there. Because as you said, if it’s a hand-to-mouth operation, you don’t really have anything. When hard times strike, that’s it. You’re gone. </strong></p>
<p id="Evrvk5">Yeah. And if I hadn’t used all of the money from Kin Khao to open Nari, Kin Khao could close, I could keep paying people for probably six months, and [we’d] be fine reopening. I mean, it’s still going to hurt because it’s less money, but we’re going to be fine reopening. It’s just because, yeah, we’re trying to expand and this happened at the wrong time. </p>
<p id="YcoaGW">I don’t know if we’re going to make it, frankly. It’s still a day-to-day thing. It depends on how long it goes and what happens, because we’re going to run out of money at some point.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="TuL8cc">One thing I have to say is, we’re in a much luckier position than a lot of restaurants. I mean, I hear landlord horror stories from everyone, and we are working with landlords who see the value that we bring to their properties, that if and when they reopen their hotels, we’re still a lively, delicious, fun, buzzy restaurant, in that space. It’s still going to be more profitable for them than basically trying to bleed blood out of a crab. So I’m lucky.</p>
<aside id="6wGOe9"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"eater"}'></div></aside><p id="pQVvDC"></p>
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https://www.eater.com/2020/11/11/21547624/pim-techamuanvivit-kin-khao-nari-sf-restaurants-cost-of-staying-open-covid-19Charlotte Druckman2019-08-06T11:26:18-04:002019-08-06T11:26:18-04:00The Baker’s Apprentice
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<img alt="Baker Zoe Kanan butters bread in the plant-filled dining room of Studio at the Freehand Hotel in New York City." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/shyVJrMDfzcOjBJVk6LobLsWru4=/86x0:1414x996/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/64921571/zoe_kanan_eyg_lead_image.0.jpg" />
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<p>How Eater Young Gun Zoë Kanan established herself as one of New York’s most promising culinary talents</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="uXsBdG">In the spring of 2015, acclaimed baker Melissa Weller was looking for a sous chef to join her team at Sadelle’s, the restaurant in downtown Manhattan she’d be opening with Major Food Group a few months later. She’d winnowed the applicants down to two: One had the necessary managerial and bread-making experience; the other didn’t, “but she had this energy and passion and enthusiasm that I thought would translate into something more that I needed,” Weller says. Unable to decide, she offered each one a job figuring one might not work out. </p>
<p id="o7m8lQ">As predicted, post-opening, only one was left standing: Zoë Kanan, the young (then 24), curious, charismatic hire with the steeper learning curve, which she overcame at lightning speed. “She’s just such a quick learner,” Weller says. Before Sadelle’s, Kanan had worked at Momofuku Milk Bar as both a pastry cook and the manager of the weddings and special orders department for a total of five years, and clocked six months at Mile End. When she applied for the position with Weller, she was, rather miserably, developing an ice cream menu for the relaunch of the Ronnybrook Farm stall in Chelsea Market. </p>
<p id="br1UF9">“I was a little intimidated by her, by her Per Se chops, and I didn’t have any experience at that level,” Kanan says about her initial meeting with her former boss. “I knew myself to be a creative person and I was like, this is what I’m going to be able to offer that she doesn’t know.” By the time she left Sadelle’s in 2017, thanks to Weller’s tutelage and her own preternatural aptitude and unflagging, power-through drive, Kanan was fluent in bagel, babka, challah, sticky bun, brioche, and pound cake. Should you go to the Freehand Hotel, about 30 blocks uptown, where Kanan is now the head baker, you will see how she’s built on Weller’s foundations, and come up with a few of her own, to establish herself as one of New York’s most promising culinary talents — <a href="https://www.eater.com/2019/4/17/18260324/eater-young-guns-awards-2019-meet-the-winners">and an Eater Young Gun for 2019</a>. </p>
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<img alt="Baker Zoe Kanan slices a loaf of dark brown bread in the kitchen of the Freehand Hotel in New York City." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QBYA7hSsvYYGmx3Ob-CpEL1Gel4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/18435880/Eater_Young_Guns_Zoe_Kanan_Matt_Taylor_Gross_33.jpg">
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<p id="BNvbNM">Where did Kanan get her gumption? In Houston, generally speaking — more specifically, in the neighborhood known as the Heights, under Marian and Jim Kanan’s roof. Her father was, for a time, on the competitive barbecuing circuit — he even had the bright red Bullbutter Bros. Barbecue trailer to prove it. Asked if he thought perhaps this was where his offspring’s competitive streak came from, he responded, “I don’t have a clue where that competitive stuff comes from, but I do believe Zoë received a double dose.” His daughter, he observed, “very early on in her life, showed a competitive and relentless energy for the things she liked.” </p>
<p id="kAaI0Q">What she liked was to glide across the ice balanced on the razor-sharp edges of two shiny blades. At age 5 she began figure skating, which, she says, gave her “a foundation of discipline” and a place to both channel and develop her “drive to be the best.” There were other things she liked — cooking, for one. She liked to help her dad, and to make sweets with her grandmothers; her maternal grandmother introduced Kanan to the joy of Jewish baking, and her paternal grandmother taught her about the power of pie. </p>
<p id="WGnXTd">So it wasn’t a complete shock that when her plans for professional axel-jumping didn’t pan out, Kanan, while working as a hostess at a restaurant called Gravitas for the summer, found herself suggesting that she assist the pastry sous chef, who suddenly found himself in charge when the pastry chef walked out. Just like that, her future came into focus. </p>
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<img alt="Baker Zoe Kanan dusts a dessert with powdered sugar as cooks behind her work in the kitchen at the Freehand Hotel." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NlOhY2hT53PyOZ1FFs1KZfxPcuA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/18435905/Eater_Young_Guns_Zoe_Kanan_Matt_Taylor_Gross_48.jpg">
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<p id="ViUyU5">Months later, the 18-year-old was enrolled in the International Culinary Center in New York City and, eventually, working at Milk Bar. It was 2009, and Christina Tosi’s sweet shop was barely a year old, still in its original location on East 13th Street. Kanan brought her resume in three times. On the third attempt, she handed it directly to Tosi. “She sent in her resume, she showed up for her interview, and that, for me, that was loyalty and consistency, compared to others,” the company’s founder and owner says. “And so I didn’t give her a kitchen job. I made her work at front of house first. Because I was willing to take a risk on anyone that’ll do the first pages of the work.” </p>
<p id="IsHMEW">Kanan was on duty from 7 p.m. to midnight or 1 a.m., bussing tables and cleaning up after customers. One day, the team was short-handed and there was Kanan, ready to step in, just like she’d done at Gravitas. And that, Tosi says, is how she “got her foot in the door of the kitchen.” Tosi recalls how Kanan made a concerted effort to befriend staffers across the organization, to ask questions, and to volunteer for work that expanded the company’s revenue streams: She was instrumental in figuring out how to ship products across the country and helped set up Milk Bar’s weddings department. At the same time, “she would always come up with either brilliant flavor combinations that she’d work on just for fun, snacky R&D stuff, or she decorated cake in a beautiful way that none of us had ever thought of,” Tosi remembers. “She was pushing one side of her brain she wasn’t comfortable with, but also not giving the other, creative side of her brain a break.”</p>
<p id="9S20oI">From Tosi, among other invaluable skills, Kanan learned how to carry herself professionally. “Christina was teaching this very specific lesson of how to be better than the men in the kitchen,” Kanan says. Tosi proved a role model in other ways: In her ability to be creative about problem solving, she drove home the point that there is always a solution, and with her “unattainable” work ethic, she set the highest possible standard for her staff. </p>
<p id="4C6KJi">If Tosi taught her problem solving, Weller taught her technique. Trained as a chemical engineer before she switched over to pastry and baking, Weller, who is currently at High Street on Hudson in Greenwich Village, is known for her precision in how she develops and executes her recipes. “She explained them into science in an exacting way,” Kanan says. “There’s barely even any room to make mistakes because it’s been so carefully crafted.” It was an education in how to write a recipe, and to be able to manipulate it to “do the exact thing that I wanted it to do,” she says. Kanan compares the effect to learning how to read music. </p>
<p id="QKG26K">Her greatest strength — and maybe the least obvious one — lies in her scrupulous selection of places to work and people to work for, and, once hired, her habit of optimizing the opportunities those choices afford her. In Milk Bar, she saw a brand on the rise and its visionary founder, a pastry chef on her way to becoming a Martha Stewart for millennials. In Weller, Kanan had access to all that chemistry and to a self-motivated autodidact who could build a bread program for Roberta’s, then pivot to bagels. Those bagels were good enough to lure the partners behind a “major” restaurant group to build a venue around them; access to Weller was also access to another fast-growing company with the spotlight trained on it. In both of those situations, Kanan took on more responsibility than assigned, pushing the limits of her job description and her own skill set.</p>
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<img alt="A spread of breakfast breads and pastries made by Zoe Kanan." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rFbGCTpn4hXIOHPxBLRXH2_QqLU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/18435900/Eater_Young_Guns_Zoe_Kanan_Matt_Taylor_Gross_64.jpg">
<cite><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.matttaylorgross.com/" target="_blank">Matt Taylor-Gross</a></cite>
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<p id="R5l4om">Most of all, her trajectory has been a lesson in the significance of having mentors in your corner. It was Weller who recommended her protege to run the baking department at Vaucluse, the Alta Marea Group’s French restaurant on the Upper East Side. When Kanan got the job, it was also Weller who gave her a crash course in lamination and leavening and answered all her questions each time she was faced with a new hurdle. And when Tosi heard that restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, founder of Happy Cooking Hospitality, needed someone to oversee the pastry program at his new project—the food and beverage venues at the soon-to-open Freehand — she gave him Kanan’s name. </p>
<p id="LKm3Ml">Once again, Kanan saw a thriving business with a recognized brand and focused leader; she saw a new, blockbuster project that had pre-opening buzz, and a corresponding budget for things like PR, and a pastry department. By now, she was clear on the direction she wanted her career to go — baking, not pastry. She took the interview with Stulman anyway and, when the two met, announced that she had no interest in the job on the table. Her passion for baking moved him, and he suggested Kanan do a tasting for him. “She brought challah, babka, and croissants; she brought all this amazing stuff, and it was magical,” he recalls. “Her food speaks for itself.”</p>
<p id="lPxFRL">And that was how Zoë Kanan applied for a job that didn’t exist and was designed for her. She’d convinced Stulman he needed a baker and a showcase for her baked goods. Evyn Block, whom Stulman hired to shore up the publicity and marketing for the Freehand’s culinary offerings, immediately recognized that the young baker was a “clear asset,” while also assuming the baking program wasn’t going to be the main attraction of the hotel’s food and drink agenda, or, accordingly, of the launch. But then she sampled — and photographed — the Turkish <em>samit</em> bread and the brownie-dense chocolate morning bun and changed her mind.</p>
<p id="sBq2QB">Kanan’s flaky, tender-crumbed output quickly drummed up local food media buzz and began turning up on social media feeds. In his review of Simon & the Whale, <em>New York Times</em> restaurant critic Pete Wells praised Kanan’s contributions, including her breads at the restaurant and her work at the Studio cafe upstairs.</p>
<p id="yfYwxd">Since then, Kanan has taken over pastry duties, ironically accepting that job she initially refused. “Rarely will you find someone so young but so committed to elevating the art of baking,” Charmaine McFarlane, the opening pastry chef at the Freehand, says. “She’s certainly a force to be reckoned with in the business, and it’s rewarding, reassuring indeed, to see a woman prove that investing in bakers and pastry chefs is money and time well spent.” In Stulman, Kanan has that rare support; he is standing by to help her take baking wherever she wants to, together, or on her own. </p>
<p id="4MgWXA">She doesn’t know where she’ll take it — yet. There’s been some scuttlebutt about her ongoing experiments to build a better croissant, involving an inversion of the entrenched, classic technique. But she’s also been messing around with a Texas tradition (via the Czech Republic), the kolache, and meddling with doughnuts.</p>
<p id="dH6WEZ">Weller hypothesizes Kanan will end up branching out into savory cooking. “She’ll do whatever the hell she wants to do, whether the world is ready for it or not,” Tosi says. “She will make the world ready for it.” And that, the Milk Bar founder added, is “the infinite possibility and wonder of it, because she’s so young.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="aVlI4g"><a href="https://twitter.com/cettedrucks"><small><em>Charlotte Druckman</em></small></a><small><em> is a Manhattan-based journalist. Her unconventional anthology </em></small><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43908933-women-on-food"><small>Women on Food</small></a><small><em> (Abrams) arrives on October 29, and her second cookbook, </em></small><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41089514-kitchen-remix"><small>Kitchen Remix</small></a><small><em> (Clarkson Potter), in April 2020. </em></small><br><a href="https://www.matttaylorgross.com/"><small><em>Matt Taylor-Gross</em></small></a><small><em> is a photographer in New York City.</em></small></p>
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https://www.eater.com/young-guns-rising-stars/2019/8/6/20750782/zoe-kanan-baker-eater-young-guns-mentorship-christina-tosi-melissa-wellerCharlotte Druckman2019-06-07T09:12:00-04:002019-06-07T09:12:00-04:00Thinking About Starting a Food-Related Business? Take This Advice
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<p>Ten pieces of advice from an accountant</p> <p id="36DPck">Stephanie O’Rourk<strong> </strong>is an accountant who crunches numbers for some of the most successful chef-restaurateurs and food entrepreneurs in the country; she’s a partner in the Hospitality Practice division at the professional services firm CohnReznick. I heard her talk about how to run a business on a panel conversation at Haven’s Kitchen in New York City, declared her the Suze Orman of food, and told her to write a book. Until she takes my advice, I’ve convinced her to share some of hers. </p>
<p id="OSiyIY"><strong>Eater: Once an entrepreneur decides on their big idea, what’s the first thing they need to understand about how to fund it?</strong></p>
<p id="QoZZiF"><strong>Stephanie O’Rourk: </strong>Don’t get caught short. One of the biggest mistakes I typically see is that first-time operators of restaurant or hospitality retail businesses underestimate the financial capital that is required to both open the business as well as maintain operations for the first year. More often than not, fledgling operators do not provide for an adequate cushion to cover pre-opening expenses or first-year working capital needs. I always encourage my clients to develop both a generous <em>capital budget</em> (the money allotted to secure or maintain fixed resources, like property-related assets: equipment, land, building space) and a conservative <em>cash-flow model</em> (how much cash you’ll need, and how you’ll spend it to cover operating costs over time) for the first year of operations prior to starting a project. A proper budget will ultimately establish the financial capital amount required to successfully launch and maintain a new business. It is always better to beat those budgets than not meet them. Reimbursing yourself and your investors earlier than projected is much easier to swallow than having to ask for additional funds or acquiring debt that may be difficult to service.</p>
<p id="sdkaIx"><strong> </strong>Truly understand your upfront costs. First-time operators specifically focus on the hard costs, such as build-out expenses, rent deposits, furniture, fixtures, and equipment and inventory. A failure to pay attention to and fine-tune pre-opening costs, construction contingencies, and initial <em>working capital</em> (think of it as what you’ve got in your cash register — it’s the money you spend to keep up everyday transactions; you determine it by subtracting your current assets from your current liabilities) needs can lead to unnecessary financial strain on the business.</p>
