Working in kitchens, you’re naturally surrounded by wine. I never quite understood what was going on inside the glass until semi-recently after deciding to try something new. I started working FOH at a wine bar. I went full monty with trying to learn everything I could (and still am) about wine. I enrolled into the WSET level 1, hit the books, and got most of the stupid questions out of the way.

Wine to me was just something that you drank to get drunk, but in a classier way than say a Rainier. After service, I would forfeit the infamous shifty unless there was an interesting bottle left by a guest or a wine someone was really excited to share with me. The sharablity of wine was always my favorite part. It’s so special to see someone’s eyes light up with excitement to share something they think is delicious, but whether I would pick up the same notes was another thing. I thought these people were crazy telling me they get notes of wet forest floor or damp river rock. What the hell are you talking about? But since the genesis of my very informal wine education I am now one of those people who can pick up notes of old saddle leather without blowing smoke.

This new found baby superpower is both a blessing and a curse. The GuildSomm Podcast guy recommended training your nose by simply taking in the environment around you and seeing what you can smell. This was all fun and games until I boarded the bus on my merry way to work and sat down next to someone wearing an “I love smoking meth” shirt fondling an xbox controller covered in feta cheese. The amalgamation of brininess and room temperature cream mixing with residual bus smell taking up what breathable air was left was noxious. I couldn’t ignore it, I couldn’t stop picking up notes of what a space filled with sweaty bodies and stress pheromones smelled like. It was morbid curiosity at its best. At the very least, I was training my nose to pick up better, more appealing smells in the future, right?

Since starting my new job and having to taste wines each day to be able to better describe them to the guest, I was still fighting to find things I appreciated about the wines I was tasting. It felt like an uphill battle, there were only a few wines on our wine list that I would ride hard for. It felt like I was missing something, but I think what I’m finding is that palates are hyper specific. And more importantly, there needs to be wines that I personally am not in love with so that someone else may fall in love with them because of their palate. Their life experiences, genetic makeup, and just simple personal preference shapes what they love about a certain wine.

After closing one night, there were wines I was expected to try before I left. It wasn’t necessarily a rough day but I was working a double and I was definitely ready to go home. In an attempt to appease my new boss, I grabbed a tasting glass and let her fill my cup. I was floored. What I thought was going to send me home with a migraine-buzz combo sent me into a state of giddiness. It was absolutely delicious, it was too expressive in flavor to not understand. Made up of 100% Juan Garcia grapes from a vineyard located in the Arribes del Duero Natural Park, El Hato y El Garabato focuses on local grape varieties and low intervention, using no filtering or fining and very little SO2. It tasted like drinking a mixture of cherry and plum juice with a slight crack of black pepper. I thought it was the most delicious wine I’ve had in my life.

As my wholistic restaurant education continues I’m excited to share all my new experiences and continue to share what senses have been honed, then subsequently violated. A part of me feels like understanding wine and learning to taste will make me a better cook in the long run, at least I hope. Both food and wine revolve around taste and palate, something I’d say a human is constantly learning through out their life, what their personal taste is, the things they like. And I’d like to say that's exactly what I’m doing. Building my palate, finding what my favorite flavors are, learning about world, and myself through the context of hospitality.

For one you begin writing, journaling to start. At first, you scoff and write things you think future you would find clever, very rarely bearing the full truth because the truth is messy. You want to look back on your memories with pride. And even though you took up journaling as a coping mechanism, you never realized it didn’t need to be perfect. You’ll grow tired of dragging the boxes of journals you’ve amassed from apartment to apartment, so you go digital. You like how things seem more sterile on a computer. How easy the backspace deletes anything too serious or dramatic. You think about how gauche an online suicide note would be, and life has become worlds better than how it started frankly. You’re still shit with money but swear you’ll build generational wealth on your slightly above minimum wage job. And you’ve given up on manifestation after you fell down a twitter astrology rabbit hole, where every post made it seem like you were going to miraculously get back together with your ex-boyfriend. You care for yourself to the normalest degree, taking a yoga class every now and again but never trying pilates because it’s too complicated. You’re in good health, better off than your 17 year old self thought you’d be. So what do you do now?

