Six weeks into summer, my produce department routine is by now well in hand. I dip low over the paperboard display with a sweeping sniff. I’m in search of that unmistakable ambrosial burst, like … what? Floral, bright, almondy, chin-dripping nectar. The season’s been remarkably hot and sunny, so the peaches have to be good by now.

Right?

You see, I’ve been burned many times by spongy, tasteless disappointments — some with the audacity to cloak themselves in a few convincing spritzes of that tantalizing peachy perfume. And yet, back I crawl every summer like a parched little masochist in pursuit of that one, perfect peach. Maybe I just like the chase.

This batch seems promising, so I take my stance for deeper inspection. Swipe, lift, squeeze. The coarse little hairs brush my nose and upper lip, like cactus fuzz without the bite. This one feels heavy, its skin like velvety suede stretched taut over a hot shin bruise, threatening to tear beneath the gentle pressure of my thumb.

Can I eat it today?

Don’t be greedy. Everything’s riding on this.

I bag one and another. Before long, the half a dozen red-and-yellow peaches I’ve plucked are now doubly heavy with the weight of summertime anticipation.

Back home and I’m smug at my own self-restraint as the intoxicating aroma taunts me on each pass through the kitchen. Twenty four hours’ insurance I’ve given you!

I approach the bowl and select the ripest one, golden yellow blushed with reddish pink. The suture carves a pert little butt into one side. Usually I like to cleave the thing with one swift rotation of the paring knife, then give a gentle twist to see if the wrinkly pit will cooperate.

Not today. Today I attack with teeth and tongue and abandon, like the wild animal I am. The first bite is like a dam breaking. Wet flesh mingles with shreds of suede on a sticky river of tart, sugared juice. I close my eyes as juice floods my face and streams down my chin.

Remember this day: July 22. The first perfect peach of the year.

The countless slogs through underripe turned half-rotted, stringy, flavorless peach facsimiles wash away on this blushing orange tide. Who knows when I’ll get another moment like this one? Stone fruit likes to make us work.

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I planted some kale and lettuce seeds far too late in the year. I wasn’t made aware of this until our landscaper laughed at me when I told her as much.

“The ground is pretty warm by now,” she said. “Don’t expect much.”

Who can really blame one for taking up late-season, amateur homesteading when our government has abandoned its public-service duties to such a degree that measles are back and the usually contained cyclospora is sickening hundreds of thousands with no definitive end in sight? (If you’re somehow still able to sleep soundly as this torturous and incompetent administration rages on, note the following: Since DOGE’s haphazard gutting of federal agencies, the FDA lost about 20% of its staff, including food safety scientists, and the CDC dropped a quarter. Before DOGE, the CDC’s parasite-surveillance team, which helped trace the origin of the 2013 cyclospora outbreak, had 11 scientists. Now it has three.)

When the spiky little kale shoots first appeared, I felt a rush of bratty smugness. Who cares if they grow to be unpalatably fibrous or bitter? I showed that professional gardener!

The same smugness can’t be applied to the lettuce, unfortunately, whose poor tiny leaves were cut down as quickly as they burst through the soil to gulp their first rays of sunlight.

I am fairly certain our resident squirrel is behind these attacks, though I’ve never quite caught him in the act. Even if I did, what difference would it make to him? It’s a free salad bar. The only deterrent is occasional, indiscriminate shouting from some martini-wielding nut job on the porch. For all he knows, I could be trying to remind him that he buried that half-eaten slice of pizza by the raspberry bush last week. (Is that where he hid it?)

Before I anthropomorphize all the sense out of this story, I should note that the same squirrels keep returning because there’s a pretty steady diet to be had back here all summer long. For about two weeks each June, the mature cherry tree in our next door neighbors’ backyard is laden with the crimson stone fruits. That is until the morning after they’ve reached peak, glossy ripeness, when they’re all gone. All that remains is a sticky carpet of pits, like peanut shells covering the floor of an Outback Steakhouse.

This is an ongoing source of tension between the tree’s owners and our next door neighbors, Michael and John. The former enjoys the shade and watching the animals fly into a frenzy each summer: “They get sort of drunk on the fermented ones!” The latter wants the tree gone, and can be seen muttering as he picks his way disgustedly through the sticky, post-feast carnage with a plastic bag.