<p id="Q8mXNR">Understand what drives the costs in the business.<strong> </strong>Whether you’re selling frozen dessert or running a full-service restaurant, fast-casual concept, or bakery, you are dealing with a retail operation, and are all subject to the same overall metrics. Revenue, which generates cash flow, is king, and no matter how well you think you can cut and manage costs and margin percentages, that’s what pays the rent, keeps the lights on, and reimburses your investors. </p>
<p id="b5Uzgb">An understanding that your daily cover and ticket count, average check, product mix, and ratio of delivery to in-store revenue are what drives the majority of your P&L (profits & loss) costs is critical. Oversee purchases and inventory in accordance with what and how much you’re actually selling, and manage labor hours and dollars to accommodate various revenue streams. </p>
<p id="MP6Uhs"><strong>What can you tell first-time entrepreneurs about weathering surprise — and often costly — outcomes?</strong></p>
<p id="RaX3Sx">Plan for negative outliers. Expect the unexpected. Not everything will be in your control. You have no power over the snowstorm that occurs at the end of April, a similar concept that debuts the same week as yours just around the corner, or the water-main break that happens right in front of your store the day of your grand opening. From a strictly financial perspective, you should be prepared for your opening not to hit it out of the park (or at least assume as much), or, if it does, for the honeymoon period not to last as long as you anticipated. If negative outliers don’t come to fruition and all goes your way, then you are ultimately in a better financial position than you ever imagined. </p>
<p id="spgn6b"><strong>Okay, so an entrepreneur has their launch capital ready. What should they think about when it’s go time? </strong></p>
<p id="Ig70BG">Know when to launch and do it on time. The seasonality of your business is going to determine the most optimal window for you to open your concept. Let’s say you’re expected to open your New York restaurant in November. A negative outlier comes to fruition, causing you to delay your launch until January. Your financial model has just dramatically changed. The fourth quarter in the majority of cities can be a prime time to launch most types of concepts. The upcoming holiday season spurs activity with tourism, shopping, consistent dining with friends, and both social and corporate parties. And then comes January, and everybody goes into hibernation, spending all their discretionary funds on detoxes, juice cleanses, and gym memberships. </p>
<p id="QT8Bk1">Alternatively, July somewhere in New England, where it’s peak vacation season, or the Hamptons, where everyone descends to see and be seen, may not be an ideal time to introduce your business to the world, for the opposite reason: You may not be prepared for the immediate, constant rush. In this scenario, launching at the beginning or middle of May instead might allow you to do a soft opening and work out the unavoidable kinks… come Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, when you have real customers, you can put your best foot forward. </p>
<p id="TWb4Fw"><strong>Beyond hard cash and costs, what are the areas of business people don’t prioritize as much as they should?</strong></p>
<p id="v269vU">Intellectual capital is just as important as financial capital. You don’t know what you don’t know, but you <em>do </em>know what you know, and you understand there are a lot of missing pieces to account for. Figure out who those experienced people are who can advise you on how to optimize your skills and knowledge and fill in those deal-breaking information gaps. The experienced operator or trusted adviser who has been there and done that can be one of the most valuable assets in your organization. </p>
<p id="4HQTwm">Additionally, invest in the culture of your business. Culture is now, more than ever, an essential ingredient of success — it’s not merely a mission statement slapped up on the wall. The millennial generation that comprises much of your <em>human capital</em> (this “metric” refers to the collective value of the skills that your labor force brings to your business) wants to feel good about the company and people that they work for. The days of employers telling staff to jump and them automatically jumping are long gone. </p>
<p id="Ch0FLN">A common mantra of successful operators is “happy employees make happy customers, which in turn makes happy profits.” Simply treating others as you would like to be treated, something we all learned in kindergarten, and showing appreciation for a job well done goes a long way. If you are a tad cynical and old-school and don’t buy into any of this, here’s a little secret: The numbers don’t lie. The national average of the cost incurred by employee turnover is approximately $1,500 for an hourly worker and $2,400 for a manager. That comprises training costs and the ancillary loss of revenue and productivity. That’s real dollars that are going out an operator’s door with every employee who leaves and goes across the street, because you need to know, in today’s world, they always can go across the street and obtain the same paycheck from a competitor.</p>
<p id="dVAY0m">Be clear on your strengths and weaknesses. The best-run restaurants and retail operations tend to be the result of a partnership between someone who is creative and talented in the kitchen and someone who is more business-oriented, who truly understands the numbers. Not everyone can do both successfully, and those who can’t shouldn’t try. Bring someone to the table with complementary and compensating assets. Whatever your deficit — maybe you suck at hiring or finances — either partner with or employ someone who thrives and excels in that regard.</p>
<p id="wjnGt8">Don’t under- or overestimate passion. While it takes passion to create and differentiate your business, if you don’t understand how to operate it effectively and efficiently and make it financially viable, no amount of passion will save you. I equate it with marriage. Love and passion are the foundation for creating and nurturing a marriage. After 25 years of being married myself, I can confidently say that while love and passion (and a considerable amount of laughter) are most certainly needed to endure, it is compromise, constant growth and evolution, along with smart and practical decision-making that get you through the ebbs and flows of a relationship. That’s no different from what’s required to sustain a successful business.</p>
<p id="wL3T0u"><strong>How does a business owner decide when to compensate themselves when a business is getting started?</strong></p>
<p id="HziPsy">Always pay yourself. Ownership needs to be compensated in one way, shape, or form. It is important to set a precedent as you grow your brand, to show your company as well as your current and future investors what you believe your value is to the organization. One of the top five questions I receive from new operators is: “Can I pay myself if my investors have not been paid back in full?”<em> </em>More often than not the answer is yes, and then the question is: “How much can I pay myself?”<em> </em>My response is always, “Well, if you weren’t there to wear that hat, how much would you pay someone else to wear it?” Your salary should be determined by what you do to serve the organization based on the current market. </p>
<p id="L27iag">When you pay yourself will depend on the economic arrangement you have with your investors: You may be required to pay their capital investment back first before you, as an operator, are able to share in the profits. You may have agreed to share in the profits from the get-go (and that can be quite the motivation if you are depending on that cash to pay your personal bills), or you may have arranged a combination of both models. No matter which avenue you chose, pay yourself! And if the business is strapped for cash at times and you short yourself to save or boost funds, then make sure you pay yourself back what is owed to you for the essential services you have provided.</p>
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https://www.eater.com/young-guns-rising-stars/2019/6/7/18655322/restaurant-business-advice-financial-tipsCharlotte Druckman2019-04-09T12:35:19-04:002019-04-09T12:35:19-04:00Is the $10 Pint of Ice Cream Worth It?
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<p>How ultra-premium, super-artisanal, impossibly indie ice cream took over the supermarket freezer case</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="Xv9ut4"><strong>Ice cream is not the American Dream</strong>, not exactly. It’s more like the American Way. It has countless stories to tell, and anyone can tell them. Walk up to the freezers at Whole Foods and stare at the rows and rows of primo pints. Which will you choose? Will it be a Van Leeuwen, wrapped in clean, modern, Easter egg monochrome? A whimsically hand-doodled Ample Hills? Or a McConnell’s, the epitome of old-fashioned?</p>
<p id="5yrWz6">They’re all selling the same thing: a trip to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trip_to_Bountiful">Bountiful</a> — an Instagram-filtered memory of one’s own past, and a greater, collective American promise. Whether their designs evoke the Yankee-Doodle optimism of Norman Rockwell or the hazy, impasto California Dreaming of Wayne Thiebaud, they’re all tapping a kind of bygone patriotic ideal. With this modern repackaging of Americana comes an additional tenet of our mythical history: the virtue of artisanry. No, they’re not churning ice cream in wooden buckets, but they want you to know that there is care and craft in each and every pint. That they’re making the brownies in your scoop of chocolate fudge brownie from scratch, in-house. That they’re using responsibly sourced produce from small, local farms. This handmade’s tale may be the most important story they tell — and sell. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="n1sXrK"><q>With this modern repackaging of Americana comes an additional tenet of our mythical history: the virtue of artisanry</q></aside></div>
<p id="WAflJ4">Capitalism is the American Way, too. You can always get someone to pay more for something — in fact, it’s encouraged. Still, eight, 10, 12 dollars is an awful lot for a pint of ice cream, which was one of the few staples that, no matter where or how we lived, it seemed we could all rely on enjoying. As our egalitarian treat becomes another common good that’s been “elevated” into a luxury item, we might want to ask a few questions of the national pastime-as-dessert — like, how did we get here? How good is $10-good? And if it’s really <em>that</em> good, how much better might $15-good be?</p>
<p id="TPb33k">Eve Babitz, who, like most of us, has been known to succumb to a craving for a scoop, may have been more inclined to lose it over boys than anything else, but her relative objectivity about the rest makes her observations reliably perceptive. In <em>Eve’s Hollywood</em>, the same book in which she recounts wearing her “leopardskin bathing suit and eating a [Wil] Wright’s chocolate burnt-almond ice-cream cone” as a gorgeous young man in a Jaguar chucks a u-ey to check her out at 13, only to drive off just as abruptly, leaving her with a broken heart, she writes:</p>
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<p id="j2tOGE">My mother once told me that in high school she won the state championship for catsup making. The girl with whom she’d shared a kitchen only won 4th place though they’d made the catsup in the same pot and there was no difference. My mother puts hers in a glass jar with flowers painted on it that she painted herself. Packaging is all heaven is.</p>
<p id="JNwgv1">It’s the frames which made some things important and some things forgotten. It’s all only frames from which the content arises. </p>
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<p id="QaEqZ7">If you asked kids what they imagine people eat in heaven, ice cream would probably be one of the most popular answers. As they get older, they might stop believing in heaven, but not in ice cream — although these prices could make a person question their faith. What if it is all <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fm3BGLQRCg">just packaging</a>? </p>
<p id="1pjGN0">Hard-packed pints, even the $10 ones, are made from the same fundamental ingredients — milk, sugar, air — with the same basic technology as the $5 pints, and even the <a href="https://consumerist.com/2008/04/21/breyers-ice-cream-shrinks-to-15-quarts/">$5 not-quite-half gallons</a>. The people responsible for these pricey pints will tell you that the cost is justified. They incorporate more butterfat; their milk is organic and comes from grass-fed, deliriously happy cows; and they use the best ingredients possible, whether direct-trade coffee or gently smoked cherries. These details — signifiers that speak to a contemporary anti-bourgeois bourgeois culture that selects for “authenticity,” “mindfulness,” and “transparency” — go into their ice cream, and the story that their ice cream tells, one as conscientiously fashioned as the other.</p>
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<p class="p-large-text" id="7HaeBR"><strong>You can put organic bilberries or biodynamic sapodillas</strong> foraged by an elite cult of yodeling eunuchs into your product and slap a $20 price tag on it, for all the United States government cares, but what’s inside had better be <em>ice cream</em>, if that’s what you’re calling it. Not gelato, not sorbet, not ice milk, not frozen yogurt, and definitely not the ever-enigmatic “frozen dessert.”</p>
<p id="vZJCDi">The FDA has a <a href="https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=79ce3e370e21ac95e3b1aa79d521ea41&mc=true&node=se21.2.135_1110&rgn=div8">specific legal definition</a> of “ice cream” <a href="https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=135.110">that stipulates both</a> the process by which it’s made — “freezing, while stirring” — and the <a href="http://www.idfa.org/news-views/media-kits/ice-cream/ice-cream-labeling">minimum amount</a> of dairy fat it must contain (10 percent). There are other rules, ones about pasteurization or the use of “hydrolyzed milk proteins” and “optional caseinates,” but the important thing to know is that anything labeled “ice cream” contains a legally mandated amount of dairy and dairy-derived fat, or butterfat, determined by weight: A gallon of ice cream must contain 1.6 pounds of dairy solids and weigh at least 4.5 pounds. So there’s a limit to how far even Halo Top, <a href="https://www.tastecooking.com/summer-halo-top/">the world’s preeminent seller of fantastically branded pints of exquisitely flavored air</a>, can stretch the definition.</p>
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<p id="vnZrUP">Butterfat gives ice cream its richness, density, and luscious mouthfeel. It is the most essential — and, traditionally, most expensive — raw material in ice cream making. The more butterfat that’s in there, the richer it feels, and the more it costs to make. In her cookbook <em>Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream</em>, Dana Cree, the former executive pastry chef for several One Off Hospitality restaurants and current owner of Pretty Cool Ice Cream in Chicago, explains that it’s “key to ice cream’s flavor, not only by contributing its own deliciousness but also by absorbing flavor from other ingredients like mint leaves or coffee beans.” </p>
<p id="dgJBZa">But there’s a “physical limit” to how much butterfat an ice cream base can take, Cree writes. More than 20 percent and “the ice cream feels flabby on the palate — more and more fat compounds on your cold tongue before your mouth has a chance to warm it and swallow it. Within a few bites, you’d notice your entire mouth has a slick of fat coating it.” This is something you may have experienced, especially with the deluxe stuff. That greasy, creamed-soup texture is not a measure of fanciness; it’s an indication that the ice cream may be full of first-rate ingredients, but the quality of those items isn’t matched by the technique applied to them. </p>
<p id="l0sPyK">In a given batch of ice cream, the amount of butterfat is more or less inversely proportional to that of its overrun, or how much air it contains. More air means more fluff, and less room for other ingredients, <a href="https://www.thekitchn.com/the-one-ice-cream-metric-that-matters-to-grocers-hint-its-not-butterfat-231918">according to Jill Moorhead</a>, who wrote the Grocery Insider column for the Kitchn, and, at one point, was the wholesale marketing director for Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. And it turns out that a good way to spend less money on ingredients that you have to pay for is to add more of the one that you don’t. </p>
<p id="yRWCfS">Within the industry, ice cream is classified into “quality segments,” which are based on price, the caliber of ingredients, overrun, and butterfat content, among other factors. The lowest quality segment is “economy,” a label applied to a product that has the maximum overrun (100 percent, or equal parts air to dairy base) — and the minimum butterfat (10 percent) — permitted by the FDA; it is the least ice cream that ice cream can be and still legally be called “ice cream.” </p>
<p id="JpYRnw">One step above that is “regular,” which covers the standard supermarket half-gallon that usually has between 10 and 12 percent butterfat. This is probably the fluffy ice cream of your youth — the Breyers, the Dreyer’s, the Edy’s, and the Blue Bells; even as you read this, future memories are being spooned into the mouths of America’s children. Then there’s “premium,” which runs the gamut from the Whole Foods’ in-house brand to the scoops you might get at your local ice cream shop, with between 12 to 14 percent butterfat and less overrun than the generic. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="DsAdzP"><q>All ice cream, no matter what it costs, is made from the same basic ingredients: milk, sugar, and air</q></aside></div>