You fall in love again and again and again and again. At the bar a million times, in the grocery store, at the park, in line for coffee, at the library, shopping with a friend. Make sure it happens everywhere and everyday. And you’ll find you hate most people, especially the ones you’ve slept with in the past. People who speak too loudly in bars as well.

You’ll make a lot of bad art, like a lot of bad art amongst some outlying pieces of ephemera that you hold onto tightly. I think your late teens are spent trying to find a way to tame the rabid animal inside you that convinces you to rip your skin off and throw it in the trash and art has a way of calming it down somehow, no matter how bad. You realize it’s an adequate coping mechanism when placed next to xanax bathtub time of your early teens.

You will be very lonely. You’ll have many melancholic grocery trips to the tune of mixtapes you’ve made for yourself to make the days a little less quiet. Florescent light radiate your eyeballs and you pay 3$ for a green bell pepper.

You’ll get dolled up and wait longer than you wanted to for a train that takes you to a place that makes you feel like your clothes don’t fit right on your body. You will talk to people who do not care if you live or die. You nurse a piss beer as the music plays and the wet grass soaks into your shoes and socks. And you leave wondering why you left the house in the first place. An amalgamation of these experiences turns you into a semi-agoraphobe but we all have things to work on, don’t we?

You hodgepodge a family together from the select restaurants you cook in, usually making the general managers your impromptu mommy. Chefs usually play papa and fellow cooks play siblings. You always had a complicated relationship with family so it’s only fair you’d only realize how odd this was, shamefully not until recently. You’ll feel like the stove you command is a plastic fisher price and that we’re all playing restaurant the way kids do. You’ve always wanted to take professional kitchens seriously, but you find that things that command seriousness to be difficult, like trying not to say bomb in an airport. Chains of command, hierarchies, pecking orders etc, are for the birds.

You think you’ll go to Italy and find yourself there, or maybe someone will find you. Cook in a beautiful palazzo and pay your way with what allowance the school gives you. Spending it on Chianti and prosciutto sandwiches, maybe a pack of smokes. You were either going to quit after you got back from Italy or quit and pick it back up when you left the country. Either way you were going to be smoking in Europe. Instead you send a fatefully bold text one night to someone you’ve crushed on for awhile, who also happened to be your boss’s son and spend the next two years doing absolutely nothing but being in love, and making hotdogs together. Your hotdog business is doing well, as well as your relationship to the hotdog man, and you do not smoke anymore.

You start taking care of yourself, seeing the world, and acting like there is a tomorrow that’s brighter than what you’ve seen. You don’t do what you expect of yourself, some things carry shame. You do not do what others expect of you either, something you hold your head a bit higher for. Thankful though for each sharp left turn, abrupt stop, and subsequent U-turn all landing you exactly where you need to be. In a warm bed, with a full water bottle, a face moisturized in Korean skincare, a garden to get up and water in the morning, a cat to pet, someone to love, and a life to live.

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When a new subjectively good restaurant opens or alternatively has been there forever but just discovered by someone with a following, social media signals to viewers to check out this “new” spot. Viewership may start making reservations while others rationalize that the restaurant is too busy to even try to enjoy an experience there. This split reaction, the public pouncing onto the next big thing along with others natural avoidance to hype causes an opposite reaction for the restaurant. The restaurant could very well slow down due to avoidance of the “perceived commotion” and guests choosing to brave the crowds have the potential to leave disappointed from a possible mishandling of the influx in business. Word gets out that it’s impossible to get a table at ______ on a Saturday or when you’re there it’s a circus, you’re probably going to see a dip in sales on Saturday.