The decimation of the our lettuce also owes to the fact that we recently removed a forest of catnip that grew all over the backyard before we moved in. The catnip created a different kind of disconcerting piazza: Half feral cats stalking around, spraying their scent all over our chives, then yowling, fighting and fucking into the wee hours. (At least they kept the bunnies and squirrels off the vegetables.)

On Sundays I often walk to the farmers market to buy fresh produce. Yet even there I’ve been gravitating toward sturdier things that I intend to cook (to at least 158 degrees F!): kale, collards, cucumbers, multicolored peppers. Recently I brought home a pint of gorgeous sungold tomatoes with the sole intent of melting them into pasta sauce with sticky-fresh market garlic and backyard mint and dill in an obscene amount of olive oil.

It’s hard not to feel like even the purest things aren’t quite right, that the simple joys require some extra protective layer. Chalk it up to the brazen destruction of our public services and public lands, to a year when climate change-jacked wildfires render the air uninhabitable during our most treasured months, when tornadoes and monsoons pummel us relentlessly like never before. See? Nature said. You can’t have nice things.

If this summer is cooked, might as well cook all my greens.

By now, the animals seem to have realized that my backyard lettuce won’t get started. No matter, they’ve since moved onto the chokeberry bush, which is heavy with clutches of the tannic black fruits. I’ve heard they’re good in smoothies, but I’m not sure I’ll harvest enough to find out. The cardinals and robins go especially wild for them. The other day, I made eye contact with a disheveled young robin just as he hacked up a ripe one. Poor little guy is new to debauchery, but he’ll learn. Only 10 months till the all-you-can-eat cherry buffet next June.

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Before a morning flight out of O'Hare Airport a couple months ago, I got in line at Starbucks. I’m not a regular, but I’ve come to equate a burnt Sbux cappuccino and almost-turnt banana with AM airport downtime, since there’s a Starbucks near every gate. The lines are always long, but they move pretty quickly by design.

Not this time though. The poor cashier was so overburdened by prepping food for the online preorders that he could only take a real-live customer’s orders once every four or five minutes. Most of us gave up after 45 minutes because we had flights to catch. A few people, including a woman in front of me, placed preorders while standing in line, then begged off to the waiting area. Thus, the cycle continued.

It’s startling how quickly we’ve accepted the shift away from almost all human interaction in the name of convenience. QR codes and apps remind us to skip the line and preorder, to time it just right so our iced protein matcha or $18 grain bowl is waiting for us, and we’re on our way without so much as a nod.

There’s some fascinating on-premise secret shopper data to back up the hollowing-out of humanity in counter-service restaurants from the Canadian software company Intouch Insight. A 2026 study, which included 753 mystery shops across 10 major quickservice brands like Starbucks and Dunkin’, found some downsides to automation bridging the labor gap. Though the industry is serving customers on average a full minute faster, roughly 22% of customers leave without receiving a “thank you.” Well over a quarter of customers said they weren’t even acknowledged upon entering the place. This last, chilling tidbit was perhaps my favorite: A smile was observed in only 64.3% of visits. I guess that makes sense seeing how the bulk of our interactions are with screens. Even so, less friendly experiences tend to make customer satisfaction slip considerably, which the study showed, too.

When I traveled to rural Mississippi last fall for work, the roadside Starbucks halfway between Memphis and Corinth was a totally different story. Everyone who came in to retrieve their preordered coffees from the pickup counter didn’t leave right away. They hung around to chat with the barista who plays soccer with their daughter or the GM who had seemingly been making their three-pump iced vanilla latte for years. It was soothing to watch a community naturally resist the neighborhood coffee shop’s overhaul in the name of contactless convenience, though I wouldn’t mind if a few more of them drank out of ceramic cups. (Does Starbucks even carry them anymore except for retail sale?)

In June I wrote a piece for Slate about AI chatbots’ infiltration of restaurant phone lines and how no one really walks in or calls to book a table at restaurants since the third-party reservation platform takeover. It seems we’re on some societal march to buff all the lovely, maddening friction out of life till it’s smooth enough so all we can see is our own lonesome face reflected back. But at what cost? Apparently, Gen Z’s telephobia is so bad that one U.K. university recently debuted a class to help students overcome their fear of talking on the phone.