<p id="E73crx">For a long time, that was it. Things didn’t get any more deluxe than premium until 1960, when Reuben Mattus came along with the idea that there were people out there, unabashedly bourgeois types, who might be interested in a more rarefied option. He upped <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/22/business/rolls-royces-of-ice-cream.html">the butterfat to at least 15 percent</a>, shunned preservatives and stabilizers (we’ll get to those, don’t worry), and cut the overrun to 20 percent. He may have been just another macher from the Bronx, but <a href="https://people.com/archive/reuben-mattus-scooped-the-competition-with-his-pricey-and-nonsense-named-haagen-dazs-vol-16-no-7/">his ice cream conjured European sophistication</a>: His wife and cofounder, Rose, called it Häagen-Dazs. They rolled their pints out in just three flavors — vanilla, chocolate, and coffee — and sold them for what, at that time, was a higher price than any other ice cream on the market, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/108106/ice-creams-jewish-innovators">75 cents each</a>, or roughly $6.40 today. The “super premium” quality segment was born. </p>
<p id="mE35u1">The Mattuses had impeccable timing: Over the next two decades, Americans became turned on to all things “imported.” If it came from Europe (or seemed to), it was perceived as finer, fancier, and more desirable, and marketed accordingly. Häagen-Dazs did more than <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/haagen-dazs-fake-foreign-branding">fit right in</a>; it spawned a number of knockoffs (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FQjQiVVi7E">this is why everyone ate all the Frusen Glädjé</a>). By 1982, high-priced pints from Häagen-Dazs and its clones comprised 20 percent of total ice cream sales. </p>
<p id="UT7BMC">This was the scene that a pair of Long Island-born hippies named Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield burst onto when they took over a former gas station to sell “Vermont’s Finest All Natural Ice Cream” in zany flavors like Mint Oreo, Mocha Walnut, Honey Coffee, or Wild Blueberry. Their scoops — and pints — offered the same superior quality as the Fauxropeans’ in terms of butterfat and overrun, but with a folksy, decidedly All-American ethos. They had little black-and-white spotted cows drawn onto their packaging, colorfully illustrated like a children’s picture book, and where their continental competitors prided themselves on the elegance and purity of their products, the hippies packed their pints with Heath bars, or a “dastardly” mix of pecans, raisins, and chocolate chips. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/08/competitors">The duo’s success posed enough of a threat to Häagen-Dazs</a> that in 1984, its owner, Pillsbury — which had purchased the brand a year earlier — <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2011/12/16/opinion/cohen-benjerry-business-regulations/index.html">tried to block distributors from carrying Ben & Jerry’s</a>. </p>
<p id="USZzLO">For all the folksiness, Ben & Jerry’s pints were still among the most expensive ice cream sold in supermarkets at the time — $1.69 to $1.79, or more than $5 in today’s dollars — though they came with a money-back guarantee. The twosome managed to leverage populism to charge more for one of the most populist things around, projecting good, clean, homegrown fun in direct opposition to pretentious European airs — all while asking customers to pay the same price. It was marketing genius, and it has served as the template for a new generation of ice cream makers. </p>
<p id="NHtZ7d">You might have imagined that ice cream couldn’t get any better than “premium”; the word indicates the ultimate in quality, the top slot. But this is America, a place where brands regularly transcend the limits placed upon them by science or decency, where terms like “fast casual” or “wellness” can become synonymous with “lifestyle,” and where no one has ever minded the redundancy of a superlative like “super premium.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="hEXHng"><q>‘If you can’t make ice cream better than Häagen-Dazs, you really can’t charge that much’</q></aside></div>
<p id="1Ne7Eq">More recently, an insurgent category, informally called “ultra premium,” has emerged. These ice creams have pornographic amounts of butterfat — 17 to 20 percent — while their branding reflects the new artisanal-American vernacular of “hand-packed,” “locally made,” and “small batch.” Ingredients aren’t just “the best,” they’re seasonal, organic, heirloom, “crafted in-house,” and sometimes, savory (fennel), unexpected (pickled mango), or disarmingly paired (milk chocolate and tarragon). Ultra-premium ice cream is also exceedingly expensive, with pints generally running between $8 and $12. </p>
<p id="R4Aabs">We can thank — or blame — Jeni Britton Bauer for the existence of ultra-premium ice cream. In November 2002, she opened the door to the first Jeni’s Splendid shop in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, Häagen-Dazs’s four-year-old Dulce de Leche was still all the rage, Ben & Jerry’s had just retired Wavy Gravy, and brownie batter was about as exciting as it got. Britton Bauer exposed the Midwestern city to the craft beer equivalent of ice cream: flavors like Sweet Curry, Basil Honey Pine Nut, El Rey Single-Origin Chocolate, and, the brand juggernaut — and a now-ubiquitous dessert conceit — Salty Caramel. “Ylang-ylang fennel ice cream sounds weird,” she admits. But, she adds, there’s a “method to that madness.” The essential flavor derived from the flower is “similar to vanilla” and, she emphasizes, creates a nostalgic effect, which is what everything hinges on for Britton Bauer.</p>
<p id="skRvp1">She priced it accordingly, and claims Jeni’s Splendid was the first ice cream to cross the $10-a-pint mark — a milestone she takes pride in. “When we think about what’s happening in flavor right now and ice cream, if you can’t make ice cream better than Häagen-Dazs, you really can’t charge that much,” she says. She still loves Ben & Jerry’s too, for its character and its mission — it’s no coincidence that Jeni’s Splendid is a certified <a href="https://bcorporation.net/">B-Corp</a> — but says that “we don’t have a 21st-century version of those companies. We don’t have that next great American ice cream.” Becoming that is her raison d’etre. </p>
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<p class="p-large-text" id="NA5sDb"><strong>“Most ice cream recipes </strong>are<strong> </strong>still based on those from the 1950s,” Britton Bauer says. If that sounds surprising, think about the FDA standards: Ice cream is required to contain a certain amount of fat, in specified proportions, and the source of that fat has to be dairy — the processing of which is governed by yet another set of rules — meaning the boundaries of an ice cream base, the liquid that eventually becomes the lickable heap perched on a cone, are relatively fixed. This means that the best way to maximize your flexibility or autonomy in recipe development is by having total control of your dairy source. </p>
<p id="06Rhj3">The only proven avenue for total control is owning every step of the process, a fact Michael Palmer can probably retire on. In 2011, Palmer, a winemaker, and his wife, chef Eva Ein, bought McConnell’s Fine Ice Cream. Based in Santa Barbara, California, McConnell’s was established as a dairy in 1934, 15 years before it launched its ice cream business. Palmer thinks that he is sitting on a pot of churnable gold, and is doubling down on his investment by constructing what will be California’s first built-from-the-ground-up dairy in close to 60 years. When it’s finished, it will have eight to 10 times the capacity of his original dairy. </p>
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<p id="IOkwWv">A licensed dairy doesn’t just have access to the raw material straight out of the cow, it has the equipment and legal permission to pasteurize the cream and milk. Becoming licensed to pasteurize is onerous, to say the least, so ice cream makers are often beholden to a dairy like Palmer’s to blend and sterilize their ice cream base. Many simply work with a <a href="https://www.strausfamilycreamery.com/products/culinary-professionals/ice-cream-base">standard, widely available commercial dairy base</a>. Not only do most of their flavors probably start with the same ratio of milk, cream, sugar, and maybe eggs, they potentially share that base with competitors who depend on the same dairy source. </p>
<p id="eX0OaK">Some ice cream makers are able to develop an original recipe for their base with a dairy partner, which allows them to retain more autonomy over their product. But they’re still dealing with a fixed entity, and ice cream, at its best, isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition: What works for peanut butter might not be optimal for mocha almond fudge. Some flavors, like strawberry, do better with less butterfat; or, like lemon, without eggs; if some of your mix-ins are particularly sweet (or salty) they require a more (or less) saccharine background. But if you’re relying on one or two premixed bases, you’re stuck. Either make do, or scrap your dreams of creating a new ice cream flavor.</p>
<p id="dFfyTq">For some ultra-premium producers, securing a dairy license for on-premises pasteurizing is a priority from the start. The license allows them to take raw milk and cream from their dairy source, then mix it themselves, so they can make as many different bases as they want, as long as they have the manpower, time, and equipment to handle it. Although Britton Bauer became certified in 2006 and previously pasteurized her bases in the back of her first Jeni’s store in Columbus, she’s found that doing everything at the dairy she collaborates with most closely yields better results. She uses the dairy’s facility to do everything herself, including the churning. “Their ice cream machines are better than any we’ve ever had,” she says. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="zxWuHp">
<p class="p-large-text" id="XfkNTD"><strong>It may be disappointing to learn </strong>that the machines are more important to how we physically experience ice cream than any perfectly calibrated ratio of butterfat to overrun, or the psychic well-being of the cows whose udders produced the milk and cream. A recipe is really just a measure of potential — of how good each bite-size gob could feel in your mouth, how its flavor might open up to you. If the recipe determines how much ice your finished product will have, the equipment used to process the ice cream determines the size of those crystals; the smaller the crystals, the better the ice cream.</p>
<p id="CPbIK5">The technology behind ice cream machinery dates back to 1843, when a woman named Nancy Johnson secured a patent for her hand-cranked “artificial freezer” that improved upon the jerry-rigged contraptions of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie">Ma and Pa Ingalls crowd</a>. No more vigorously shaking a bucket full of salted ice one moment, then whipping and scraping the sweetened, flavored cream the next. This new device was the prototype for <a href="https://www.eater.com/video/2017/7/25/16027422/best-ice-cream-maker-test-review-cuisinart-breville-smart-scoop">the familiar, ever-churning canister system widely used today</a>. Explained by Laura B. Weiss in <em>Ice Cream: A Global History, </em>with Johnson’s invention, “all that was required of a cook was to give the crank several good turns. That action would turn the dasher, ferrying the ingredients from the edge of the freezer to the center and back again.” The mechanism, as detailed in U.S. patent No. 3254, functioned by “constantly allowing fresh portions of the cream or other substances to be frozen to come in contact with the refrigerating surface.”</p>
<p id="X0o8mN">In 2019, commercial-grade equipment is, obviously, electric, and can accommodate larger quantities of ice cream. You can program it for churn rate and length, and for the amount of aeration. But these systems operate exactly the same way and rely on the same architecture as Johnson’s: A canister filled with an ice cream base spins inside a larger vessel. Industrial-grade machines fall into two categories, batch freezers and continuous freezers. The first is smaller and demands more human attention on the inputting and receiving ends — to load your base into the canister, feed in the flavorings, and then to collect the ice cream as it snakes out of the spigot like cold, bloated toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="ErurPq"><q>To make ice cream, you’re forced to complete an impossible task: Freeze a solution that, despite being called ice <em>cream</em>, is more than half full of water, all while avoiding the formation of ice</q></aside></div>
<p id="8bk1Fn">Today’s heroes of the artisanal startup brigade were batch-freezer babies, and Tyler Malek, the chef behind Salt & Straw, which he runs with his cousin Kim, remains faithful to the batch machine. He wants to figure out how to use its limited capacity and functionality to make the best ice cream, period. He claims he prefers it to the continuous freezer, equating the difference to hand-rolling pastry dough as opposed to sending it through a sheeting machine. “There’s something you can taste in ice cream when it’s handmade,” Malek says. </p>
<p id="MH4AgJ">An asshole might ask, “What is handmade ice cream, really?” They would have a point. Anyone using an electric churner, whether a batch machine or continuous freezer, is not, technically, making the stuff by hand. What can be done by hand, as the ultra-premium parties tend to do, is make the mix-ins from scratch, and that Malek does, more meticulously — perhaps maniacally — than anyone. “The pint we’ve brought to market that had the most hands, was nine,” he says, before Kim explains: “He marks an ice cream by how many hands it takes to make it.” When he wants to put gummy candies in his ice cream, he doesn’t stop until he’s figured out how to build the chewy, waxy bears of his dreams.<strong> </strong></p>
<p id="894lP5">Like Miley Cyrus, Malek seems to enjoy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG2zyeVRcbs">the climb</a>. He loves hand-packing pints — “scooping the ice cream in, ladling in the caramel, adding nine pieces of ganache to each” — and he and his cousin refuse to adjust their local point of view even as they expand the eight-year-old Salt & Straw beyond Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco. Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group has invested in the company, allowing them to grow their business at their own leisurely pace. If the only way to move forward is to think inside the box, chefs like Malek are taking that to its farthest conclusion; you could call it thinking inside the coffin. Who’s to say it can’t lead to better results?</p>
<p id="3zsKIL">McConnell’s Palmer, for one. “The term ‘small-batch,’ people think it refers to those tiny batch machines,” he says with exasperation in his voice. “I will tell you it’s an awful way to make a very good, consistent product.” This is why, he adds, “so many people co-pack.” </p>
<p id="FirIuF">Co-packing — using <a href="https://www.icecreamprivatelabel.com/choosing-a-food-manufacturing-co-pack-facility/">a third-party contract manufacturer</a> — is the workaround for anyone without the capital or space who wants to scale up their production and access a continuous freezer. Jake Godby and Sean Vahey of San Francisco-based Humphry Slocombe continue to use a batch freezer at their first, freestanding location, but they have turned to co-packing to expand their business into supermarket aisles. “Since we don’t have enough equipment capacity for grocery, we have partnered with a co-packer in the East Bay to help make our pints,” Vahey said. “Our production team prepares all of the ingredients, and the co-packer runs it through their machines for us.” He insists that they work “very closely” with the co-packer to insure the “quality and taste” in their pints is up to par with what they scoop out of their storefront.</p>
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<p id="MQgdKb">It’s even possible that the quality and taste of those grocery pints surpass that of their shop scoops. Because, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516589&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.etsy.com%2Flisting%2F254831782%2Fupside-down-melted-ice-cream-cone-hat-20%3Fgpla%3D1%26gao%3D1%26%26utm_source%3Dgoogle%26utm_medium%3Dcpc%26utm_campaign%3Dshopping_us_b-accessories-hats_and_caps-other%26utm_custom1%3D59fc83ae-0864-4a29-9f63-ff812f343f62%26utm_content%3Dgo_304498955_22746094835_78727330235_aud-537409439212%3Apla-106550410835_c__254831782%26gclid%3DCj0KCQiAnY_jBRDdARIsAIEqpJ09DF1J7yRnNoRk52ARQdZ8wjMJpG3z2iaR432ce-GRQ65kZpEHNJEaAn4aEALw_wcB&referrer=eater.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eater.com%2F2019%2F4%2F9%2F18280840%2Ffancy-ice-cream-van-leeuwen-jenis-salt-straw-mcconnells" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">hold on to your hats</a>, “ice cream should get better if you scale up,” says Ben Van Leeuwen, co-founder of the eponymous brand. After getting his start selling ice cream out of a pastel-yellow truck in Brooklyn in 2008, he and his partners <a href="https://ny.eater.com/2018/4/27/17291230/van-leeuwen-expansion-nyc">now operate a bi-coastal empire</a>. The enormity of Van Leeuwen’s continuous freezer strikes you immediately when you walk through the company’s <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2016/08/12/cold-treats-equal-a-hot-business-for-van-leeuwen.html">Brooklyn facility</a>, which Ben and his business partners Pete (his brother) and Laura O’Neill (his ex-wife) leased in 2015 and upgraded in 2016. At 5,000 square feet, the factory is more than six times the size of their previous space. A continuous freezer is self-loading, self-depositing, and yields consistently better results: Bigger machines are able to freeze ice cream more quickly, and the faster it freezes, the smaller the ice crystals — and the smaller the crystals, the smoother the ice cream. “We joke it’s kind of like Walter White’s lab,” O’Neill said, standing among the large, stainless-steel cylinders connected by overhead pipes. As you look at them, you begin to understand this isn’t as simple as buying just one (huge) piece of equipment — it requires an entire family of machines, such as special clean-in-place food-grade piping to transfer bases from pasteurizer to freezer, with numerous procedural stations along the way. </p>
