New York Times Archives

For the state-of-the-art wedding feast, ‘Look Is Everything’

JUNE 18, 2018, The New York Times

All the tasting-menu options that Susan Shek and Noah Sexton have sampled for their August wedding are delicious, but they want food that makes a visual statement.

They’re leaning toward caviar on a buckwheat blini that bears no resemblance to a blini; it’s a squat little tower made of reconfigured blini ingredients. The caterer has also suggested the steak frites, a slender rectangle of beef encircled by a flat ribbon of fried potato that floats inches above it, anchored at the base.

These are just two of 16 image-forward hors d’oeuvres offered by Pinch Food Design, a Manhattan caterer. Other potential menu items include “tartare Jackson Pollock style” — the sauce spattered over chunks of raw salmon or tuna — and shards of chocolate bark dangling from the spokes of a large umbrella that a server carries at the reception, inviting guests to pluck at will.

What to do when laptops and silence take over your cafe?

FEBRUARY 13, 2018, The New York Times

Kyle Glanville should have been thrilled. All 70 of the outdoor seats at Go Get Em Tiger were taken, only three days after he and his partner opened the cafe in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.

He was not. “Everybody was at a laptop wearing headphones,” Mr. Glanville said. He strode inside, unplugged the device that provided free Wi-Fi and tossed it into a bin in his office.

He wanted a courtyard where people talked to one another, not a silent office for remote workers. And while anyone with a cellphone hot spot could connect without his help, he had made himself clear. On a recent weekday morning, almost a year and a half later, the courtyard was still full of people, but this time they were talking to one another. Only one was at his laptop.

Lights! Camera! Culinary school will teach Instagram skills

OCTOBER 2, 2017, The New York Times

HYDE PARK, N.Y. — Check out the tray liners at Martina, Danny Meyer’s new pizzeria in the East Village, which were designed as branded Instagram bait. Each has what the executive chef, Nick Anderer, calls “a frenetic doodle” of contemporary Roman slang phrases, images of wineglasses and pizza, and at the bottom left, the restaurant’s name.

And if you wonder why your Instagram shots of Martina’s pies look so good, credit the lighting system, which allows the staff to adjust bulbs individually, with “a warmer hue in the dining room than in the kitchen,” Mr. Anderer said, “so it doesn’t cast too much shade against the pizza.”

To survive in tough times, restaurants turn to data-mining

AUGUST 28, 2017, The New York Times

The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you’ll be eating something else — without a second bottle of wine, because you can’t find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out.

The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.

Is New York too expensive for restaurateurs? We do the math

OCTOBER 25, 2016, The New York Times

The New York City restaurateur’s perennial lament — that staying afloat is tougher here than anywhere else in the country — grows louder each time another restaurant closes. Rents are astronomical, the complaint goes; wages are rising, regulations are byzantine, and don’t even talk about the price of fresh produce.

But is it true? Is New York any less hospitable to independently owned restaurants than other big cities?

Recent figures suggest that it may be: The number of independent restaurants in the city fell 3 percent from March 2015 to March 2016, slightly more than the 2.7 percent drop nationwide, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm that tracks consumer spending.

In Rome, using ‘Roman Holiday’ as a guide

OCTOBER 18, 2016, The New York Times

The silver-haired gentleman in the perfectly tailored dark suit made a sweeping gesture and gave me a wistful smile.

“It was right here,” he said. “1952.” He pointed to a particular spot on the floor. “That is where she stood.”

If he was alive in 1952 he was a very little boy, but every guide I speak to at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome knows and reveres the spot where she stood. “Roman Holiday” was the first American film to be shot in its entirety in Italy, and “she” was Audrey Hepburn in her first starring film role, playing a princess on the lam who spends one glorious day in Rome with a journalist who figures he has the scoop of his career. Gregory Peck was the journalist; it didn’t take long for the scoop to turn into a brief romance.