After you decide where to eat, you not only want to enjoy your time but the food as well. The quality of experience you can have is in part due to your company, tightness of your clothes, the lighting, how loud the music is playing etc. But the quality of food is another some would argue, an easier variable to control when trying to delight a group of people. It’s so excruciatingly hard to engineer a space that can be special to everyone when they are there. Subconsciously you wish for a time transcending memory to walk away from the table with. Why else would you go out to dinner nowadays? Food is an excellent memory maker because you experience it with all 5 of your senses, it’s visceral and hard to forget. You suddenly remember you’re alive and that you can actually enjoy things. That’s why food is so important, so if you’re going to hype anything up, hype up quality. If the food is mid but an influencer advertised it differently for whatever reason people don’t blame the influencer, they blame the restaurant. Here in lies the problem with influencers, they need to maintain relevancy in the algorithmic attention economy, as in they need to post like crazy to stay cool. The total number of genuinely good restaurants in one area is a somewhat fixed number unlike the amount of infinite posts that need to be made in some mystical frequency to remain profitable and relevant. If you’re a food influencer, your content creation will need to pivot at some point or you’ll have to start bullshitting on who and where the “good restaurants” are. There are many different ways to support your local restaurants than temporarily inflating them into something they’re not. Nothing built on bullshit lasts very long.

There is a loss of personal subjectivity when influencers tout and oversaturate social media with a select few spots they were paid to post about or may even genuinely like. This goes without saying but it’s the proverbial, “If Nick Rizzo jumps off a bridge, would you?” Discovering new restaurants you like is always going to be subjectively based on personal experience and taste. I didn’t grow up in New York, so I don’t seek out the iconic black and white cookie of the North East to feel at home. We eat the things we eat because WE LIKE THEM, not because someone else does. This doesn't mean to stay within your comfort zone and never try anything new but I implore you to find restaurants in ways other than food influencers who may* lead you astray. The idea of hyping up the right place on social media is somewhat convoluted because of food’s natural subjectivity. This is also further misconstrued when you consider the smoke and mirrors involved behind the scenes of food reviewing content. There may be a non-disclosed paid partnership, brand deal, or just plain misleading material for the sake of content. The restaurant industry is built on trust. Trust from the guest we won’t trigger a deadly allergic reaction, trust that the table you reserved online is waiting for you, trust our recommendations, our expertise, trust you’ll be taken care of well while you’re there. This is something a food influencer should understand and implement in their own practice if they wish for longevity in a business built off the back of the restaurant industry. I’m not here to vilify anyone but if your livelihood is based on reviewing restaurants and eating at them, remember your voice impacts everyone you reach, including the restaurant. Lead with curiosity and honesty. If you didn’t like something, someone else might.

An alternative for finding a new restaurant could be asking for a recommendation from a trusted colleague or friend and go from there. I understand we aren’t in an economy where you can strike out when going out to eat, value is king. But all the more reason to try out the less talked about spots in your area or the place you’ve always been curious about. It’s likely your intuition was trying to tell you something!

Thinking of being something and actually being that thing are two vastly different experiences. I always wanted to be a cook, in theory. My motivations were pure, I wanted to cook for people as a way of showing care. But in recent years, it almost feels as if I have care fatigue. I can feel that magnetic pull to this day of wanting to care, thinking about caring, showing care through food but in practice, I’ve become somewhat of a lazy bones. I want to care, I want to wake up and think there is purpose in my action when flipping an egg but I just can’t. And there is a lot of guilt I carry around this lethargy because when a cook doesn’t like cooking it shows and it’s an ugly thing. I can think about food all day, eat it, write about it, draw vegetables with joy, but when it comes to actually cooking I am at a loss. Because when I think about cooking, I feel tired. I feel so damn tired, like I could fall asleep standing up. “Do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life”, is what my father says, but he never found anything he likes doing and he’s a bitter man because of it. I don’t want to be a bitter man, but something inside tells me there is less merit in thinking about food and making a career out of it than cooking food itself. Someone like Alice Waters is more of a theological food figure than she is a chef. She specialized in bringing the right people together, cooking for them, and creating something beautiful out of that time and space. She writes about not being an especially amazing chef or restaurateur for that matter, but she absolutely loved food! But is my love of food enough? How will my love of food pay my bills? Can I convince you a ripe summer peach is delicious just by writing about it, or should I slice it up and sprinkle some demerara sugar on top and serve it with cream? Which would be better and which am I better at? Who’s to say.

This song is everything and more. So girly and bubblegum pink, very disruptive to whomever is attempting the stoic line cook thing.

When things get a littler hotter and tickets start flying, it’s nice to have something a little more upbeat to really coax out the adrenaline.

