Commentary — Karen Stabiner

The restaurant lover’s guide to picking a president

Los Angeles Times

We judge presidential candidates on so many extraneous criteria: the style and color of their clothes, their hair, their height; whether they laugh or smile or scowl.

The legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote, “First we eat. Then we do everything else.” In that spirit, I think it’s our patriotic duty to add how and where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump dine out to the list. It turns out not to be extraneous at all.

Swing state women: Time to rewrite history.

The Boston Globe

When I was 17, I was denied the editor’s job at my high school newspaper because I was a girl — which I know because years later the faculty sponsor confessed and apologized.

When I was in my twenties, I got a job at a magazine where the men who did the hiring secretly considered dress size a job qualification, and months later watched the copy desk threaten a walkout to make sure a wildly capable size 10 got a job.

Gwen Walz’s empathy

The Minnesota Star Tribune

You know the recipe for a traditional political convention: Political star power, celebrities, a lot of preaching to the choir, standing ovations, speeches that run long and cutaways to delirious delegates.

And then there’s Gwen Walz, aspiring Second Lady and professional-grade empath. For all the marquee names, she is, I believe, a tremendous stealth asset — particularly among women her age and up, who are moving toward the Democratic ticket, but not as quickly as younger voters are.

‘I appreciate you’ is a sign of high anxiety in 2024

Los Angeles Times

Thanks for reading.

No, that won’t do. What I mean to say is, I actually, literally, appreciate you for reading this.

“Actually” — and verbal boosterism in general — is everywhere these days. I spotted it most recently in Apple’s new Safari ad campaign that ran during the Olympics, because an unadorned slogan — “A browser that’s private” — doesn’t sound as convincing as “A browser that’s actually private.”

Tim Walz, food czar?

The Minnesota Star Tribune

Gov. Tim Walz should be the Harris administration’s food czar.

Yes, the man who washes down tater tot hotdish with vast amounts of Diet Mountain Dew is the guy who can get us to eat better. Look at the photos from his teaching days. The man has dropped some serious pounds, and he did it long before anyone had heard of Ozempic.

The DiCaprio effect when dating after 50

Boston Globe

Men prefer younger women. If you’re a woman over 60 — maybe even 50 — you know I’m right.

“We are not playing around.”

It was January 22, 1990. I know the date because somebody on the news had just mentioned the seventeenth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The future of dining out is lining up

The New York Times

It is hardly the only bagel line in Los Angeles, but people I trust say Courage Bagels is worth the wait.

A mountain of food at the restaurant? No thanks.

Boston Globe

The big platter of food in the photograph looks so good: a mountain of seafood, roasted vegetables, and rice.

Oh well. Guess I’ll go somewhere else for dinner.

Just don’t call it a bagel. It’s fluffy, domed and dimpled

Los Angeles Times

Bagels are under siege, and if you need proof, I offer a single word: Airy.

Bagels, which have always been synonymous with chewy, have recently been described

— approvingly — as airy on both coasts and in Canada.

Also, fluffy.

Spotify gave me back my father

Boston Globe

My father stopped by my house recently, even though he died in 1987, and I have Spotify to thank for the reunion.

I’d just subscribed to the music streaming service, and at my daughter’s suggestion I allowed Spotify to suggest songs it thinks I might like. That’s a problematic sentence for me — I don’t like technology telling me what to do, and I don’t think it can think — but I don’t want to congeal as I age, so I decided to give it a try. I could always opt out.

Should we say this term of endearment to friends?

AARP

It happened without warning.

A friend and I were nearing the one-hour mark on a meandering phone call, the kind of catch-up we depend on now that we don’t live in the same city, but I had to get back to work.

“Listen, sweetheart,” I said, “I have to go.”

“Okay,” she replied. “Love you.”

‘American Fiction’, Alzheimer’s, and mid-century moms

Boston Globe

We bemoan the onset of Alzheimer’s, yet having seen ‘American Fiction’ twice, I can finally consider the possibility that my mom had some kind of disconnected peace, absolved at last of her parental responsibilities.

Is 'Barbie's' message of empowerment all it's cracked up to be?

Los Angeles Times

I’m not a Barbie fan. She made me and my friends feel bad about ourselves for being built like real girls, back in the day. I only reluctantly watched the movie, once it was free on a streaming service, so I could participate in the national debate.

And then I got seduced, a little bit, by the movie’s sly, subversive charm. Recently, younger women have explained to me that feminism is irrelevant to their lives, so I am grateful when a $145-million movie makes its case. That’s some megaphone.

AI appropriated my books. Someone will profit, but it won’t be me

Los Angeles Times

Groucho Marx said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. I wonder how he’d feel about being one of the authors who have had their books pirated by, among others, Meta, which has fed a huge book database into LLaMMa, its entry in the artificial intelligence arms race. After all, Groucho is a member, drafted from beyond the grave, with two of his books among the tens of thousands on the list.

The 21st-century shakedown of restaurants

The New York Times

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: A social media influencer walks into a bar ….

No, wait. This isn’t a joke. This is a 21st-century shakedown.

Here is how it works: An influencer walks into a restaurant to collect an evening’s worth of free food and drink, having promised to create social media content extolling the restaurant’s virtues. The influencer then orders far more than the agreed amount and walks away from the check for the balance or fails to tip or fails to post or all of the above. And the owners are left feeling conned.

What’s the worth of a Michelin star?