Private eyes in the grocery aisles

APRIL 4, 2015, The New York Times

Mansour Samadpour makes his way through the supermarket like a detective working a crime scene, slow, watchful, up one aisle and down the next. A clerk mistakenly assumes that he needs help, but Mr. Samadpour brushes him off. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

He buys organic raspberries that might test positive for pesticides and a fillet of wild-caught fish that might be neither wild nor the species listed on the label. He buys beef and pork ground fresh at the market. He is disappointed that there is no caviar, which might turn out to be something cheaper than sturgeon roe. That’s an easy case to crack.

The Counter Archives

Photo by Libby Anderson/Flickr/Nicolas Raymond/Graphic by Talia Moore

The Shutdown Notebook

A weekly series about one chef who closed three restaurants during the pandemic—and intends to get them back.

Click here for all headlines.

Graphic by Alex Hinton | Source Images: iStock

As the pandemic ebbs, surviving restaurants face a new challenge: each other

MARCH 9, 2022, The Counter

Numbers don’t lie, but they do sometimes struggle with follow-up questions.

In the ramp-up to the federal government’s omnibus aid package, released Wednesday without any more restaurant aid, advocacy groups lobbed numbers to show how tenuous life continues to be for the sector, in a last-ditch attempt to secure more help. Shuttered restaurants, dire predictions of more closures to come, lost revenues, lost jobs; none of it was enough to sway Congress.

This is how a California farmers’ market looks when there isn’t enough water for thirsty crops

AUGUST 12, 2021, The Counter

My food trajectory is pretty simple. Chicago: tired, overcooked produce. Ann Arbor: tired, overcooked produce. Santa Monica, California, Technicolor year-round abundance that I am still not used to after most of my life here. Every Wednesday I’m at the farmers’ market when it opens, and every Wednesday I buy more produce than makes sense

How impractical am I, you might ask. Here’s how: I often walk back to my car to offload a large basket full of goods so I can make a second pass and buy more. I am not a vegetarian, but animal protein has to fight for a toehold on the plate.

From Spago to Campanile to now: Re-imagining the American restaurant

JUNE 28, 2021, The Counter

When the chef Mark Peel died last week, his daughter, Vanessa Silverton-Peel, said, “My dad in so many ways was really ill-fit for the emergence of this whole rock star-chef era. He always thought of himself as a cook, he thought of himself as doing manual labor.”

“He wasn’t the guy who was always looking for attention,” said Silverton-Peel. “He was the guy who wanted to feed people really good food.”

Chef Jacques Pépin got through the pandemic with kitchen utensils, a video camera, and a great wardrobe

JUNE 16, 2021, The Counter

It takes un village to be Jacques Pépin, these days: The 85-year-old chef and educator’s expanding identity roster now includes Facebook celebrity, activist, and, according to GQ, online style icon. When the pandemic sent all of us home, his first instinct was to help us cook, with a batch of instructional videos posted on social media. Next he turned his attention to The Jacques Pépin Foundation, which teaches job skills to formerly incarcerated people but had canceled three fundraising events; it needed help as well. Along with his daughter, Claudine, the foundation’s president, and Rollie Wesen, its executive director, Pépin created a video recipe book full of recipes contributed by a network of chefs, which went to everyone who bought a $40 annual membership. Wesen joined Pépin for this conversation, to talk about what came next.

“I quit. Wait. I’m broke.”: A career chef searches for a bridge back to safe employment.

JUNE 10, 2021, The Counter

It’s January 2020 and everything’s going fine. I’m executive chef at Barbrix, and executive chef and partner at All’acqua, both of them owned by the same guy. Then all of a sudden it’s March 15 and we don’t know what to do. We don’t normally do take-out, but the owner says let’s give it a shot. He works sauté, I work the pizza oven, we had a dishwasher, and his brother could do delivery.

But I’m 65 years old, I’m a cancer survivor and I have the beginnings of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), which could stay like this for 30 years or could get worse. I’m not a quitter, but I realized this was way more serious than we thought.