<p id="A3vhIa">Due to its capacity, size, and cost, installing and operating a continuous freezer is only an option for brands that aim to produce vast quantities of ice cream. In the not-so-distant past, among super-premium brands, that mostly meant Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs, outfits that have the demand and distribution to justify (and afford) continuous freezers. Van Leeuwen’s growth in New York, LA, and Whole Foods global allowed the business to invest in the new factory and equipment, which currently produces around 2,000 gallons per day.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="MYyq8g"><q>‘Should we define super-super premium by the size of its batches? The art in “artisan” is how you scale your product’</q></aside></div>
<p id="xFzmEf">There’s a point where that kind of setup begins to pay for itself. Before that, though, there’s a tentative phase where batch equipment doesn’t cover the desired output, but demand isn’t quite high enough to fully support the cost of the tricked-out gear. Brian Smith of Ample Hills was in that kind of growing-pains stage when he moved his Gowanus-based operation into a larger space in Red Hook, with a brand-new continuous freezer. Before that, he was at capacity with his batch freezer, doing 450 to 500 gallons a day, or 12 to 15 gallons every 15 minutes. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/dining/ice-cream-factories-brooklyn.html?ref=dining&_r=0">His latest facility will allow him to increase that tenfold and beyond</a>. </p>
<p id="hZr4Me">Each batch freezer costs $36,000, Smith says. A continuous freezer is a lot more — he wouldn’t say how much his new one cost, all told — but it’s a behemoth. It will, he says, “allow us to regulate it and make it more consistent. The machine itself makes a creamier product. It will include a homogenizer, which we don’t have now.” The homogenizer is the second step — and piece of equipment — in the ice cream-making process; it comes after the pasteurizer. Think of it like a rock tumbler for fat molecules; it blasts them into small, evenly sized particles, which will more readily emulsify (or divert) the water. After it’s been blitzed in the homogenizer, the base is transferred to an aging vat, where it cools to a churnable temperature and its flavors have more time to develop.</p>
<p id="89V0GK">An added perk of the continuous freezer is its fruit feeder, which allows mix-ins to be mechanically incorporated. Now, no one needs to stand by to collect the finished product, so Smith can cut down on manpower and rest assured that the contents of each pint are uniformly distributed. “I went from being terrified that we wouldn’t be able to make a better product,” he said. “Now I’m excited we can make a better ice cream at scale ... and be able to lower prices.” </p>
<p id="QZIFa4">Everyone seems to have scale on the brain — not just how to do it, but the optics of the endeavor. “Should we define super-super premium by the size of its batches?” Palmer asks. The real “art in artisan,” he asserts, “is how you scale your product.” This flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught as consumers of specialty goods. “There’s this automatic — you would defer to the smaller brand’s quality, thinking, ‘Oh, if they’re smaller, they must be better,’” Ben Van Leeuwen complains.</p>
<p id="KF1wtz">You can see how this looks: A generation of ice cream makers develops their products, builds their brands, and cultivates their followings in thrall to a zeitgeist whose most hallowed values upheld the handmade over the mass-produced, the local over the (multi)national, and the notion that smaller isn’t just better, it’s the best. Now that they stand on the brink of potentially becoming the next Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, they’re declaring that actually, maybe, that’s all wrong. For ice cream, unlike <a href="https://www.eater.com/2018/11/19/18099127/bread-silicon-valley-sourdough-tech-bros-tartine-chad-robertson">cult breads</a> or <a href="https://www.eater.com/2018/4/18/17207906/jamon-iberico-made-in-america">heritage meats</a> or hand-jarred jam, they’re saying, perhaps bigger really is better. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="7sPReL">
<p class="p-large-text" id="o3Vl54"><strong>Anyone who makes ice cream,</strong> whether they have the most ramshackle of rigs or the newest gadgetry on the market, is fighting the same battle: against time. Ice cream is best the instant it leaves the machine; every second after that, it’s a little worse than it was before. No one, not even Michael Laiskonis, the James Beard Award-winning pastry chef who, as creative director of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, spends his days contemplating the molecular structure of ice cream, can escape this ironclad law of dessert thermodynamics.</p>
<p id="hZFBxG">Every time Laiskonis pumps a soft inflated, nougat-thick ribbon out of his commercial-grade batch freezer for testing, he is reminded of his friend, a fellow pastry chef, who once confessed how profoundly sad it left him, knowing that the people he made ice cream for would never taste it at its peak. </p>
<p id="oV78cE">This is just as true for the most incredible ice cream as it is for the worst; you could eat whatever just came out of a Halo Top or Turkey Hill spout and it would probably still be terrific. That’s because ice crystals are at their smallest at the moment the ice cream meets the world, just as it crowns and leaves the machine, where it turned over and over so that its water content was unable to clump together and seize up into crunchy ice. The second the water begins to freeze, Laiskonis says, “you’ve lost the battle.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="2YpPpy"><q>Ice cream is best the instant it leaves the machine; every second after that, it’s a little worse than it was before</q></aside></div>
<p id="3Pcyad">Things only get worse from there. The machine – any and all of them — is designed to create a certain, fixed number of ice crystals, explains Salt & Straw’s Malek. “Regardless of how cold your freezer will be going in, your crystal count drops immediately,” he says. “So if we start with 1000 ice crystals, as soon as you pull it from the machine, you drop and start losing the smallest ones and say you drop down to 900. Then you put it in a holding freezer and it drops to 800 and then it travels to another really cold freezer and it drops again to 750. ... The biggest crystals that are left grab up that water, suck it up, hold it in and you get really large crystals.” Every time you open the door to a freezer, in your kitchen or at your local supermarket, you injure your pints, loading them down with ever larger, smoothness-shattering crystals. There’s only one proven, if partial, remedy: stabilizers.</p>
<p id="ZWGazN">Stabilizers were introduced to ice cream around the time we started pumping it full of air. After World War II, Americans lost interest in soda fountains and ice cream parlors, and grocery stores became the primary point of purchase as people brought their cartons home rather than socializing over ice cream. By the mid-1980s, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/02/opinion/her-is-the-panacea.html">as the <em>New York Times</em> reported</a>, more than 80 percent of all ice cream sales were transacted at convenience stores or supermarkets. The rise in mass production brought the ubiquity of the carton, which needed to hold up for a lot longer than the scooped-to-order ice cream on a cone. </p>
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<p id="rxHHOi">It should be obvious but may require saying: The primary job of stabilizers is to keep whatever solution they’re added to stable. And yet people seem to dislike stabilizers, or the idea of them. They get lumped in with the phrase “artificial additives or preservatives,” the lists of ingredients that no one can pronounce or spell, which must surely describe something unnatural and evil.</p>
<p id="21hzb8">Yet ice cream makers who proudly — and often self-righteously — trumpet their avoidance of stabilizers and insist that their said absence improves the product and makes it more “natural,” aren’t being entirely straight with us. By and large, these additives are derived from natural ingredients and as long as they’re used in the correct, small doses, they can produce ice cream better suited to withstanding the journey from the factory to your freezer without becoming too haggard.</p>
<p id="RzboRv">A few hours with Laiskonis might disabuse the stabilizer truthers of their contempt. “Most of cooking is trying to manipulate water,” he says. He could, he suggests, write a single-subject cookbook about that element. Ice cream, which is 60 percent water, would definitely get its own chapter. To make it, you’re forced to complete an impossible task: Freeze a solution that, despite being called ice <em>cream</em>, is more than half full of water, all while avoiding the formation of ice. Ice is, well, icy — it’s watery and crunchy, two attributes that make for a shitty pint. As your base churns in its chilled container, it begins to freeze, and thickens as it does so, in part because that water is forming crystals. If you can keep the crystals to a minimum number and size, you will produce decent ice cream. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="8NVGWF"><q>Ice cream is faded memory in the form of perfectly smooth, barely frozen butterfat; its flavors, no matter how long you infused those tea leaves, are always fuzzy around the edges</q></aside></div>
<p id="FrhJ50">Along with acting as thickening agents, stabilizers bind water that would otherwise turn to ice. Their binding properties allow them to do more than impair water’s ability to freeze; they keep it tied up so that the fluctuations in temperature that would cause your ice cream to begin to melt, then subsequently refreeze and form new icicles, have less impact. And today’s stabilizers derive from plant-based ingredients. Those most commonly deployed for ice cream are locust bean and guar gum, and they tend to be used in tandem. Their names sound scary, and the inclination is to assume they’re artificial chemicals. But the layperson’s term for locust bean is carob bean. Guar’s a plant, too. Another common stabilizer, carrageenan, is seaweed-based. Options that sound even more science-y, like xanthan gum and pectin, come from natural sources. </p>
<p id="oCIsgF">The better ice cream stabilizers are blends — those from Italy developed for gelato are thought to be the best. They generally incorporate emulsifiers (elements that fuse otherwise incompatible compounds like water and fat), so they’re all the more efficient. Used correctly, they “increase viscosity” and give you a “creamier mouthfeel,” Laiskonis says. “Too much gets you something gummy, and increases overrun, too.” That’s what gives stabilizers a bad rap: Several mass-market brands cut costs by using less-expensive stabilizers in place of milk fat, milk solids, or eggs. </p>
<p id="Dl0ANx">Laiskonis has determined that perfection is achieved when stabilizers comprise less than half a percent of the base (“typically 0.2-0.4 percent if we’re getting technical”). At such a low concentration, your taste buds won’t detect any of it. Your mouth will pick up on a more substantial, appealing texture in the ice cream — that slight “chew” that gives the impression of extra-lusciousness. If you want to know what stabilizers taste like when there are enough of them present, just ask Britton Bauer. She calls it “a mouth-watering metallic flavor” that “has a slight bitterness.” If you haven’t experienced that flavor, eat a Twinkie, she advises. Laiskonis insists you’d need to add a hell of a lot of them for your taste buds to register what Britton Bauer described. She concedes that “the natural ones are fine,” but where many would argue that, when used wisely, they improve the texture, and possibly flavor, she thinks the former suffers for them and the latter is muted. </p>
<p id="qtMwUR">She has sympathizers, Ben Van Leeuwen and Palmer among them. Van Leeuwen, for his part, likes to remind everyone that Häagen-Dazs doesn’t use stabilizers either; Palmer admits that leaving them out of his pints gives him less control over their fate once they leave the McConnell’s facility. Still, it might leave you wondering why you’d spend so much money on something that will never be as good as it once might have been. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="NsBqkg">
<p class="p-large-text" id="HvCeuZ"><strong>That is the question</strong>, after all: Is the $10 pint worth it? And how different are these ultra-premium products from each other — or the rest, really? You’d think a blind taste test would help answer those questions. It did not. </p>
<p id="4cY88T">Some of New York City’s finest ice cream minds — and palates — generously volunteered their services and were put through a rather rigorous two hours of eating and assessing ice cream. Max Falkowitz, editor, journalist and ice cream expert? Fany Gerson of La Newyorkina? <a href="https://www.eater.com/2017/5/30/15691504/meredith-kurtzman-otto-nyc-gelato">Meredith Kurtzman of gelato</a>? Natasha Pickowicz of Café Altro Paradiso and Flora Bar? Alex Stupak of Empellón? Nancy Druckman (ice cream fanatic and definitely a relation of the author — i.e., her mother)? Laiskonis? All present. There were numerous flights, and the judges were asked to consider each item they tried on the basis of the intensity and quality of its flavor, its texture, and its finish. Samples of Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s were slipped into each round to determine how the ultra-premium products compared to those in the price bracket beneath theirs. </p>
<p id="5w3t6J">The results of this test were hilariously ambiguous and mostly inconclusive. The tasters barely agreed on anything, except that none of them was particularly excited about a single item he or she tasted. Opinions varied, not just from one brand to the next, but from one flavor to the next of a single brand. Common complaints were of samples having “no character” or being “too sweet.” A tester who will remain nameless (okay, it was the mom) said it was the first time she had ice cream that “tasted terrible.” Possibly the most telling information to emerge was that, out of nine vanillas, Häagen-Dazs came out on top, and it wasn’t very close. (One of the test coordinators decided they liked the Van Leeuwen vanilla best because it tasted like marshmallow, which makes you wonder if anyone knows what vanilla tastes like, and why that company doesn’t name that flavor “marshmallow.”) In related news: Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough scored solidly, too. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="386f90"><q>Possibly the most telling information to emerge was that, out of nine vanillas, Häagen-Dazs came out on top, and it wasn’t very close</q></aside></div>
<p id="M0Ojdo">Whatever the answer to the question of “worth it” may be, Britton Bauer doesn’t “see ice cream going back to $5 from here.” And why should she? She’s been making and selling a lot of it, and her success shows no signs of slowing. But she wants to change her pricing model: Why not, she asks, charge by the flavor? Special flavors that are limited by access to products or require extra manpower should fetch a higher price than some of the less complicated, perennial offerings<em>.</em> You could “find a pint at $9.99 at Whole Foods, or one that’s close to $15 at a specialty market for a more labor-intensive pint,” she suggests, quick to mention that distributors determine prices. “I think $9.99 is pretty great,” she says. For now, when you order through the Jeni’s Splendid website, $12 is the damage per unit.</p>
<p id="O0LtFe">Ample Hills is distinguishing itself by going low when everyone is going high. Smith decreased the price of his pints in groceries in early 2018 from $9.99 to $8.99, and his latest packaging uses hand-drawn cartoon animals that have been part of the company’s in-store and online imagery since he and his wife Jackie Cuscuna opened their first location in Prospect Heights in 2011. The look suits the brand’s ongoing Disney affiliation; in addition to <a href="http://www.disneyfoodblog.com/2017/12/05/star-wars-ice-cream-flavors-coming-to-disney-world-ample-hills/">special-edition Star Wars pints</a>, Ample Hills opened a storefront at Walt Disney World Resort nearly three years ago. “We’re making ice cream that’s more geared [to] a Ben & Jerry’s Version 2.0,” Smith says. </p>
<p id="5x0vXr">Smith sees Ample Hills as less “intellectual” than the brands with which he shares retail real estate, and believes this curtails his ability to charge as much as they do. At the same time, he sees a gap in the high-end market where outstanding quality and kitsch overlap. He doesn’t use the word “stoner,” but it’s easy to infer that Smith is speaking to the more laid-back foodie who doesn’t take himself too seriously and digs artisanal junk food. “Our goal is not to be the most expensive pint in the freezer. As long as we’ve got Jeni’s to the right of us at $11.99, we feel at least we’re not out there on a limb.” </p>
<p id="AqN7fw">Cracking the mass market will require a slightly different algebraic set. “If we’re in Target, it’s going to be the most expensive pint by far. The goal then will be $7.99. But that’s a ways off. You can’t go up in price.” Van Leeuwen, which <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180806005175/en/Van-Leeuwen-Ice-Cream-Closes-Minority-Investment">took on investment last year to fuel national expansion</a>, is now regularly $7.99 at Whole Foods, but it’s using a trick <a href="https://www.seriouseats.com/2009/03/haagen-dazs-will-decrease-pints-ice-cream-tubs-ben-and-jerrys.html">pioneered by its forebears</a> — one of its “pints” contains just 14 ounces of ice cream, not 16. It’s a clever way to raise prices, or keep them the same while becoming more accessible; people rarely notice when a pint isn’t a pint, as long as it <em>looks </em>like a pint. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="f3Jtel"><q>‘Even the cheapest, crappiest commodity stuff is good on a summer day, because it’s still ice cream’</q></aside></div>