Sexy song, so fun to cook to

Save for the impromptu dancing

For when you’re closing up shop (the kitchen) and you’re feeling the wine.

For you and your cooking buddies to sing together

Just a banger, and if you hate your chef you can pretend you’re singing about them, idk

Amazing karaoke song, or for something to sing into your wooden spoon microphone

I <3 Erykah Badu and that’s all

Play RIGHT before service to feel like you’re bravely riding into battle

So catchy and fun to listen to, I’ve found it’s really good at diffusing awkward or passive vibes.

I feel like playing this at work is my mini revolt against capitalism while on the clock. Play the whole album, it’s the answer to whatever question you’re asking yourself at the time.

Very fuck you, pay me energy.

Unhinged internet music is divisive in any kitchen, proceed with caution unless you're in rage bait mode. Side note, when playing a live show in Seattle in 2019, 99jakes played the whole show on a Nintendo DS which was amazing.

I’ve only now realized this reads like a BuzzFeed millennial listacle, I’m so sorry. Here’s the playlist ;p

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It began with drive thrus. I remember going through the Mcdonald’s drive thru everyday after school, quick and easy for my grandparents who were raising a kid that wasn’t theirs. I had a hot potato kind of childhood, passed around from person to person, place to place. When I was with my mother, we would stop at 7/11 for breakfast/coffee before making our way to school everyday and I would have a 7/11 branded fruit pie for breakfast. Whatever flavor I had, it had the same sucrosey gel in the middle that zapped my molars and sunk into my nerve endings. I had no qualms with this as a child seemingly born with love handles. But when we started learning about the food pyramid in school, which has its own problems we won’t get into this rodeo, I started to realize we didn’t necessarily have “whole foods” in our house. Dinner was the Kid’s Cuisine with the molten yet chalky brownie, Tostino’s pizza rolls or frozen macaroni pinwheels from Michelina’s. Fast, easy, and affordable was what ruled my childhood. And I don’t really have anyone to blame, directly.

We have fit our lives around our export of labor. We try not to see our community, familial responsibilities, chores, hobbies, or our health as things that rob us of our energy to perform our jobs, but we do. Which makes sense, considering no work equals no food, housing, or perceivable dignity in society. An Erewhon smoothie does not have the ability to fix the systemic problems within our food system but its cost, convenience, and quality of ingredients can temporarily make us feel like we have bought back some time for ourselves. But this is the dilemma we face as consumers, we lose choice when we prize convenience over everything else and it all starts and ends with food. Food, being the scope in which you are attempting to buy back your time with frozen meals from TJ’s, meal subscription services, UberEats, takeout etc. These services aren’t evil, but they are predatory. They specifically market to you that you don’t have the time. It’s something they insist, but whether you do or not isn’t their fucking business, right? But it is. They quite literally profit off you feeling like time is running out, and that you couldn’t possibly get in the kitchen and cook something for yourself. I will tell you as a tired cook myself, yes sometimes I am just too exhausted but it should boil down to my choice. When I order from UberEats, I usually eat alone and fast, with some sort of Youtube video playing to keep me company. Sound familiar? And I’d love to say just for the sake of the argument that it’s never quite satisfying, but it’s true. Most dishes are meant to be eaten immediately. And after all is said and done, I just spent 70$ for something lukewarm, and void of something I can’t describe. There is nothing romantic about it, and I feel like I’ve tapped into a corporate slop bowl vibe that doesn’t sit well with me.