No choice but to quit: Priya Krishna chose unemployment over a workplace that didn’t work

JUNE 9, 2021, The Counter

I remember the first day of working from home at Bon Appétit; I was at my parent’s place in Dallas where I ended up staying for three months. I had lost a ton of freelancing assignments and sort of mentally accepted that my income was going to be a certain amount less. But I thought: I can live off of this, and that’s fine.

The industry I reported on was imploding, with no help from the government; adding to that was the killing of George Floyd and all the protests that ensued. It made me think about my blind spots as a journalist, as a person, and how can I be better, what I can improve. There was a lot of anxiety, self-reflection, trying to figure out how to do the most good in the privileged position I was in. Reporting was really helpful, shining a light on voices who I felt at that moment needed to be highlighted.

Old jobs, new jobs: Rewriting a future in food

JUNE 9, 2021, The Counter

Job loss and the pandemic go sadly hand in hand: 2.5 million restaurant workers out of work, a ripple effect on businesses that relied on them, farmers with crops they couldn’t sell. We’ve heard more than we ever wanted about people whose lives have been turned upside down.

And yet food people, whatever sector they’re in, don’t give up easily, in part because they are driven as much by passion as practicality. Maybe more so; these are not careers that scream certainty or attract the buttoned-down. People have decided, or been forced to decide, that it’s time to rewrite the future, whether that means an adjustment—a new job, a reconfigured business—or something more dramatic. Leaving the field is not an option for most of them, it seems. And for every one who did step away, there are newcomers who’ve been drawn in.

How a family farm weathers the pandemic: ‘Sustainable agriculture’ takes on new meaning for farmers hoping to survive

MAY 26, 2021, The Counter

Back then, the real action began an hour before the Santa Monica farmers’ market opened at 8 on Wednesday mornings. Wholesale customers got a one-hour head-start on civilians, so local chefs, the brain trust of Los Angeles’ burgeoning restaurant scene, started to wander in at 7. A few sent minions to pick up preorders, but many chefs showed up in person to kibitz with farmers whose knowledge often exceeded their own.

Transcend the bran muffin: One woman’s manifesto for whole-grain baking

MAY 6, 2021, The Counter

Roxana Jullapat’s new cookbook, Mother Grains, is a hardcover dare: She defies the home baker to try whole grains and not get hooked. Everything we think about baking with them is wrong, as far as she’s concerned—and she stands ready to show the brave among us a better way.

What if we turned restaurants into government contractors?

FEBRUARY 11, 2021, The Counter

Biden’s new executive order is delightfully and deceptively simple: Restaurants can provide food aid and be reimbursed by FEMA at 100 percent. But FEMA isn’t in the funds-in-advance business, and that’s where it gets complicated.

Here’s what it’s like to spend 10 months covering a restaurant industry in extended crisis

JANUARY 28, 2021, The Counter

Bret Thorn wants a beer.

Not any beer, mind you. One poured by a bartender, not consumed at home or shivering in a yurt. One served at a neighborhood place where he can choose to sit at the bar and schmooze with strangers, sit at the bar and not talk at all, or take a table with friends. One that provides him access to all the intangibles of going out.

Photo essay: New rules push restaurants to the brink, with no end in sight

DECEMBER 11, 2020, The Counter

The pivots come so fast they’ve blurred into one extended, manic pirouette, as Los Angeles restaurants that just invested in outdoor amenities turn back to take-out and delivery, with no good sense of when outdoor will return. Indoor dining shut down in July in L.A., and it ends next week in New York City.

“We’re not going to wait for something to happen:” This is what it’s like to open a new restaurant in a ‘ghost town’

OCTOBER 22, 2020, The Counter

In spite of everything—which is saying a lot—there’s still a small thrill on a restaurant’s opening night. One couple has already ordered takeout and headed home, two guys just sat down at a table against the wall, and an eager employee stands at the sidewalk with menus and a spiel, hoping to add to their ranks. Edobox, a Japanese fast-casual place, has opened for business just as the country faces a third Covid surge.