<p id="Gxe7sX">Some might say no matter how delicious the ice cream or how big the pint, $10 is an absurd amount. Britton Bauer confesses, “I think $15 is too much for a pint.” Others might be offended by the very idea that any American could be priced out of enjoying this once-accessible treat. We have a right to happiness; ergo, we have a right to ice cream. </p>
<p id="ZJillP">Maybe the truth is that all ice cream, even the worst, is good enough. Ice cream tastes like something forgotten. It’s a perfect example of synesthesia — faded memory in the edible form of perfectly smooth, barely frozen butterfat. Its flavors, no matter how long you infused those tea leaves or spices in its base, are fuzzy around the edges. When we indulge in it, we’re not looking to experience the purest, most concentrated version of a bunch of fresh mint leaves, or for the deepest expression of caramel with salt. We do so to access a feeling. That is why, as Smith says, “even the cheapest, crappiest commodity stuff is good on a summer day, because it’s still ice cream.” And if you grew up on that cheapest, crappiest commodity stuff, you might even prefer it, because its familiarity makes that nostalgic connection stronger. Or, to put it more cruelly, a line from Sam Lipsyte’s novel <em>The Ask</em>: “It was horseshit, of course, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="GAJhaB">Ice cream reduces grown people to the children they once were. It’s why the entrepreneurs who have committed to improving or “elevating” ice cream stubbornly, maybe irrationally, believe in their fool’s errand. It’s why those who are willing — and able — pull out their wallets for $10 pints, convinced that what’s inside is worth it. Our faith in heaven may be long gone, but we haven’t given up on ice cream, even if packaging is all it is. Here, the frames are often the content, the source of a holy commercial aura that comforts and drives us. It’s the American Way.</p>
<p id="Xn9vf8"><a href="https://twitter.com/cettedrucks"><small><em>Charlotte Druckman</em></small></a><small><em> is a journalist who lives in Manhattan, the island on which she was born and raised. The co-founder of Food52’s Tournament of Cookbooks, her unconventional anthology </em></small><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43908933-women-on-food"><small>Women on Food</small></a><small><em> (Abrams) arrives on October 29, and her second cookbook </em></small><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41089514-kitchen-remix"><small>Kitchen Remix</small></a><small><em> (Clarkson Potter) in April 2020. </em></small><br><a href="https://partyofone.studio"><small><em>Party of One</em></small></a><small><em> is Brooklyn-based collaborative creative studio founded by </em></small><a href="https://melissadeckert.com/"><small><em>Melissa Deckert</em></small></a><small><em> and </em></small><a href="http://www.nicolelicht.com/"><small><em>Nicole Licht</em></small></a><small><em>.</em></small><br><small><em>Fact checked by </em></small><a href="https://twitter.com/sdschuyler"><small><em>Samantha Schuyler</em></small></a><br><small><em>Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter</em></small></p>
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https://www.eater.com/2019/4/9/18280840/fancy-ice-cream-van-leeuwen-jenis-salt-straw-mcconnellsCharlotte Druckman2017-08-02T14:02:01-04:002017-08-02T14:02:01-04:00Madhur Jaffrey on the Legendary Judith Jones
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<figcaption>Judith Jones at home in 2015 | Helen Rosner</figcaption>
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<p>The prolific cookbook author toasts the editor who helped shape her career</p> <p id="5hIgIK">Thanks to technology and social media, whenever a luminary leaves us now, word travels fast and it multiplies, exponentially, even faster. Since news broke this morning of editor <a href="https://www.eater.com/2017/8/2/16082742/judith-jones-cookbook-editor-obituary">Judith Jones's death</a>, a blanket of retweeted stories previously published about her — and newly drafted obituaries — has covered my feed. As my friend,<em> New York Times</em> reporter and columnist Tejal Rao noted while we were taking in the news, Judith was the kind of editor who preferred to step aside when the editing process was through so that her writers, many of whom were women of color, could shine. She would not have appreciated a pile-on of attention.</p>
<p id="PxfIG9">I interviewed one of them, Madhur Jaffrey, the prolific and inimitable Indian cookbook writer, for a story I did with Judith for <a href="https://www.eater.com/2015/9/23/9355183/judith-jones">Eater back in 2015</a>. Judith’s own words ended up being so compelling, we decided to let them stand alone. But Madhur’s input is invaluable and seems all the more meaningful now. I only wish that Judith could have read what her writer — and friend — said about her. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="6WoLEY">
<p id="DOFioH"><strong>I had written a book, my very first book</strong> — it came after <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D01E5DB113DE43BBC4F53DFB166838D679EDE&nytmobile=0&legacy=true">an article</a> that Craig Claiborne did on me in the <em>New York Times</em>. It was a whole page about an actress who likes to cook. <em>[The manuscript was passed among a few editors, to no avail. Eventually, in 1969, it landed with Andre Schiffin, head of Vintage.] </em></p>
<p id="5scx9F">He said, “There’s only one person who should have this book and it’s Judith Jones.” I sent the book to Judith [at Knopf], and she sort of bought it overnight. She was very interested. She gave it the title <em>An Invitation to Indian Cooking</em> — that was her idea, that it should be welcoming you into that world.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="VjsnbP">
<p id="1hM9Za"><strong>She never interfered with my style</strong>, she just made it more coherent and would say, “This is what it should be served with” or “Maybe you could offer…”</p>
<p id="Q0t0cr">For my last book I did with her, I have that green pencil that she used always to make corrections. Her notes were always in green. They were always very careful edits. Some people just take a green pencil and work their way through it and make it something else. She leaves the author’s voice completely there. And the idiosyncratic spelling or thinking, she leaves so that the book is an individual kind of creation rather than a commercial project. She let my recipes run on. I like to give details, because I think people are afraid. I’ve always explained very fully what something should look like when it’s done. People nowadays, it’s all about how it looks on a page.</p>
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<p id="Q5JZYg"><strong>I learned from the very first book</strong> how to do a proper cookbook, and that was entirely Judith’s doing. She’s a really intelligent person. I couldn’t work with someone who wasn’t intelligent and wasn’t <em>interested</em>. Most editors treat you like you’re peripheral, and they have so many other things to do.</p>
<p id="nkRjya">It’s a straightforward relationship. One human being recognizing another human being completely.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="8lBVjx">
<p id="CHJH88"><strong>I do remember, for one of my last books with her</strong>, we were supposed to have a photographer, and no one ever has enough money to pay someone to cook all the recipes [for the photo shoot]. Judith said, “I’ll come,” and the two of us cooked together in my house in the country, and Christopher Hirscheimer came, and Melissa Hamilton. Together, they styled and used all my pots and pans and whatever I used for serving. It became a really lovely, very personal kind of book. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="PiUHN8">
<p id="7FGuI4"><strong>I remember going up to Vermont</strong>, and staying in her house with [her husband] Evan and Judith, and cooking. You know, there’s a kind of personal interest she takes in her authors. You talk to any of them, and they all have a story. You got the feeling she was thoroughly involved in [each book] personally. </p>
<p id="EYVVkY">You know she can do anything, and she doesn’t think our [cookbooks] are less than those of great writers. She was living proof of somebody who can edit a masterpiece of fiction and can edit a cookbook, and she’s not discriminating and saying one is a higher form of art and one is lesser. They’re both valid, and one can be done well or badly.</p>
<aside id="8ZrKJE"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Empress of Cookbooks Judith Jones Has Died at 93","url":"https://www.eater.com/2017/8/2/16082742/judith-jones-cookbook-editor-obituary"},{"title":"Legendary Cookbook Editor Judith Jones, In Her Own Words","url":"https://www.eater.com/2015/9/23/9355183/judith-jones"}]}'></div></aside><p id="OACJ65"><a href="https://twitter.com/cettedrucks"><small><em>Charlotte Druckman</em></small></a><small><em> is a journalist and food writer-type based in New York City. </em></small></p>
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https://www.eater.com/cookbooks/2017/8/2/16083094/madhur-jaffrey-on-the-legendary-judith-jonesCharlotte Druckman2017-05-30T13:55:36-04:002017-05-30T13:55:36-04:00A Gelato Maestro's Last Scoop
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<p>Meredith Kurtzman gave New York its taste for gelato, but even now, on the verge of retirement, no one knows her name</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="qpoiky"><strong>The greatest gelato maker in New York</strong> has lived in the same tenement on Sullivan Street since 1976. Meredith Kurtzman has crystalline memories of seeing Patti Smith perform at St. Mark’s Church, WBAI’s Free Music Store, and CBGB, and of grocery shopping on Essex Street with her grandmothers. She claims blackberry as her favorite flavor, but dislikes cinnamon, scorns “goo-goo” desserts, and considers chocolate her nemesis. There are no awards or cookbooks with her name on them, no pints of ice cream bearing her signature, no eponymous chain of shops — or even a single property — in her purview.</p>
<p id="vA2OfK">There was barely a whisper in the food world when she first called it quits a couple of years ago, after more than a decade of churning fast-melting miracles at Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, a foundational restaurant in what Kurtzman calls the “evil empire” of Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, B&B Hospitality Group. Under her guidance, Otto became a destination for gelato, definitively putting ice cream’s smoother, more elegant sibling on the city’s dining radar in the early aughts. </p>
<p id="XcyRVF">In his 2012 memoir, <em>Restaurant Man</em>, Bastianich extolled the virtues of Kurtzman’s gelato: “It’s made by a crusty, West-Village hippy lesbian. She’s probably 60 years old. I don’t like her very much; she hasn’t been nice to me. She’s crotchety. But her ice cream is unbelievable — she’s obsessively consumed. She’s a genius, a true artisan in the classical Italian spirit. She uses only seasonal fresh fruit, and everything is worked by hand. The Otto ice-cream experience is truly amazing. It’s a work of art. There’s nothing quite like it. No one in the United States of America is even fucking close.” Even Jon Snyder, the competition over at Il Laboratorio Del Gelato, conceded that Kurtzman “has been a trailblazer in terms of bringing the Italian method of ice-cream making to the U.S.” </p>
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<figcaption>An illustration of Otto's Fall/Winter 2013 gelato menu, drawn by Meredith Kurtzman.</figcaption>
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<p id="axtL1B">In the last few years, chefs like Brooks Headley of Superiority Burger (and, formerly, B&B‘s Del Posto), Nick Morgenstern of Morgenstern’s, Sam Mason of Oddfellows, and Christina Tosi of Milk Bar have all become known, by name, for their ice cream. But anyone who knows anything about frozen desserts will tell you that none of these relative newcomers — except Headley, who was briefly under Kurtzman’s tutelage — comes close to their unacknowledged forerunner. Pastry chefs rarely receive the same amount of credit, attention, or success as their savory counterparts. But in the face of overwhelming critical acclaim, and a small but crucial role in building the B&B domain, Kurtzman’s anonymity seems more remarkable than most — and, with true retirement looming, all the more glaring. After a reluctant return to the professional kitchen last year, moonlighting at cherished Park Slope institution Al Di La, she is set to put down her spatula again later this summer — this time, perhaps, for good.</p>
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<p id="SOYBRi"><strong>At 66, Kurtzman is scrappy;</strong> she has a wiry solidness. She is 5 feet tall, with a frizzled halo of curls held back by a red bandana folded into a headband, and large, knowing eyes set off by graphic black-framed glasses. Not prone to outbursts of enthusiasm, she’s solemn, silently emitting a gentle but steady “get off my lawn” warning. Seated at the bar of Via Carota on Grove Street with a glass of wine and a small plate of deep-fried, sausage-stuffed olives that probably constituted her dinner, she seemed content enough as she traced her meandering itinerary from Manhattan’s Washington Heights, where she was born, in 1950, to her present-day stomping grounds on the other end of the island. “I’ve never lived a life where I had a plan,” she said. “I just kind of drift along. I’m kind of lazy, I guess.”</p>
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<figcaption>Kurtzman makes gelato Al Di La Trattoria on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.</figcaption>
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<p id="ZS1c4P">When Kurtzman was 4 years old, her mother got tired of carrying her up four flights of steps, and the family decided it was time to leave the city. “Flights of steps are a recurring theme in my family,” Kurtzman said. They moved to Mount Vernon, in Westchester County, New York, where Kurtzman would spend the next 12 years with three younger siblings. Her father, Harvey, <a href="http://www.harveykurtzman.com/">was a cartoonist</a> who wrote for <em>MAD Magazine </em>and produced <em>Little Annie Fanny</em>, a serial comic strip that ran in <em>Playboy</em> for 16 years. Kurtzman’s mother, Adele, was a homemaker who took a job as a short-order cook in her 50s; after that, she spent 25 years as a fundraiser at a school for mentally disabled children before retiring a few years ago, in her 80s.</p>
<p id="LmraG2">“I was a bit of a loner, and silently suffered through my own share of bullying from my peers throughout my youth,” Kurtzman said. She became obsessed with wanting to “escape to New York as a teenager after taking a visit to MacDougal Street in the early ’60s, and seeing it as Oz.” She wound up at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan a few years later, then worked freelance as a fabric designer and silkscreen printer — “two things that are dying, or died” — for more than two decades. While the ’70s were a productive decade for her, after Reagan was elected and the economy took a nosedive, her textile commissions slowly dried up, and she grew to hate the work. By the mid-’90s, she knew that she needed to find another way to support herself, and after realizing that she “was cooking more and more at home to avoid working,” she landed on getting a job in a professional kitchen. But she also thought that a 40-something woman wasn’t suited to being a line cook, so she applied for a scholarship to learn pastry, and was given a small stipend to attend culinary school.</p>
<p id="lCjLtv">From there, Kurtzman secured an internship at Verbena, a restaurant opened in 1994 by Diane Forley, one of the early preachers and practitioners of seasonal cooking on the East Coast. “I did what I would never advise younger people to do,” Kurtzman said, “which is to be in charge of a pastry department right out of school.” During her two and a half years there, she “found that ice cream thing.” She noticed that Forley’s bases resembled those used for gelato — they called for more milk than cream — unlike a lot of New York City restaurants’, which had it the other way around. It’s “kind of disgusting, actually,” she said of high-fat, high-end ice cream. “It coats your tongue.” Gelato has a lower fat content than its American counterpart because it uses <a href="http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2012/07/whats-the-difference-between-gelato-and-ice-cream.html">less cream and fewer egg yolks</a>; it’s also mixed so it doesn’t have as much air whipped into it, resulting in a denser product with a more concentrated flavor.</p>
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<figcaption>Gelato at Al Di La</figcaption>
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<p id="J9YqMm">Forley, who now owns plant-based <a href="http://flourishbakingcompany.com/">Flourish Baking Company</a> in Scarsdale, New York, and recently launched an online <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/dining/aquafaba-vegan-meringue-shop.html">vegan confectionery</a>, remembers Kurtzman’s determination and focus, and how seriously she took the task of selecting produce. “The Greenmarket was just getting busy. It’s not what it is now,” Forley wrote in an email. “But Meredith would always look for what was fresh in the market and the seasons — finding the ripest strawberry. Flavor was really important. You can’t really teach somebody that. You just have to have it.” Forley picked up on it in Kurtzman’s textile designs, too. “I understand that she’s so artistic, and she’s so humble that she doesn’t talk about it. But I remember seeing her work and thinking, that’s just insane.”</p>