“I don’t care about the nostalgia of phones, but if something goes wrong with my booking or I left my wallet at the restaurant, who am I supposed to contact?” one reader smartly told me. I suppose it depends how often an actual person is checking the restaurant’s inbox or the chatbot’s call summaries.

On a recent Friday morning, I delayed the start of my workday and went for a cappuccino and potato omelet sandwich at Bocadillo Market in Chicago’s West Town. (Indulge me briefly, will you?—on the confounding bliss of this bocadillo: a soft-cooked potato omelet mingles with avocado puree and tangy salsa verde goat cheese on a baguette with shattering crust and wispy interior. And yes, it comes with even more potatoes, doused in tangy aioli.)

At one point, a couple came in wearing athleisure and looking harried.

“We tried to save time by preordering, but it wasn’t working,” the woman said with an accusatory edge to her voice.

They retreated to a table near the ordering counter to wait, perched on the razor’s edge of their seats in their coats, while the chef and owner James Martin made their oat lattes and carefully wrapped their bocadillos for takeaway.

By then, I’d been talking to him for almost an hour, about how some of the best cooking in the city can be eaten at breakfast and lunch and about his upcoming trip to Galicia. He scolded me gently for taking so long to come in for breakfast.

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” I said.

So I added a little more time to the parking meter and mulled a second cappuccino. The emails would still be there in 20 minutes.

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I spent a considerable chunk of last year researching and writing a book about burgers. It comes out this week, and you can buy it in many places, including here and here and here.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I fell in love with human-interest storytelling as a journalism student in undergrad. I didn’t start my career as a food writer, but the seeds were sowed when I was in my early 20s, writing and editing articles about hedge funds for Reuters while I secretly researched culinary schools on my lunch breaks. When a recession forced me out of that job, I got a certificate in professional cookery then spent the next half-dozen years covering restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets. I became a freelance food journalist in 2014. Since then, I have cobbled together an odd, mostly satisfying career—spending several years as a restaurant critic and eventually establishing myself as a kind of observational comic of culture through the lens of food and drink.

Early last year, an editor from London publisher Headline reached out to see if I’d be interested in writing a food-focused book on a “specific, quite commercial” topic, which turned out to be a compendium on the humble, ubiquitous and much-beloved hamburger.

A tall order, no? Indeed, burgers makes up a staggering 60% of sandwiches eaten worldwide. The burger’s origin story is jealously claimed by half a dozen U.S. states. If I’d had 20 years and a million-dollar budget to write this thing, there’d be elements I’d overlook. So I started with what I know and I let my curiosity lead me.

I found, unsurprisingly, that the burger contains multitudes. Researching the countless guises of this affable handheld, I pondered deeper questions about cultural porousness, primordial urges, economic engines and food systems. I also tested my own linguistic limits while seeking as many ways as possible to convey the hedonistic pleasure of eating what’s essentially tricked-out fast food.

I’ve pasted a few excerpts below from the introduction and compendium of burger styles, along with a few profiles I love.

I hope you’ll consider buying one for yourself and/or for someone you love who loves burgers. Keep it on your coffee table or kitchen island—really wherever you’d like to have a bit of deliciously photographed burger trivia at your fingertips. I’ll end with a few concluding lines from the intro.

So here’s to the burger in its infinite guises: pillar of tradition and spurner of dogma, community builder and frequent point of contention, timeless emblem of profligate pleasure and friendly vehicle for progress, built across millennia and continents and yet conspicuously, messily, deliciously American. A handheld gift for all to share. But, like, order your own, OK?

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I spent Valentine’s Day weekend in New Glarus, Wisconsin, which is a charming place that self-describes as Wisconsin’s Little Switzerland. There’s a lot to love about this quirky town, where the Old Fashioneds are brandy-based and sugary as hell, the schnitzels hubcap-sized and the folk genial as can be, particularly when temps unexpectedly hit 60 in February. But I left mystified by one inexplicable trend: that the coffee drinks there have lost their minds.