For former James Beard award winners, silver medal was once pure gold

AUGUST 21, 2020, The Counter

In the pre-pandemic world, a James Beard award was the equivalent of a Grammy, an Emmy, an Oscar; it drove customers and even potential investors. Right now, when survival is up for grabs, the benefits are less clear.

The James Beard Foundation announced on Thursday it is taking a two-year step-back—no announcement of 2020 winners, and no award competition in 2021—while it rebuilds the awards process from the ground up in collaboration with what the announcement calls an “outside social justice agency.”

Food halls used to play second-best to real restaurants. Now they offer an unlikely refuge to a battered restaurant industry.

JULY 14, 2020, The Counter

Akhtar Nawab has seven chef friends whose restaurants have gone out of business because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and yet he is headed from New York City to Chicago to see how a new 10,500-square foot project is going, ahead of its anticipated opening August 3.

Nawab has seen the future, and it doesn’t look like his friends’ defunct places, nor like his full-service restaurants in Brooklyn, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. It looks like a food hall: specifically, the Dr. Murphy’s Food Hall in the Cook County Hospital complex, which Nawab’s Hospitality HQ Group will operate in addition to Inner Rail Food Hall in Omaha, Nebraska; until July, he also operated a stall at Brooklyn’s Time Out Market.

How to keep farmers’ market shopping safe, from the stall to your kitchen sink

MARCH 27, 2020, The Counter

Nothing is the same: The Wednesday farmers’ market in Santa Monica, California, at almost 40 the oldest, and biggest, in the state, used to be half shopping, half socializing, the closed-off streets clogged with people chatting and comparing purchases, the farmers barely able to squeeze sideways between stalls. Customers bought citrus fruit from farmers who a generation ago had accompanied their parents to the market.

A takeout food safety timeline, from the restaurant kitchen to your dining room table

MARCH 20, 2020, The Counter

As the Covid-19 case count mushrooms in the U.S., restaurant dining rooms are largely empty. To feed loyal customers—and try to make ends meet—some kitchens have turned into delivery operations, but they’ve had to adjust. Here, restaurateur Nate Adler shares his approach at Gertie, an all-day Brooklyn café. They send out rotisserie chickens, breakfast sandwiches, and care packages, without ever opening their doors, doing all delivery and take-out business through a take-out window.

Nearly a third of small, independent farmers are facing bankruptcy by the end of 2020, new survey says

MARCH 18, 2020, The Counter

It seems an oasis of good news in a desert of bad: Small farmers who saw restaurant sales evaporate and farmers’ market sales erode, in the wake of Covid-19, have found alternative ways to sell produce. They contribute to boxes sold by shuttered restaurants, sell their own boxes out of their trucks, even offer delivery. And they’re selling retail, not wholesale, so the money’s good.

If chef and restaurateur Dan Barber asks how they’re doing, the unanimous answer is, “Great.”

The American restaurant is on life support

MARCH 2, 2020, The Counter

In a week, The New York Times would run a rave review of FieldTrip, a rice-centric little place in Harlem, New York City. Crowds of eager diners would suddenly descend, and the Sweetgreen chain, as well as the folks at Rockefeller Center and developers around the country, would get in touch about possible alliances.

Is this beloved Los Angeles bakery resilient enough to survive replication?

NOVEMBER 14, 2019, The Counter

By 10:30, the commuter coffee-and-pastry crowd has come and gone, but there’s still a line to the door at Proof Bakery in Atwater Village, a small neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Customers crane their necks to see how many of their favorite items are left, because once they’re gone, they’re gone. They monitor the little tables, all of them full, to see who’s close to done; one woman gives up and turns an outdoor window ledge into a seat. It’s a more varied crowd than you might find at more stylish venues on more stylish if overpriced streets, and employees at the nine-year-old bakery know most of them.