<p id="bVw75x">After Verbena, Kurtzman briefly worked at Bouley Bakery and got “very bored of making 300 of something,” then had what she refers to as a “few dark years” where she bounced around from “one failing restaurant to another.” Between gigs, she became a regular at Lupa on Thompson Street and found out from its co-owner, Jason Denton, that his business partners, Bastianich and Batali, were opening a seafood-centric Italian restaurant in Midtown, called Esca; they were feeling iffy about the pastry chef they’d chosen. “They were paranoid about stars, as they usually are,” she said, “and hired me last minute, just before they opened, while the other poor person was still there — I think she could have done just as well as me, but whatever.” </p>
<p id="bJwzyF">While Kurtzman characterizes her time at Esca as “one of those in-the-cellar-try-my-patience jobs,” it also took her to Italy, where she had “her first big-time gelato experience,” a scoop of <em>mirto</em> (myrtle) gelato on a slice of brioche, in Salerno, on the southwestern coast. “I was like HOLY SHIT!” she said, in a rare burst of enthusiasm.</p>
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<figcaption>Kurtzman checks on a cake at Al Di La.</figcaption>
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<p id="yFAq1i">Back at Esca, Kurtzman “really got in the groove” and started using “a funky little machine” to make small batches of 11 different flavors at a time. At the turn of the millennium, New Yorkers paid little attention to gelato and had few decent examples of the stuff to speak of — “an old Italian guy on Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street” and Il Laboratorio del Gelato, according to Kurtzman. Enter Batali’s bold, minimalist vision for Otto: an enoteca that would introduce diners to Roman-style pizza and, on the dessert side, focus singularly on gelato and Italian coupes. Kurtzman, recognizing the opportunity, agreed to start the dessert program. </p>
<p id="EHxZAx">To prepare for the gig, Kurtzman went back to Italy for more lessons, spending five days at a shop in Sansepolcro, a small town in Tuscany. The owner spoke little English and used a more industrial method than an “artisan” gelato operation would employ these days, but he also taught her something invaluable: how to break down a base into sugars and fats, and how to balance them correctly, so that they yield a final product that’s creamy, while maintaining structural integrity and expressing the essence of its flavors. “The other good part,” she added, is that “he had a whole pile of gelato magazines, which I took back to my hotel and read in the evening. And copied stuff. They were all in Italian, which I don’t speak still, but I figured out enough.” What she ultimately reverse-engineered was a sugar compound that would result in incredibly smooth gelato and sorbetto that was never too icy or too sweet. </p>
<p id="2bZNyF">Dextrose, a corn-derived sugar, is the key. In all ice cream (and, say, Frappuccinos), sugar is responsible for smoothness. Most American ice creams and sorbets use table sugar, simple syrup, or corn syrup as their sweetener, which produces icier results. But Kurtzman incorporates dextrose, which, in addition to having a “cleaner, brighter flavor” than the white granulated stuff, produces a thicker, more concentrated, jelly-like syrup that’s less inclined to freeze; the upshot is a creamy scoop that’s neither cloying nor leaves that “disgusting” coating in your mouth.</p>
<p id="nBpP0J">Classified dextrose formula in hand, Kurtzman returned to Otto. The pizza had its detractors — “this may be the kinkiest pizza the city has ever seen, and it’s not surprising that Famous Ray’s devotees are furious,” Robert Sietsema, now an Eater restaurant critic, noted in his <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2003/05/06/crazy-eights/">review for the <em>Village Voice</em></a> — but everyone went nuts for what Kurtzman was doing. For many, this was their first taste of gelato: Lying somewhere between hard-packed and soft-serve American ice cream texturally, its flavors fuller and unobscured, it left no waxy residue in its wake. “The best gelato I've tasted lately in New York,” Ed Levine <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/dining/a-city-at-the-melting-point.html">wrote</a> for the<em> New York Times</em>, “is at Otto, Mario Batali's pizzeria at 1 Fifth Avenue.” Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite of <em>New York Magazine</em> expressed<a href="http://nymag.com/nymetro/food/reviews/underground/n_8404/"> similar sentiments</a> — “dessert at Otto means gelato — thick, rich, and well worth the $7 price tag (for two flavors)” — while Sietsema was “imprinted immediately” by the “olive oil gelato, drizzled with extra oil and dotted with crunchy sea salt,” that “lies smooth and cold on the tongue” and “shocks and then seduces.” </p>
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<figcaption>Kurtzman reads her e-mail at home in Manhattan after a day of work.</figcaption>
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<p id="xjXORt">Kurtzman had made gelato a thing. Her most iconic creation was that olive oil variety — inspired by a recipe she came across sometime in the '90s, by the French chef Jacques Chibois — which spawned countless imitations. On its own, the scoop was bizarrely wonderful, voluptuously creamy and out-of-left-field fruity in the way that savory olives are. “Who can forget her original olive oil coppetta with silken taffy-pull olive oil gelato, passion fruit granita, fennel seed brittle, and basil syrup, all drizzled with Sicilian olive oil and sprinkled with Maldon sea salt?” her former boss, Batali, recently asked, reverently, via e-mail. “It changed gelato in NYC instantly and forever.” </p>
<p id="q5ZeaX">Otto emerged synonymous with gelato, and things went along uninterrupted and routinely for close to a decade — a first for Kurtzman, who hadn’t lasted even three years anywhere else. And then she was asked to read that passage in Bastianich’s book; she threw the book across the room. “He kind of apologized, but he published it anyway,” she said. “And you know what? I never said anything. I’m just very good with the stone face. I would give the stone face.” She claims that she hasn’t spoken to Bastianich since the book was published, in 2012.</p>
<p id="jtB5IO">She stayed on though, business as usual. A couple of years earlier, in 2010, Batali had revealed to Kurtzman that he had bigger plans for her: B&B was building a manufacturing plant in Port Chester to produce bread and pasta for many of the company’s New York properties, including Eataly, and he wanted her to run a gelato annex while continuing to oversee her department at Otto.</p>
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<figcaption>A recipe print that Kurtzman illustrated at her home in Manhattan.</figcaption>
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<p id="Jah7Aw">She declined the offer, preferring to stay put at the enoteca. The “small raise in salary” Batali dangled wasn’t enough to justify the tradeoffs: The Eataly in Flatiron alone does at least four times the volume of gelato that Otto made at its peak, Kurtzman guesses, and producing at that scale would require a change in process and formulas — infusions would be trickier and stabilizers, which she tries to use sparingly, would be an issue. Mostly, though, she wouldn’t be able to have her eye on every pot, or machine. “I like to be hands-on,” she said. “I mean, despite the fact that I say work is physically difficult, I don’t want to just be a manager.” Besides, she added, “This isn’t going to have my name on it. I’m going to be busting my ass to say MARIO BATALI in big letters, and what do I get for it?” (The gelato annex was never built.) </p>
<p id="q2mNxX">What she’d gotten for her time at Otto was hearing loss and two bum knees. Galley labor is hard on the body at any age, and the damages add up; it’s no place for the old. And yet, unless you’re in that small percentage of chef-entrepreneurs with an empire, or, at least, a single property you can manage at a distance, you don’t have much choice but to stay put for as long as you can take it: Most restaurants don’t offer their employees pensions or 401(k)s; Social Security doesn’t cover living costs in major cities; and the working wage doesn’t allow for substantial savings. While B&B offers a pension plan with medical coverage, and Kurtzman had signed up for it, she didn’t know how long she could live off of her savings and whatever income she’d get from that package and Social Security. Either way, by October 2015, she knew something was going to give, and before her body completely betrayed her, she needed to quit.</p>
<p id="C7UmS7">On her 65th birthday, Kurtzman gave two months’ notice and, as a requirement in her contract, left behind all of her recipes. One of her assistants, Domingo Espinal Sanchez, continues to faithfully reproduce her formulas exactly as written. Bastianich sent her a “very nice note,” acknowledging their rocky relationship and conveying his regret that she was leaving; Batali said that she is welcome to come back at any time. (“No way in hell,” she said.) As a parting gift, Bastianich gave her a watch. “It was a Shinola watch, a nice watch,” she said. “Actually, it was an ugly watch. It was an ugly Shinola. I traded it in for another one I like more.”</p>
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<figcaption>Kurtzman cleans her glasses after gardening in Mt. Vernon, New York, where her mother still lives.</figcaption>
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<p id="GQiOLy">Restaurant retirement didn’t quite go the way she’d imagined. After a road trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway to see the Shenandoah Valley, she combed the listings to see if test kitchens or cookbook authors needed recipe developers, and managed to pick up a few freelance gigs. Opportunities were scant. So was money. Not long after exchanging the Shinola watch, she sold it on eBay. “I was like, <em>I’m never going to wear this and I could use 400 bucks because I don’t have any work.</em>” In March 2016, with little on the horizon, when she heard that her sister Nellie had a roommate who was looking for her own place, Kurtzman decided to sublet her apartment and spend some time with her 91-year-old mother in Mount Vernon, caring for her and tending garden for a while. </p>
<p id="aMeWn7">Two months in, Kurtzman still needed money. She heard there was an opening for a part-time pastry chef at Al Di La, a trattoria in Park Slope she’d always liked, and she reached out to chef-owner Anna Klinger. Neither party required much convincing: Kurtzman would come in four days a week and do prep for a shortlist of desserts that could be plated in her absence. The menu features ricotta fritters with a side of warm chocolate sauce, a pear cake studded with chunks of bitter chocolate, <em>gianduiotto</em> (the classic Italian pairing of chocolate gelato with hazelnuts), <em>affogatto </em>(another Italian institution, vanilla gelato drowned in espresso), and a couple of ever-changing gelati and sorbetti. There’s usually a special crostata on the board too. She’s gotten accustomed to the “beat-up old kitchen,” and Klinger leaves her to her own devices, just how Kurtzman likes it. The self-described “oddball” in what’s generally deemed an industry of oddballs knows she’s not “real controllable,” and prefers to have as much control over her work as possible.</p>
<p id="zrLkH1">In the beginning, Kurtzman commuted from Mount Vernon, but she was eventually resigned to moving back into her rent-stabilized sixth-floor walk-up with a climb-in shower in the kitchen. “I’ve never lived in a normal apartment,” she said. “I’d like to have a bathroom before I die.” But, she added, “I’ll probably die in that apartment.” Climbing the six flights in her building would be an effort for anyone; it’s more so for a 66-year-old, even a spry one like Kurtzman. </p>
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<figcaption>Kurtzman tends to the garden in the backyard of her family home in Mt. Vernon.</figcaption>
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<p id="UlFyyi">Kurtzman has the stairs of her commute to contend with, too. “I get on the subway at six in the morning, which I don’t love,” she said. “Nobody on that train looks happy to be on it. I can tell you.” When she reaches the restaurant, there’s more climbing to be done. Without the chilling equipment of the state-of-the-art kitchen at Otto, Kurtzman has to run to the basement to cool down each new batch of gelato in the sink. She’s figured out how to minimize the daily number of required trips down the steep steps after nearly falling down the entire flight. “I don’t know how much longer — I don’t know how long I can do this,” she admitted in February. </p>
<p id="yEXVF8">Two months later, she e-mailed to say she’d given her resignation at Al Di La, “as an exit to aching knees and general tiredness of getting up at 4:30, yada yada.” She might, she added, have some consulting work coming her way, but really wanted “to bid adieu to restaurant work.” And so, a little over a week from now, on June 7, Kurtzman will try to retire from the galley, again. </p>
<p id="zGYg3U">Before then, before she’s gone, diners might order dessert — one of the evening’s fruit tarts or a scoop of implausibly smooth, appropriately sweet and tangy fruit sorbet. Maybe, if it’s offered that night, it will be the caramel gelato, a dark tawny, creamy sphere with the intensity of nearly burnt sugar. Diners will recognize the gelato’s greatness, but probably won’t pause to think of Kurtzman, alone in her tenement on Sullivan Street — if they have even heard of her, which they likely haven’t. Why would they? The impossibility of aging gracefully in the back of the house is rarely reported, never shown on television. In the kitchen, people come and go. Turnover is as quick as the work itself. There’s always a younger, faster hand to take the place of a wrinkling, slower one. No one talks about that, about where cooks go to die. But they’ll remember that gelato. And they’ll miss it, all of them.</p>
<p id="oX4oD6"><small><em><strong>Correction:</strong></em></small><small><em> The sausages at Via Carota were stuffed with sausage, not ricotta. Eater regrets the error.</em></small></p>
<p id="32MGgX"><a href="https://twitter.com/cettedrucks"><small><em>Charlotte Druckman</em></small></a><small><em> is the author of </em></small><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Skirt-Steak-Standing-Staying-Kitchen/dp/1452107092?tag=eater0c-20" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><small>Skirt Steak</small></a><small>, </small><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stir-Sizzle-Bake-Recipes-Cast-Iron/dp/055345966X?tag=eater0c-20" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><small>Stir, Sizzle, Bake</small></a><small>,</small><small><em> and the co-founder of Food52’s Tournament of Cookbooks.</em></small><br><a href="http://www.bessadler.com/"><small><em>Bess Adler</em></small></a><small><em> is a photographer based in Brooklyn.</em></small><br><small><em>Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter</em></small></p>
<aside id="OlwdMu"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"eater"}'></div></aside>
https://www.eater.com/2017/5/30/15691504/meredith-kurtzman-otto-nyc-gelatoCharlotte Druckman2016-10-19T12:32:08-04:002016-10-19T12:32:08-04:00Where to Eat in the Marais
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<figcaption>Helen Rosner</figcaption>
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<p>In Paris's old Jewish quarter, you'll find falafel, cream puffs, and the crepes that dreams are made of</p> <p id="ufjKb4">We have a saying in my family: Every city has a Jewish quarter. My father insists on finding it, even if it's nothing more than a random old synagogue somewhere. And since Dad planned my first trip to Paris, it's no surprise that my introduction to the Marais was a Jewish one.</p>
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<p id="bjfyb3">It's a legit Jewish quarter, and, to some extent, reflects the complex history of Jews in France: I remember, as we walked the narrow, cobblestoned streets with even narrower sidewalks that are the oldest part of the city, my father pointing out the bullet holes in the walls of the Goldenberg delicatessen on Rue des Rosiers, site of a deadly anti-Semitic attack in 1982. When we turned into the Place des Vosges and the sun bounced off the faded-to-pink red bricks on the facades of the early 17th-century houses that line the square, I held my breath and felt almost sorry, because I realized that no landmark in my hometown of New York City could ever compare.</p>
<p id="jml5l7">I was 14 at the time, and I vowed to return to Paris as often as I could. It’s a promise I’ve kept. And I always go back to the Marais. In college it was where I met friends for falafel lunches on Sunday. <em>Les hipsters</em> were beginning to reclaim it even then, in the mid-90s; you’d see couples zipping through on their scooters, owning bedhead chic like only the French can, disembarking at cafes for late lunches, gathering on corners with wine glasses in hand. A few years later, gentrification was in full swing—Petit Bateau and A.P.C. had set up shop. When I went freelance and started going to Paris to write, I lived in the 3rd, in what’s known as the Haut Marais and is the older half of the zone. The apartment building I stayed in had two entrances: one on the busy Boulevard St.-Martin on the cusp of the 10th arrondissement, the other on the two-block-long, sleepy Rue Meslay, home to a row of discount shoe stores. Here, at the quarter’s northernmost seam, a trace of its proletarian disposition lingers, despite the encroaching, not-so-discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p id="3winhL">I went back to Paris in May, on vacation, and returned to the Marais like always, walking though the recently renovated <a href="http://www.museepicassoparis.fr/">Picasso Museum</a>, lining up for the only crepes I’ve ever loved at Breizh Cafe, and basking in the rosy glow of the Place des Vosges. Here’s my culinary guide to the neighborhood; it draws on all of the versions of the Marais I have known in the hopes others might experience them all, too.</p>
<h3 id="cUl39j">Haut Marais (3rd Arrondissement)</h3>
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<cite>Meghan McCarron</cite>