In the case of meal subscription boxes, it’s a great option for people who may have limitations that make it difficult to get to the store or those spread too thin. Meals tend to hover around 10$ give or take and when we factor in labor, transportation, food cost, marketing, etc, that price point per meal checks out. Though you could make most of the dishes provided at the fraction of the cost if you have the ability to do so. While poking around the various meal subscription sites, I stumbled upon the “Homechef x Minecraft collab”. This way of feeding yourself may not be disordered but it is dystopian. Homechef.com boasts, “The Home Chef x Minecraft menu includes eight options starting at $7.99 per serving. The Crafter’s BBQ Turkey Meatloaf includes cornbread “wheat blocks,” the vegetarian-friendly Evoker’s Pesto Gnocchi is served with dark forest spinach and peas, the Villager’s Beef Shepherd’s Pie comes with harvested mashed potatoes and the Bee’s Knees honey dijon steak features loaded baked potatoes. There’s also a Glowdust Chicken Nuggets with golden dipping sauce, chicken BLT sandwiches with dark forest greens, one-sheet Golden Apple Chicken with smashed potatoes and a mushroom and swiss beef burgers with truffle potato and carrot fries.” The wheat blocks, though true to the game, eerily remind me of the protein blocks in dystopian classics such as Snowpiercer or Soylent Green. The interesting thing is the overarching theme of survival. Both Minecraft and movies like Snowpiercer are emotionally evocative because of the risk of survival. It’s not that deep and I’m not an expert, but as a child of the internet I can sniff out emotional marketing pretty well. Emotions drive purchasing decisions and unfortunately food being sold in this form commodifies it to the upteenth degree. This also teaches children from a young age that food is a product and to perceive flashy, interesting advertisements as the best choice for self nourishment.

In other news, Trader Joe’s recalls have increased greatly with non-edible contaminates. Large scale recalls like this happen because food is being mass produced in a factory. “A recall of Trader Joe’s items after glass was found in rice was significantly expanded on Tuesday to more than 36 million pounds of product, officials said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a news release that 36,987,575 pounds of various ready-to-eat and frozen chicken and pork fried rice, ramen, and shu mai dumpling products were being pulled from shelves.” Those animals who were killed with the sole purpose of being eaten died for nothing. Death without reason is lame. Not including the thousands of pounds of plastic waste and labor wasted. There aren’t glass shards in your dinner when you make it yourself unless you want them in there, you know? Because you’d be making it in your kitchen, with full autonomy. Your dinner wouldn’t have been flown in, driven, assembled, packaged, driven again, flown out, distributed and placed on a shelf for you to pick it up and reheat at home begrudgingly after your long work day. When you buy food from anyone you’re quite literally entrusting those people with your life. We cannot lose sight of the fact that these companies are trying to build empires and capital gains, not nourish you. Their system is ever growingly delicate due to supply chain disruptions, war, climate crisis etc. They exploit land, labor, and culture. They’re robbing us blind, and we’re just thankful we don’t have to cook dinner tonight. But what if dinner wasn’t a chore?

They’ve all succeeded in convincing us there just isn’t enough time to cook. And in the late stage capitalism sense it’s somewhat true. I think this is why we binge watch tradwife videos on Instagram, we yearn for a time when we had time. But that’s all a sham too. Historically, cooking was domestic labor usually done unwillingly by women, indentured servants, or slaves. So before we go liking that video of an influencer selling us on the benefits of beef tallow with the “I just landed a brand deal smile”, let’s create an alternative!

An act of defiance now, is elbowing your way through bullshit telling you can’t feed yourself and checking in with yourself to see if you can in the first place because automation isn’t human. We’re being robbed of our connection to the land we inhabit, seasons we can experience, and the community we could be a part of or create when we feed ourselves like it doesn’t matter. And it’s easy to criticize convenience culture in a vacuum but there are real world reasons as to why it exists in the first place. A meal subscription service gives a single mother more face time with her baby before she has to wake up and work her fourth double in a row. To imagine a world without convenience culture would be a world without people who want or need things. Now we can’t fully reverse the effects of globalism but we can assess areas in our own lives where we can localize our consumption.

We can satiate our appetites for community, creativity, mutual aid, and dinner all in one dish. It doesn’t need to be every night, solely vegan, or the most beautiful plate you’ve ever seen. Because the key here is the effort within the inconvenience. Play around with the idea of food being more than something that you buy, but that you can experience. Explore the corners of your daily life and maybe you can locate the time to do the following:

• Host a dinner party!

• Have a BYOM (bring your own meat) BBQ at the local park

• Create a meal train for someone in need of support

• Cook for a friend or dare I say a crush?!

• Find a new recipe to try out according to your budget

• Get a group of friends together and cook a hot meal for your unhoused neighbors

• Give sourdough a shot and give the excess away, you will have a lot!