In California, farmers are facing sunburned apples and frozen greens

NOVEMBER 12, 2019, The Counter

Mike Cirone didn’t prune his apple trees as much as he usually does, this year, because an extended heat spell made him worried about sun damage on the fruit. There was “leaf scorching” on the outermost leaves, he said, so he left the trees bushy to shade the apples at his farm in San Luis Obispo, five miles from the central California coast.

An hour inland, in Paso Robles, Barbara Spencer and her husband, Bill, got a different kind of surprise at Windrose Farm—early, harsh frosts, down to 16 to 18 degrees. One frost brought their greens harvest to a “screeching halt,” says Spencer, because they hadn’t covered the hoop houses with protective plastic in time.

At this food hall, public space comes first, vendors order collectively, and employees are trained to work at any counter

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019, The Counter

If history in fact repeats itself, a line is forming in downtown Santa Monica, California as you read this. The first West Coast outlet of chef/author/TV personality David Chang’s fried chicken place, Fuku, is scheduled to open Wednesday at Social Eats, a tiny food court that debuted this summer, and locals are ready to participate in this generation’s favorite outdoor sport: waiting with a bunch of strangers to get something to eat.

The boom in eco-friendly tableware is causing chaos at restaurants

JUNE 3, 2019, The Counter

It was still dark when Christina Grace got dressed for work: well-worn jeans and a tee, no-skid shoes and a baseball cap. For a touch of color, apple-green rubber gloves. If you’re going to root around in the garbage, rubber gloves are essential.

She headed for a Midtown Manhattan branch of Dig Inn, a quick-service chain that had hired her consulting firm, Foodprint, to analyze its trash, with an emphasis on post-consumer waste—the things customers throw out from the moment they place their orders until they walk out the door.

Who feeds 19 million New Yorkers every day?

MAY 9, 2019, The Counter

Each day, nearly 800,000 people go to work to supply food to millions of New Yorkers.

The city’s food—19 billion pounds each year, according to a 2016 study commissioned by the city—is trucked in via six primary routes: Four bridges and two tunnels, with the George Washington Bridge bringing in the most volume. It’s sold at 42,000 outlets throughout the five boroughs, over half of them restaurants and cafes, the rest, chain supermarkets, bodegas, and online grocery stores. The food ends up on the plates of over 8.6 million residents, over 60 million tourists each year, and hundreds of thousands of daily commuters from the tri-state area.

Los Angeles Times Archives

Quarantine bakers, we can do better than banana bread

MAY 18, 2020, Los Angeles Times

I am a quarantine baker, because baking is meditation but better: You live in the moment and get a treat for having done so.

I look for recipes that symbolize the qualities we need to endure our newly restricted lives, ones that feel substantial and reward a disciplined attention to task. So I would like someone to explain why a search for “banana bread recipe” yields 452,000,000 Google search results. It will be more by the time you read this; it’s the Instagram darling of the moment.

Wall Street Journal Archives

From left: Pickled grapes, pickled cantaloupe, pickled watermelon rind. Ted Cavanaugh for the Wall Street Journal. — From left: Pickled grapes, pickled cantaloupe, pickled watermelon rind. Ted Cavanaugh for the Wall Street Journal.

Refrigerator pickles: Summer fruit, all sealed up

AUGUST 3, 2016, Wall Street Journal

Cookbook author Ted Lee doesn’t like green Thompson seedless grapes. It’s nothing personal, but by the time they make the flight from California to the market where he shops in Brooklyn, they seem to have lost some of their flavor. So he pickles them, along with red seedless grapes, because to him a jolt of vinegar and garlic and chili flakes and rosemary is just what a jet-lagged grape needs.

Pickling is so virtuous: It not only revives fruit but uses up things like watermelon rind that would otherwise go to waste. It also means that you can buy up all the summer produce you want, right now, and what you don’t eat can be brined and refrigerated to see you through the lean months.