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<p id="bhzSEF"><a href="http://breizhcafe.com/en/"><strong>Breizh Café</strong></a>: If you were planning to stop on a street corner for a crepe because it’s a checklist item, keep walking. For the destination-worthy crepe experience, go to Breizh — and Breizh alone. You will taste a true Breton-style galette—a savory crepe made with buckwheat flour and the best butter on the planet, <a href="http://www.lebeurrebordier.com">Bordier butter</a>, from that same region. Breizh is an international chain of sorts, with locations in Japan and owner Bertrand Larcher’s native Brittany, but this was the original. The cafe’s straightforward formula is brilliant: crepes + oysters + cider. The galettes look like filigree—lacy, thin and crisp on the edges—and taste almost like roasted potatoes, with a toasty nuttiness. The simplest are the showstoppers. Expect a wait, but know it will be justified and that you might even want to come back the next day. There’s an <em>épicerie</em> next door that sells the caramel, the butter, and the buckwheat flour you just tasted, should you want to take it with you. <em>109 Rue Vieille du Temple, +33 1 42 72 13 77</em></p>
<p id="BW3dRG"><a href="http://www.bobsjuicebar.com/"><strong>Bob’s Kitchen</strong></a>: Healthy eating isn’t much of a priority when I’m in Paris, so I can’t tell you what to order. But you might like to know that lots of fashion-world disciples and wellness-minded gadabouts flock to this hub of vegetarian activity. It’s a breakfast-and-lunch establishment only. <em>74 Rue des Gravilliers, +33 9 52 55 11 66</em></p>
<p id="XwtJLI"><a href="http://cafecharlotparis.com/"><strong>Café Charlot</strong></a>: Do you have a breakfast meeting on your schedule? Need to get some work done? Feel like sitting down for a coffee and or writing some postcards (you should do this)? Need a reliable, perpetually buzzing place to convene for drinks? This is your all-purpose, quintessential contemporary French café. <em>38 Rue de Bretagne, +33 1 44 54 03 30</em></p>
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<cite>Helen Rosner</cite>
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<p id="CN1dfc"><strong>Chez L’Ami Louis: </strong>Mimi Sheraton has written about her willingness to "enplane" for a meal at this 92-year-old bistro, which the former <em>New York Times</em> restaurant critic cited as her "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/travel/26personal.html">favorite restaurant in the world as I know it thus far</a>" back in 2009. But Mimi did not have to tell me this, because I have had my own, in-house expert on dining since birth: my father. It was here that he introduced me to the pommes soufflés of his dreams. Can you imagine a fried potato, where, somehow, the starch becomes its own air-filled shell? It dissolves on your tongue, collapsing as the roof of your mouth comes down against its hot, fried paper-thin surface; <em>poof</em>, it’s gone. He insisted on the chicken too. Roasted in a wood-fired oven, that bird is so good, you can kiss your Zuni memories goodbye. The praise comes in cycles; sometimes everyone’s on the outs with Louis, and a couple of years later, it’s hot again. The truth is, it hasn’t changed. I really only want to go to this lovably unpolished, wood-paneled nook, with its red-and-white gingham window curtains, smell of long-cooked meat, and promises of thick slabs of foie gras terrine with Dad. I think you should go with your parents—or someone else’s parents—too. <em>32 Rue du Vertbois, +33 1 48 87 77 48</em></p>
<p id="vD9x7E"><a href="http://www.fromagerie-jouannault.fr/"><strong>Fromagerie Jouannault</strong></a>: There are a few other contenders for cheese in this neighborhood, but this one speaks to me because of its proximity to the Marché des Enfants Rouges, and its father-daughter ownership. Either of the Jouannaults—père or fille—will help you choose your wedge, and they’ve never steered me wrong. <em>39 Rue de Bretagne, +33 1 42 78 52 61</em></p>
<p id="R4xQWb"><a href="http://www.mairie3.paris.fr/mairie03/jsp/site/Portal.jsp?document_id=11632&portlet_id=969"><strong>Marché des Enfants Rouges</strong></a>: Welcome to Paris’s oldest covered market (it turned 400 last year!). Its name translates to Market of the Red Children, a reference to an orphanage whose young wards wore red uniforms. It’s easy to miss both of its entrances—the main one on Rue de Bretagne, the other on Rue Charlot. Keep your eyes peeled for the green metal gate. Once inside, do a lap or two to check out all the options—there are stalls for every mood. I went through a merguez phase that had me returning, numerous times a week, to the Moroccan vendor, Traiteur Marocain, for a mountain of couscous with that smoky lamb sausage atop it. When I overdosed on the merguez, I’d stop by the produce seller who presses fresh juice and does healthy salads. You’ll notice the Japanese purveyor <a href="http://lefooding.com/en/restaurants/restaurant-chez-taeko-paris">Chez Taeko</a> is a big draw; get in line if you’re in a bento frame of mind. Each stall has its own seating, and you’re meant to perch accordingly. <em>39 Rue de Bretagne</em></p>
<aside id="ixkuY5"><div data-anthem-component="actionbox" data-anthem-component-data='{"title":"Experience Paris yourself","description":"Eater’s bringing this guide to life with a food-filled trip to Paris, brought to you by Black Tomato. See the itinerary and book a trip now.","label":"EXPLORE","url":"http://www.blacktomato.com/us/destinations/france/eater-journeys-france/?utm_source=eater_site&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=eater_journeys"}'></div></aside><p id="ta8dWV"><a href="https://www.merci-merci.com/en/le-111-beaumarchais/le-used-book-caf%C3%A9"><strong>Le Used Book Café</strong></a>: Part of the next generation of "concept" stores, Merci launched its charm offensive on the border of the 3rd and 9th arrondissements in 2009. The multi-storied venue is always good for a walk-through, whether you’re a clotheshorse, into Paola Navone glassware, or just like being surrounded by pretty things. But it’s the café next door that I plan my visit around. It’s lined with bookshelves and you’re encouraged, as you sip a late-morning coffee and down a scone or tartine, to pull a volume off the shelf and get lost in its pages. <em>111 Boulevard Beaumarchais, +33 1 42 77 00 33</em></p>
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<cite>Pain de Sucre/<a href="https://www.facebook.com/paindesucreparis/">Facebook</a></cite>
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<p id="bJCnb8"><a href="http://www.patisseriepaindesucre.com/"><strong>Pain de Sucre</strong></a>: This is some next-level patisserie shit. A cream puff is never just a cream puff. Everything is intricate and layered: each domed bombe, square-shaped <em>tarte</em>, stuffed bread, personal baba au rhum, and gateau slab has multiple textures, colors, and flavors. A tiny masterpiece, every one. <em>14 Rue Rambuteau, +33 1 45 74 68 92</em></p>
<p id="atqPHJ"><strong>Pasta Linea:</strong> I know you came to this city for its bistros—gastro-, neo-, post-, post-ironic, retro-, or whatever iteration is having its moment. You came for your country paté, your foie gras terrine, your croissants and steak frites or tartare, your <em>poulet rôti</em> and macaron, your salmon and sorrel and towering soufflé. So why would you want to visit this tiny Italian café with its generous portions of pasta handmade with organic flour; its regional cheeses, salumi, and wines; and its burrata near-to-bursting with cream? Why, because you’re going to need a break from all that other stuff. I promise. <em>9 Rue de Turenne, 33 1 42 77 62 54</em></p>
<p id="X9Np7e"><a href="http://cafelaperle.com/"><strong>Café La Perle</strong></a><strong>:</strong> Where all the cute French boys are. I don’t know why. They just are—in their appropriately Franco-skinny jeans and narrow-cut sweaters, with their cultivated insouciance, tousled hair and shadowy scruff. It’s where Romain Duris and his doppelgangers would hang out (Romain, where’d you go, though?). After John Galliano spewed his drunken anti-semitic rage at a (probably cute) couple having drinks there, the café became <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/fashion/at-la-perle-in-paris-a-clientele-shift-after-galliano.html?_r=0">slightly less unassuming</a>, for a time. But I think the people have calmed down and realized there’s really nothing to see here, folks, except for the hotties. <em>78 Rue Vieille du Temple, +33 1 42 72 69 93</em></p>
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<cite>Hotel Petin Moulin/<a href="https://www.facebook.com/413215755432309/photos/a.676479172439298.1073741826.413215755432309/815301415223739/?type=3&theater">Facebook</a></cite>
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<p id="KjTGaA"><strong>[My Own Private Bar]: </strong>This is one of my favorite bars in Paris, but there’s a catch. You can only access it if you’re staying at the <a href="http://www.hotelpetitmoulinparis.com/">Petit Moulin</a>, the small, whimsically outfitted hotel designed by Christian LaCroix on the premises of an old boulangerie. (Would now be the wrong time to tell you I wondered, for longer than anyone should, if he was affiliated with that trendy brand of sparkling water?) If you happen to be staying there (it’s adorable) or if you happen to know someone who is staying there, you can park yourself in that quiet, cozy, no-fuss "honesty bar" (keep tabs on your tab and pay accordingly) for as long as you like. Perfect for a tryst, it’s also a solid option if you want to catch up with someone you haven’t seen for ages, or need a moment to yourself, with wine. <em>29/31 Rue de Poitou, +33 1 42 74 10 10 </em></p>
<p id="c1tNRi"><a href="https://www.poilane.com/"><strong>Poilâne</strong></a>: Should you go to the O.G. Poilâne across the Seine, on the Left Bank’s Rue du Cherche-Midi? Yes. That’s where I went, frequently, for <em>les punitions</em> (the barely-sweet, shatteringly crisp, crimped shortbread discs—sandwich them with jam if you think of it) and apple turnovers and, obviously, the signature <em>miche</em>. But a few years ago, a satellite came to the 3rd Arrondissement, and it made things a lot more convenient. So, once you’ve made the necessary pilgrimage to the flagship, do stop in. Why wouldn’t you? It’s Poilâne. <em>38 Rue Debelleyme, +33 1 44 61 83 39</em></p>
<p id="XzPRap"><strong>Tout Autour du Pain:</strong> When I first discovered this boulangerie, it was called 134 RdT, an abbreviated version of its address—134 Rue de Turenne, which made it easy to remember. Last year, it changed its name. Thank goodness it did not change hands or inventory. Baker Benjamin Turquier’s baguettes have been singled out as one of the top ten in Paris <a href="http://parisbymouth.com/134-rdt/">three times already</a>, and his butter croissant received similar acclaim; he’s one of those culinary unicorns who can do both pastry and bread. Double up! <em>134 Rue de Turenne, +33 1 42 78 04 72</em></p>
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<cite>Helen Rosner</cite>
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<p id="dFhlrl"><strong>L’As du Fallafel: </strong><em>Faites attention!</em> Two valuable pieces of advice lie ahead. Just because you are in the center of the Jewish Quarter and there are Stars of David wherever you turn, do not assume that any place you walk into for falafel is going to be THE place. So don’t be willy-nilly about it. When you get here, to the right spot, order the special falafel sandwich topped with that divine, crisp-skinned, tender-fleshed eggplant. It used to be you could ask for extra aubergine to pile on, but they discontinued that practice. I found a workaround. Among the menu’s <em>entrées</em> (that’s what the French call appetizers) is eggplant sautéed in lots of oil with onions and tomatoes. Order one of these and spoon that eggplant onto your sandwich, as an added garnish. <em>34 Rue des Rosiers, +33 1 48 87 63 60</em></p>
<p id="Wiu5Mm"><strong>Camille:</strong> When Americans envision the quintessential Parisian café, what they’re imagining is something close to this red awning-ed venue, complete with outdoor tables and woven chairs.<em> Ça, c’est typique!</em> The food isn’t going to blow your mind, but it’s consistent, and most important, you can have it on Sunday and Monday, when most of the restaurants in this neighborhood are closed. Steak tartare for dinner is my go-to here. <em>24 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, +33 1 42 72 20 50</em></p>
<p id="GYemSY"><a href="http://www.carette-paris.fr/"><strong>Carette</strong></a>: Carette opened in 1927 on the Place du Trocadéro, and it’s as picturesque as ever and still bustling. A newer location arrived a few years ago on the Place des Vosges, Paris’s oldest square. If you are a pastry-chaser, you will come here for a <em>palmier</em>, which happens to be my very favorite baked good on the planet, and theirs is a perfect specimen. You can sit down and enjoy it with a hot beverage, or find a free bench in the park and eat your buttery, flaky, caramelized <em>viennoiserie</em> while you watch the children play, the young lovers canoodle, the old folks reminisce... and the dogs do their business. Okay, maybe not. <em>25 Place des Vosges, +33 1 48 87 94 07</em></p>
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<p id="1Wxsc7"><strong>Chez Omar:</strong> If only Americans had imported the French-Algerian brasserie along with—or instead of?—its purely French counterpart… Well, actually they have, but that doesn’t make it any less of a treat to visit the Parisian prototype. A longtime gathering place for fashionistas, this winningly worn standby still draws its fair share of couture worshippers. Loyalists come back for <em>steak au poivre</em> or couscous with <em>méchoui d’agneau</em>. You’ll want to do the same, and it’s open on Sunday and Monday nights, which is useful information to have. <em>47 Rue de Bretagne, +33 9 86 39 91 14</em></p>
<p id="Dz1uBN"><a href="http://www.claudecolliot.com/"><strong>Claude Colliot</strong></a>: He is the best with the sweetbreads. No, really, I think about them a lot. It’s not like I’m always eating sweetbreads, either. He’s a self-taught genius (as in, at age seven, when he wanted cake, he simply made one, from scratch, without a recipe or any instruction from an adult), and chefs like Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Ducasse tried to hire him to head up their kitchens. Claude held out for a place of his own. It paid off. His wife, Chantal, who runs the front of house, is an ace on wine. In the tranquil, candlelit room, you might spot a beautiful person or two—Sofia Coppola is a former client from Colliot’s catering days (he cooked for her on the set of <em>Marie Antoinette</em>), Quentin Tarantino is a fan, and Marion Cotillard is a close friend—but you’ll be discreet about it, as befits the tenor of the place. <em>40 Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, +33 1 42 71 55 45</em></p>
<p id="juJ2K0"><a href="http://www1.mariagefreres.com/"><strong>Mariage Frères</strong></a>: This is where tea drinkers are born. Even if you think you don’t want to buy anything, you must promise to smell a few different varietals, just for the magical experience of sticking your nose into a huge tin and being transported, via inhalation, to another world. Start with Imperial Wedding, a gateway drug with its chocolate and caramel notes, and then follow your nose from there. There are black teas with blue orchids, green teas with roses, rooibos with bourbon and vanilla. Purchases aside, you will be better for having breathed them in. <em>30 Rue du Bourg-Tibourg, +33 1 42 72 28 11</em></p>
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<p id="wlKFRi"><a href="http://pierreherme.com/"><strong>Pierre Hermé</strong></a>: <em>À mon avis</em>, Hermé is the greatest living pastry chef. His shops around the city are numerous, and the first, on the Rue Bonaparte in the 6th, has my heart. But his seasonal tarts and macarons, and even his chocolate, are too good to pass up if you happen to be strolling by another location. The flavor combinations will mess with your head, in all the right ways. <em>18 Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, +33 1 43 54 47 77</em></p>
<p id="xyeIVF"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/PozzettoParis/"><strong>Pozzetto</strong></a>: People will tell you that Berthillon is the best—and obligatory—place to have ice cream in Paris. They’re not exactly wrong. It’s an institution, and definitely the yardstick against which other French ice cream should be measured. But I’d argue Pozzetto is better, even though if we’re being technical here this is gelato, not ice cream. Run by a Sicilian family, it’s a detour-worthy, mom-and-pop gem. The pistachio is made with Sicilian <em>pistacchi</em>,<em> </em>and if you don’t get a scoop of it, you’re an idiot. <em>39 Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, +33 1 42 77 08 64 </em>[There’s a newer second branch of Pozzetto nearby in the Haut Marais too, at 16 Rue Vieille du Temple]</p>
<p id="eAguht"><a href="http://www.cafeine.com/belle-hortense"><strong>La Belle Hortense</strong></a><strong>:</strong> It’s a bookstore… and it’s a bar. You can pull a new or rare title (or bottle) off the shelf and dive in. Many of the bound releases are art-focused and the space is used for exhibitions, so artsy types are likely to rub shoulders with their literary counterparts here. If you get hungry, you can go across the street to <strong>Au Petit Fer à Cheval, </strong>a tiny bistro established over a century ago and now under the same ownership as the bookstore. The endearingly threadbare restaurant contains one of the smallest bars in Paris, and it’s fittingly horseshoe-shaped. I’d always rather be reading, so you’ll find me where the pages are. <em>31 Rue Vieille du Temple, +33 1 48 04 71 60</em></p>
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https://www.eater.com/2016/10/19/13290296/paris-marais-restaurant-bar-cafeCharlotte Druckman2015-09-23T10:00:03-04:002015-09-23T10:00:03-04:00Judith Jones, In Her Own Words
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<figcaption><a href='http://www.landonnordeman.com/'>Landon Nordeman</a></figcaption>