Los Angeles Times

Fine dining needs a therapist. Restaurants at the high end of the spectrum — ambitious chefs, multiple courses, impeccable service and prices that reflect all the effort — are having an understandable identity crisis. Getting to the top of the mountain takes a toll. Staying there can mean a world of pain.

Chef David Kinch closed his lauded Los Gatos, Calif., restaurant, Manresa, on Dec. 31, after 20 years and three Michelin stars. The work, he said, had been “backbreaking.” He’s ready to shift his attention to his bread bakery and two casual places.

My lonely boycott hasn’t hurt In-N-Out Burger, but our small decisions do add up

Los Angeles Times

In-N-Out Burger is the most popular fast-food restaurant in California, according to a data-tracking site.

Maybe it’s a great burger, and maybe that’s why it’s so popular. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never had one. For that matter, neither had my grown daughter, for the first 12 years of her life, because I refused to sign her up for the In-N-Out Burger truck that showed up at her elementary school on Fridays to give parents a break from packing lunch.

Not me. The other kids got burgers and fries, but my daughter got pasta and an apple. It made her feel left out, which made me feel bad, and yet I did not fold.

Hospitality is a two-way street

Los Angeles Times

COVID and inflation have knocked restaurants to their knees, and everyone with a vested interest, from owner to chef to server to customer, seems to have an opinion on how to get them up and running again.

Going on Bake-ation

The New York Times

I’m going to California to see my daughter, son-in-law and cousins, my preferred ocean, and friends who have known me since I was younger than my daughter is now. I pack for happy: four pounds of apples, a vacuum-packed trio of vanilla beans, 10 favorite recipes tucked into a plastic folder. The right size tart pan.

I am going on a bake-ation — my word for any trip that involves good weather and the opportunity to make dessert for friends and family.

Trust us, you don’t want a reservation at L.A’s hottest new restaurant

Los Angeles Times

I am as guilty of culinary speed-dating as anyone: When I come to L.A. these days, a friend scours the food sites, curates a shortlist of the best new restaurants, and off we go. Forget the antiquated notion of being a regular. Even a single return visit seems as passé as an iPhone with an earbud jack.

We’ve yet to venture farther east than the landward side of Lincoln Boulevard — which is to say, we’ve barely made a dent in the available inventory of L.A. hot spots. There’s a bustling food scene downtown, after years of rolling up the sidewalks before dusk. And you have to eat in Highland Park — have to — now that Eater has dubbed a stretch of Figueroa Boulevard there “L.A.’s hippest block.” We no longer crave a specific cuisine; what we want is the place that just opened.

Family dishes

The New York Times

My father was truly a fool for love. I was born with 10 fingers and 10 toes, a big thing to a man who had 10 fingers but only nine toes, the second and third on his right foot fused together . The doctor thought that the standard “You have a healthy baby girl” would suffice, but no: My father insisted that he run back to the delivery room — run! — to inventory my hands and feet.

I could breathe on my own, a common enough feat among newborns, except that my parents’ first child, a boy who arrived too early and spent a single day on earth, could not.

The icing on the cake

The New York Times

My mother lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., so packing for a summer 90th birthday visit was easy: Loose linen clothes, a sheet of baking parchment, and a three-ounce bar of Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate because my sister wasn’t sure she’d bought enough.

I was going to bake my mom a birthday cake — the chocolate cake her mother-in-law was known for, called “bachelor bait cake” on the little index card I inherited in a box of family memorabilia. I tormented myself, a little bit, over which cake in my repertoire was the right one; I liked this one because it had history.

My mother’s mink

The New York Times

One day my mom simply put the mink coat in a plastic bag, stuffed the bag into a box and shipped it to me. She lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., where she has no needof a calf-length fur in the eight weeks that pretend to be winter, and the mink had become something of a reprimand: Why did she no longer live the kind of life that required a fur coat?

Not an easy question to answer, so she sent it to me, to do with as I wished. Selling it was the obvious choice, but not the easy one. Mom’s coat is one of those things that mattered to my parents enough for them to assume it would matter to their kids; it seemed callous to dump the mink the moment it arrived.

I hung it away until a friend warned me that mink sheds in the summer heat. A day later it took up residence in Macy’s fur storage vault until the following winter, when I found a furrier who trafficked in used fur coats.

It was only four blocks from Macy’s to the furrier, but by the time I arrived I had relived most of the happy mink moments of my youth, snuggling against my mom in the midst of a Chicago winter, inhaling the crisp, cold, dry smell of a sea of minks on an outing to the symphony. How proud my dad was to go into debt to buy my mother that coat; how proud she was to wear it.

Restaurant baby

It is 11 a.m. The empty bar at this hour seems about 40 feet long, curved mahogany polished to a high sheen, like the shinbone of some extinct woodland giant. The mirror behind it reflects row upon row of bottles, the popularity of their contents revealed by the level of liquid in each one. The room smells of leather, cigarettes, and last night’s perfume. My drink sits on a napkin in front of me. Down at the far end of the bar, the owner huddles with a friend over bottomless cups of coffee. On his way to refill their cups, he smiles and wordlessly plunks another maraschino cherry in my glass.

Brisket brought us together

I grew up after the crinoline and before the slip dress, on propriety's waning edge. When I was little, I wore a dotted-swiss and organdy party dress to Passover Seder at my aunt's house, and I dutifully scanned my patent-leather shoes for nicks while I waited for the service to end. But by the time I graduated to a kilt with matching sweater and knee socks, questioning the status quo had become the politically correct attitude, and so my sister and my cousins and I perfected an array of disaffected expressions to let everyone at the table know that we had far more important things to do.