Refrigerator pickles reward patience—their flavors improve after about a week—but they demand no particular expertise. I stumped Jean-Paul Bourgeois, executive chef of New York’s Blue Smoke restaurants, when I asked how long his watermelon-rind pickles last. The refrigerator protects them like canning does, so they’re good for months, maybe a year as long as they’re submerged in liquid—though Mr. Bourgeois always uses them up sooner than that.

Master the art of the sandwich

MARCH 31, 2016, Wall Street Journal

Travis Lett, chef-owner of Gjusta in Venice, Calif., takes the sandwich seriously. His meats and fish are house-smoked, the condiments made from scratch; in the early days, the breads kept him and his bakers up late, playing with sourdough starters.

He strides into the kitchen and hesitates—not because he’s unsure but because he’s running options in his brain. I’ve asked him to construct a customized sandwich for me, and the build-your-own list at Gjusta includes six meat and fish options, three cheeses, seven spreads and nine vegetables on any of 11 breads. Or four bialys. You do the math.

Los Angeles has always been a sandwich town, never mind the carbs and the fact that the camera adds 15 pounds. The city’s culinary endowment includes French dips at Philippe’s and Cole’s, hamburgers at the Apple Pan or Cassell’s, hot dogs at Pinks, pastramiat Langer’s, the Godmother (a virtuosic take on the Italian sub) at Bay Cities Italian deli and on and on.

Build a bolder salad: recipes that pack the punch of bitter greens

APRIL 19, 2016, Wall Street Journal

Now that even McDonald’s offers a baby kale salad, forward-looking diners and innovative chefs face a quandary: Which green is the new black? The answer—on menus and at farmers’ markets from coast to coast right now—is an array of strong, bitter and peppery leaves that make kale seem more like the milder salad greens it shouldered out of the way.

Chef Paul Kahan, whose eight-restaurant Chicago empire includes Blackbird, Avec and Dove’s Luncheonette, doesn’t even include kale on his list of bitter greens. It’s a “green green,” he said, a gentler variety, not as forceful as the greens he’s gravitating to currently. Chef Jody Williams, who owns Buvette and, with partner Rita Sodi, Via Carota in Greenwich Village, calls kale an “entry-level bitter green, a gateway green.”

Just past that gate, a collection of bigger, bolder leaves awaits, most of them of Italian heritage, almost as much fun to pronounce as they are to eat.

Recipe for a cake with sunshine baked in

Updated JANUARY 20, 2016, Wall Street Journal

Like everyone else, I went to Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco for the pizza, but the dish that stuck with me was the dessert. Torta di riso is a common enough Italian sweet, but this particular rice cake was harmony on a plate: rich custard balanced by vibrant lemon, dense with rice that still had some bite to it. A lot was going on inside that unassuming slice, and I was not going home without a road map back to it.

I walked right up to the chef-owner, Chris Bianco, to ask for the recipe. He was at the oven, mid-pizza, but he said sure, write down your email address and I’ll send it.

Europe (finally) wakes up to superior coffee

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015, Wall Street Journal

Morning coffee, Florence, Italy: I planned to head for one of the espresso bars where elegant people toss back a dark brew in a tiny cup. I knew to pay first and hand the receipt to the barista. I knew to drink fast, on my feet, because only tourists pay extra to linger at a table. I knew not to drink anything with added milk after 11 a.m., noon, tops. If I ever felt close to sophisticated, it was in an Italian espresso bar.

I mentioned a favorite destination to my 25-year-old daughter. “We are not drinking that coffee,” she said, her tone compassionate but firm. I followed her and her GPS out the door.

Whole-grain desserts for the hedonist

Updated JANUARY 4, 2017, Wall Street Journal

Multigrain desserts (don’t wince) are no longer the leaden-but-virtuous pastries of yesteryear. A new generation of bakers is using whole grains innovatively—not in place of white flour as a statement of nutritional piety, but in the very same mixing bowl, with delicious results.

Think hybrid; think enhanced classics. Oatmeal cookies, cranberry tart and pear pie aren’t exactly new ideas, but the iterations under consideration here...