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<p>The editor behind Julia Child and Lidia Bastianich — not to mention Langston Hughes and John Updike — on life, books, and cooking</p> <p></p>
<p><em>Editor's note: Judith Jones died on August 1, 2017, at the age of 93, almost two years after this profile of the legendary editor first ran. Read her obituary </em><a href="https://www.eater.com/2015/9/23/9355183/judith-jones"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em> </p>
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<div class="introduction"> <p>he phrase "living legend" is perhaps overused, but if the words still retain any of their original significance, Judith Jones is its embodiment. At 91, she's somehow simultaneously spry and frail, girlish and dignified. There are moments where she pauses — a memory lapse — but always returns a second later, sharp, ready with a temporarily forgotten name, or a detailed anecdote about her former employers Blanche and Alfred Knopf, founders of the eponymous publishing house where Jones worked from 1957 up until her retirement in 2013.</p> <p>She may be best known for her championing of a certain manuscript on French cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle, but her legacy exceeds that considerably. When it was published in 1961, <em>Mastering The Art of French Cooking</em> ushered in a golden age of cookbooks in United States and marked the start of Jones's prodigious output as an editor and shaper of the category. When she was hired at Knopf, however, she was known as the young woman who, a few years earlier, had persuaded Doubleday to publish <em>Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl</em>, after discovering the French edition in a pile of submissions she had been ordered to reject.</p> <div class="float-right"><q>She may be best known for her championing of a certain manuscript on French cooking, but her legacy exceeds that considerably</q></div> <p>"The idea of working on cookbooks never even occurred to me," Jones writes in her memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tenth-Muse-My-Life-Food/dp/0307277445/?tag=eater0c-20" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food</em></a>.<em> </em>"Blanche had hired me primarily to work with translators of French authors she had signed up after the war, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus." Irish author Elizabeth Bowen and American journalist John Hersey were also among her early charges; she worked with the poets Langston Hughes and Sharon Olds; she oversaw all but the very first of John Updike's books, some five dozen in all.</p> <p>But simultaneously, Jones was introducing the American public to Julia Child, and soon to similarly definitive regional<strong> </strong>culinary voices: Claudia Roden (on the food of the Middle East), Irene Kuo (China), Madhur Jaffrey (India), Edna Lewis (the American South), and Lidia Bastianich (Italy). In crusading for these books, Jones not only brought unfamiliar cuisines and ingredients into the kitchens of American home cooks, but she also helped their writers share their passions, and find and develop their voices.</p> <p>With all of that, we still seem only to mention Jones by association. She is "Julia Child's editor," or part of the ‘70s culinary power posse that included James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, and Richard Olney. That may be because her friends and writers generally cast long shadows<strong>, </strong>or because, as happens across all genres, readers tend to give all the credit to the byline, allowing the individual who makes the author look her very best — or who knows how to find a story where it seemed like there was none — to slip quietly into a historical footnote.</p> <p>You might say that this is the job of an editor, and you might be right. But the fact of Jones developing, and often personally discovering, so many incredible and diverse voices — in food, but also in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry — can hardly be a coincidence. There are through-lines here: her zealous tenacity, boundless curiosity and, rarest of all, her striking ability to both recognize and coax out talent. She would sooner apply the word to her writers, but "legendary" is the only suitable adjective for her output, and the woman herself.</p> <p>I'd wanted to meet Jones for a long time. We attended the same small all-girls school on the Upper East Side, and despite matriculating over a half-century behind her, I'd taken it as a sign that we must surely be simpatico. Over the course of several conversations in her Manhattan apartment, one in the company of photographer Landon Nordeman, we spoke about her approach to editing, the highs and lows of her storied career, and the wisdom she's acquired along the way. Here's Judith Jones, in her own voice.</p> </div>
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<p><strong>I'd had a few years out after college</strong>, but I hadn't really settled down anywhere, so I went to Paris, and stayed for two and a half years. I had never learned how to cook, and neither did my husband. We sort of came together over food. We would try things in tiny little kitchens with <em>garde-mangers</em> on the windowsill. But we made things, and we were so excited, and they were pretty good. I think that was what helped me<strong> </strong>love cooking, because it was making do, but making it fun and creative, and not everything was perfect.</p>
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<p><strong>When I came back to the United States</strong> I realized first thing how hideous the ingredients were. I mean, it was a low time in cookbook writing in America, and there was also the fact that there didn't seem to be an audience for them. There was the — what did Jim Beard call it? He had a lovely funny term for folks who cooked at home. "The Quick and Easy Crowd," that was it. Those were the disappointments; you just felt like, why bother? And so when I saw part of the <em>Mastering the Art</em> manuscript, I just couldn't believe it. It was as though somebody sent a present for me. But I was sitting at Knopf, editing Albert Camus and a few others I had found. I think finally when I was given the go-ahead, Mr. Knopf said it at the editorial meeting — I didn't go because I was too junior, but it was brought up. My friend Angus Cameron, who was the hunting and fishing man, presented the idea, and finally Alfred said, "Well, let's let Mrs. Jones have a chance." That was the beginning of it. I mean, it was just magic.</p>
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<p><strong>I was a general editor</strong>, so cooking was just a part of it; I didn't want to be working on more than one cookbook in a season. So I don't think I got into the politics of the food world, and the meanness. There were a few people that were mighty difficult. I shouldn't name names.</p>
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<p><strong>The cookbook editors were a Home Ec lot</strong>, and they weren't particularly creative people. We used to kind of joke about it, and being a cookbook editor, you were defensive — because you know, it was low, the bottom of the ladder of success. There weren't particularly good cookbook editors, and mostly they worked for places like <em>Good Housekeeping</em> and they were about being easy — short and easy. I think that tells you all. Because that's not the goal of cooking. The goal is making a delicious dinner.</p>
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<p><q>You never stop learning with food, it's very exciting. I had some sweetbreads the other night; they were so wonderful.</q></p>
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<p><strong>For a long time, the women</strong> — and they were usually women — who wrote about food were treated as second-class citizens. All because they cook! I think that's opened up. A good writer gets some good assignments, and they're treated better somehow. It just takes time.</p>
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<p><strong>I was Updike's editor for every book but his first</strong>; he'd left Harper because they tried to tell him what to do and he wasn't happy. Little by little over the years, he'd say to me, "I want to know what you think." I waited it out.</p>
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<p><strong>The most important thing an editor can do</strong> is be a diplomat. It's not your book, but you can subtly <em>try</em>, and it usually ends up that the writers express themselves so much more clearly. At least, that was my experience.</p>
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<p><strong>It's funny, because the harder the books were to edit</strong>, the more challenging they were, the more fun, in a way. I always wanted to get to know the writer, because once they trust you, you work much better together.</p>
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<p><q>If you want to write, write. It has to be a passion. When you edit, you're willing to stay up all night and then be slapped in the face.</q></p>
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<p><strong>I'm not sure that I'm that conscious of what I'm doing</strong> when I edit. I'm just happy when it comes out right and it's written with conviction.</p>
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<p><strong>With my first book, I</strong> <strong>was talking about various phases in my life</strong>, and I ended one of those little chapters with the line, "I licked the platter clean." Now, that was my era; that was the kind of thing you would have said. It came straight from my mouth. And my editor had put his line through it, he'd slashed it. So, when I sent it to the copy editor after looking at it, I just wrote "stet," and it was stetted. Sometimes, you just know that's better than argument.</p>
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<p><strong>One of the things that happened for me</strong>, cheekily, in the very first book I wrote, was I found that I was stiff, that I didn't know quite who I was writing for. I finally got out of that little study room where I wrote, and went and rolled on the old couch, and I started a letter: "Dear so-and-so."</p>
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<p><strong>To me, cooking is an art form</strong>, and like any art form, you first have to learn the fundamentals. And then, once they're there, once they're just part of you, and you get up and do a little dance or something, you don't follow somebody else's formula. You can take off on your own, and you learn through doing. Then you can let go of some of these strict rules, and make your own rules. I don't even think level measurements are such a big deal these days.</p>
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<p><q>You don't want to get to a point where people think everything's accessible, because it isn't. Coconuts are damned hard to whack open.</q></p>
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<p><strong>Things happen in life. </strong>Julia once said to me, and I've quoted her on this, "Judith! We were born at the right time." And I said, "Yes, Julia, but we had to act on it." And she said, "Right you are!"</p>
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<p><strong>To be absolutely truthful</strong>, I got so excited by Julia's book and what it did for making people better cooks, and the tools that you needed to make it really work in an American city or small town, and I thought, <em>If we could do this for French food, for heavens' sake, let's start doing it for other exotic cuisines!</em> I used the word "exotic," and that meant the Middle East with Claudia Roden, it meant better Indian cooking with Madhur Jaffrey. But how did I know that a person was the right person to do it? If I saw in somebody something I really liked, and was original, then we'd get together and say, "How can we market this and get a larger audience?" and so on, and I'd tell Jim Beard about it, and he'd have some good ideas. That's the way I did it, but it's changed a lot.</p>
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<p><strong>The ethics of recipe-writing and stealing is rather interesting</strong>. It's only the text that is protected by copyright. You know, you tell people this and they say, ‘Huh, really? Well, I've used it several times.' And I say, well, aside from everything else, it's not very courteous, because someone else has been playing with this and developing ideas, and you don't just go in and go off with them. But it happens! I've even had people say, 'Oh, have you got the recipe? I'd love to make it,' and you have to be hard-boiled.</p>
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<p><strong>I think Marcella Hazan could irritate people. </strong>The haughtiness of Victor Hazan — I mean, I got to know them well, but even in the writing: "Well, you know, Americans wouldn't understand this." I was very happy when we separated. I just felt, <em>Who needs that?</em> If I didn't need it, who does?</p>
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<p><q>There are very nice people in publishing. I hope that doesn't change.</q></p>
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<p><strong>When we were doing the photographs </strong>for one of Lidia Bastianich's books, I had a list of questions for her. And one of the questions I asked was, "Why do you have a hot, hot pan? And why, when you've sautéed your onions and garlic and all that kind of thing, do you push them away to the sides of the pan, and you put in some other vegetables as aromatics, and go <em>[stirring motion] shush-shush-shush-shush</em>?" And she said, "Well, I just learned to do that." Madhur Jaffrey was the only other person that I'd encountered that treated the step exactly like that — exactly! It was a way of giving an intensity of taste. And we all just got so excited by this, because what it told you was that somehow, food flowed from India. That's a long story about one particular thing, but it's very significant.</p>
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<p><strong>Lidia was so excited that she was a writer</strong>; she would tell people, "This is Judith! She made me a writer!" But when I retired, Lidia was getting away from writing and more into the form of a cookbook, the rules of the game. I tried to say nothing, because I can't be there — you can't have two editors. But it's sad, because good food writing is not a set of sterile rules. Even M.F.K. Fisher — you don't think of her so much as a recipe writer, but when she does throw in a recipe, you're just <em>panting</em> by the time you get to taste it. You can't stand it! You're very much in her hands.</p>
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<p><strong>If a restaurant chef wants to write a cookbook</strong>, if he or she wants to do it and is good and really has something to offer, it helps us to learn from them, because they're very creative people. But the real trouble with anybody's home cooking comes when they don't rely on themselves enough, and so it's not a creative force. The world could be perfectly happy or not happy without them, but we couldn't be happy without M.F.K. Fisher.</p>
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<p><strong>New cookbooks</strong> — I hate to tell you how few I look at, even.</p>
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<p><strong>Let's face it, the individual home cook isn't that careful</strong>. Perhaps they'll cut a few corners, because it's a little bit boring to check your yeast for four days.</p>
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<p><strong>In a funny way, food writing is curtailed</strong> by all these <em>what</em>s and <em>and</em>s, and you know, there's not much courage there.</p>
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<p><strong>I think what's going to be in for the next decade</strong> is emphasis on food as medicine, until we go crazy and don't even want to eat food. I hate it! And the shakes! I mean, I like to use my teeth, and chewing is very good exercise.</p>
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<p><strong>I was going to start a march on supermarkets</strong>, and it would be mostly — because this is my other bugaboo — that just to make more money, they push food that is for four, six, eight people, and there's never anything that's just for one person. But you shouldn't be fighting your supermarket. It's just not practical, and they know it isn't practical.</p>
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<p><strong>I was thrilled when I read Atul Gawande</strong>. He's a surgeon, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Being-Mortal-Medicine-What-Matters/dp/0805095152?tag=eater0c-20" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">his book</a> is on the bestseller list now, and it's just such a beautiful book on the last phase of life before dying. We have treated that last phase as though it were an ordinary chapter in our lives, when it's really a time that's extremely important, that you're very vulnerable, you need people to take care of you, but you do not want to be smothered with it. But he handles it with such grace and such understanding. And I started reading that book, I couldn't stop, and I read it in three days, which is very good. You shouldn't give up.</p>
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<p class="end"><strong>I still don't think</strong> I'm necessarily a cookbook editor.</p>
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<p class="credit"><a href="https://twitter.com/cettedrucks">Charlotte Druckman</a> is a journalist and food writer-type based in New York City. She's the author of Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen, and her cookbook on cast iron-skillet baking arrives in fall 2016 from Clarkson Potter. <br><a href="http://www.landonnordeman.com/">Landon Nordeman</a> is a photographer who regularly contributes to The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Saveur, ESPN The Magazine, Time, National Geographic Magazine, W, Vanity Fair and Vogue. He lives in New York City.<br> Editor: <a href="https://twitter.com/hels">Helen Rosner</a></p>
https://www.eater.com/2015/9/23/9355183/judith-jonesCharlotte Druckman