Food World Things That Are Actually Good

This post originally appeared on January 6, 2018, in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I spent so much time and energy last year, especially towards the end of the year, focused on the things that made me mad — calling out the bad guys, trying to be inclusive of those left behind — in food journalism and the restaurant world, that I didn’t leave enough room in my head for feelings beyond anger and self-righteousness and doubt.

There are serious stories in this industry. There are serious issues. But what’s so great about our publication and the food world at large is that there is also so much joy to be had in it. There are ice cream sundaes and glamorous steakhouses and ugh I’m so cheesy, but there are legions of people who just want to make others happy through food.

So here, fresh into 2018, a list of joyful things. We might as well enjoy them before nuclear winter:

1. Gabrielle Hamilton’s New York Times Magazine column
2. Mimi Sheraton’s and Chrissy Teigen’s tweets
3. These blue benches at this new restaurant in Denver
4. The black forest cake at Rudy’s (which I ate on my birthday recently)
5. Camille Becerra’s Instagram stories
6. Tejal Rao’s everything, but definitely this piece about cakes
7. These candy makers in Toronto
8. All of the old Four Seasons and Le Cirque shout outs in Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries
9. Bobby Doherty’s photos and styling for this feature about dinner parties
10. Missy Robbins’ leg of lamb recipe in her cookbook
11. All the good stuff happening over at Taste
12. Ottolenghi’s chocolate chip cookie recipe in his cookbook
13. Danny Bowien’s Mind of a Chef season
14. The pre-dinner snacks at Vespertine
15. The kouign amann ($$$) at Manresa
16. The hanging plant explosion at restaurants nationwide
17. This Shake Shack plushie
18. The shitty soup robot

On Eater

• Intel: The originator of Detroit-style pizza will expand throughout the Midwest and beyond; Google wants to sell Zagat; Tao opened an Eggslut knockoff; the cold weather cost Montreal icon Joe Beef its wine cellar; hospitality brand AvroKo will expand to London; In-N-Out added hot cocoa to its menu; Eataly Chicago chose a weird time to put up potentially offensive posters; John Besh is spinning off his hotel group from his restaurant group, and he won’t have any ownership in it; Dallas chef John Tesar teases expansion to California; Sean Brock opened his fourth Husk in Savannah; Locol is partnering with Whole Foods; Tartine Bakery will expand to Seoul; Andrew Cuomo is considering dropping the tipped minimum wage in NY; the husband-and-wife owners of sweet Philly restaurant Aldine are splitting up, with the wife keeping the restaurant; the much-anticipated Blossom Bar opened in Boston; the former Grace chef in Chicago has one serious non-compete; and a proposed commercial gas moratorium could spell disaster for LA’s new restaurants.
• End-of-year closures: Marcus Samuelsson’s D.C. casino restaurant; New York’s Vermilion; Oakland’s Juhu Beach Club; the original location of Smoking Goat in London; New York’s Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar; almost all the restaurants at Vegas’s Lucky Dragon casino.
• The annual Lawry’s Beef Bowl is LA’s enduring college football feast.
• Cool video: Nepalese momos drawing people to the back of a grocery store in Ohio.
• Five restaurant chains to watch in 2018
• I love looking at pictures of pretty restaurant design around the country and am currently digging a lot of what’s going on in Denver.

Photo by Adam Larkey

This week on the Upsell

This week on the Eater Upsell podcast, my co-host Dan Geneen and I talked restaurant-world trends with editors Serena Dai, Stefanie Tuder, and Bill Addison, and Instagram trends with our in-house social expert Adam Moussa. What are we seeing? Axe-throwing bars, blue banquettes, plants, champagne bars, neon, ube, table-side drama, fried squash rings, Detroit-style pizza, and beige “normie” food on Instagram. Meanwhile, here are 140 more 2018 food trends predicted by other people.

Off Eater

• The reckoning comes for the coffee bros. [SF Chronicle]
• Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2017 Jealousy List. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
• Here’s Adam Platt’s list of where to eat this year. [Grub Street]
• JJ Goode is America’s best worst cook. [Taste]
• God bless you every single day, Martha Stewart. [Martha Stewart Blog]
• Navigating the uncanny valley of food. [Wired]
• Back when dieting was a manly dude-bro thing. [Jstor]
• Starting this week in Iceland, companies have to prove they pay the same amount to women and men. [NPR]
• Gwyneth Paltrow is currently shilling an at-home coffee enema. [New York Post]
• I would very much like to see this rap about Asian foods turned into a children’s book. [HuffPost]

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