• Take a trip to the farmers market, if using EBT you can find eligible markets with the SNAP retail locator

• Walk around your neighborhood and document all the edible plants in your area

• Host a potluck, craft night, or book club with friends

• Check out the local Food Not Bombs chapter in your area

• Become a regular at a restaurant or cafe close to you

• Apply for a community garden plot or guerilla garden

• Join a local facebook foraging group in your area

• Go to the library and find these books if you’re interested in learning more about our food systems throughout history and how to change them for the better: Reaping What She Sows by Nancy Matsumoto, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan, How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher and Cod by Mark Kurlansky

Food can be so much more than the contents under a piece of plastic film. Don’t buy into the idea that you don’t have enough time to enjoy your life. Feeding one another may be one of our last opportunities to actually slow down. Be protective of the little freedom we have to choose what we nourish ourselves with. The apparent compression of time by super mega corporations can be stretched when you start to envision food as a form of connection with the people around you and direct rebellion against The Man.

My mother would often cook spaghetti and meatballs, punctuated with a plethora of fucks and shits and a similar amount of McCormick’s dried oregano. She had thought of this as a fancy ingredient. After you’d finish the seconds forced upon you, you’d be wrestling with the greyish green specks stuck in your teeth well into bedtime. And the meatballs were solely that, balls of meat. The trauma accumulated in my life is not solely reliant on my mother’s cooking I promise, they were just the most arid meatballs I’ve had in my life. And in retrospect having been her age, her cooking at the time was well within the spectrum of a 20 something’s skills. I secretly loved my mother’s cooking though. I loved seeing her effort in trying to nourish me and show she cared. She always made it seem like a big to-do, getting in the kitchen and cooking for us. In hindsight, she was right about that too. Cooking for others can be exhausting. And since those moments are few, though potentially lacking in flavor I covet them deeply. I long for those times in secret because I simply can’t allow myself to miss the dysfunction. Not one bit could I miss my dingy childhood, conditions unfit for a child in the eyes of virtually anyone. That would mean I’m sick in some way surely, some sort of Stockholm syndrome. Truthfully after all these years, I still find myself confused. Stewing on how the past continues to command my present. As I walk through life I am cautiously surprised at the level of care I can receive from others, often communicated through a meal. Then it certainly begs the question, why couldn’t I get that as a child? I could’ve been less of an asshole teenager, I suppose. Am I weak for expecting to have been cared for? I was always told to adjust my expectations of others or I’ll always be let down. Easy, coming from the woman who I expected the most from.

Maybe the maternal gene just skipped her, who’s to say? She was young and we all make mistakes. Have some empathy, Jesus! She was just a girl!

Well, you were too! You needed someone. And where do I put all this? I’m hurt, irreparably but who’s to say, she tried her best…or did she?

The worst offender was her version of ratatouille. The classic French stew, made of sliceable vegetables: tomato, zucchini, yellow squash, herbs, spices etc. Then layered beautifully if you like it that way. We aren’t of any French denomination, we were simply poor and the dish was a cheap and easy way to feed us a good portion of vegetables and feel refined. The problem with the dish wasn’t the taste, it’s that you simply can’t fix spending the last of the money for the month on drugs with a few dollars worth of vegetables. I hated that dish so much I made sure I was out of the house when she cooked it because it was a consolation dinner and I was an easy mark. “Sorry, I made you pee in a cup so I could pass another drug test, Bon Appetite”. It was a total farce, pretending to be the type of mom that was worried about vegetable intake but would smoke in the house willy-nilly. Get real. That dish represented the mother she could be if she had tried. I love my mother, and she never needed to be the mom that cooked 7 days a week. I see her and her hurt and I wish I could take it away so that she may become the woman I needed her to be. Our woven pasts may be troublesome, my mother and I but I think ultimately, she’s why I decided to cook for a living. Every good moment I’ve chosen to hold on to was thanks to food. Memories I may have the opportunity to foster for others, what a privilege. How uncomplicated. The things you forget when you’re serving others, who you are, your experiences are totally taken out of the equation. Maybe that’s why my mother would step into the kitchen in the first place, to forget herself and just care.