We stayed in a nicely refurbished motel that shares a parking lot with a cute coffee hut that pours delicious espresso — unfortunately too often obscured by a multitude of sugary, technicolor, cold foamed sins. (Think lattes with white chocolate, salted caramel, Irish cream, vanilla cold foam and caramel drizzle.) The far worse offender, however, was the multicolored series of Lotus-brand functional drinks. I later learned these start with a plant-based energy concentrate of ingredients like coffee fruit, the “calming” amino acid L-theanine, antioxidant-rich elderberry and natural caffeine from green coffee beans — that also contains 39 grams of added sugar per serving.

The next morning, we lined up at different coffee shop to find yet another Lotus-tinged drink menu, which also featured the option to boost any old latte or frappe with beetroot powder (heart health! cognitive function!), mushroom powder (immune support!) or CBD (beat back the anxious coffee jitters, maybe?!).

Apparently, we deserve coffee that works harder.

This little Wisconsin hamlet is far from alone. Over the ensuing days that this piece has sat in my drafts, I’ve received nearly two dozen emails about functional packaged beverage debuts and wellness-boosted cocktail menus. One announced the world’s first zero-proof, functional martini (with adaptogens)! Another debuted the world’s first RTD period relief beverage (chock full of Omega-7 from Himalayan Holy Fruit aka sea buckthorn, aka a wildly rare fatty acid clinically shown to reduce inflammation)! Elsewhere, a raspberry lychee canned THC soda infused with lion’s mane and cordyceps mushrooms promised “stress relief and peaceful introspection.” A restaurant’s spring N/A menu boasted “electrolyte-heavy” watermelon basil spritzes. Another dangled clear collagen and whey isolate spritzes and savory, satiety-boosting “brothtails.”

All of this is to say, I’ve lately been ruminating on the function of beverages in America and find myself completely at sea (which might also mean I’m not getting enough potassium).

In fairness, I’m not exactly a client of this category. I’m more what one might call a vanilla beverage consumer. I use them to hydrate, caffeinate, to get a little (happily) fucked up, a la wine or a few martinis. I tend to abstain from THC beverages because I find most of them gross. I derive deep pleasure from the small, daily ritual of brewing a French press of strong coffee into which I pour a healthy measure of organic whole milk, enough to make it almost into an AM milkshake, which I’ve been told makes me, like, sooo Midwestern. I like a little treat in the form of a (now $8) cappuccino or oat latte. Likewise, nothing beats washing down a couple of tacos or sub sandwich with a Diet Coke on a Saturday afternoon. So that gives us hydration, pleasure, caffeination and — kind of mindful — mind-bending.

As evidenced by my inbox alone, the scope of beverages’ potential uses has lately broadened significantly, most notably into the realm of the functional, as in—well, what exactly? A curative, mood-booster, glow-up or vague life fixer? A supplement to our daily doc-prescribed supplements?

I asked for some guidance from my friend Ali Francis, a lifestyle journalist and co-founder of Best Food Blog, a writer-run publication about eating that I value deeply.

Francis has done a lot of reporting and writing on this and other wellness topics that intersect with mainstream culture. (Here’s a terrific piece she wrote in the fall for VinePair on protein-jacked cocktails.) She explained that a so-called functional beverage promises to do something for us beyond basic hydration or pleasure.

“Not just quench thirst, but optimize you,” she said. “Sharper focus, better skin, calmer nerves, faster metabolism, gut repair, protein intake, spiritual ascension, etc. It’s basically a beverage with a résumé.”

Based on what she has gleaned from the experts who actually study functional beverages, their benefits tend to be modest at best and imaginary at worst. She went on to parse how “functional” invades the realms that should be intended for actual care of our bodies and minds — via the oily, brand co-opted term known as “self-care.”

“You’re often paying a huge markup for something you could get more reliably from actual food or sleep,” she said. “I also think they’re a bit dubious psychologically: they let you feel like you’re taking care of yourself while not actually doing the unsexy things that constitute real care — sleeping, eating properly, going outside, having access to healthcare — all while delivering something fun enough to distract you from that fact.”

‘Sharper focus, better skin, calmer nerves, faster metabolism, gut repair, protein intake, spiritual ascension, etc. It’s basically a beverage with a résumé.’

Francis largely avoids the functional category, with a few, very specific exceptions that include Culture Pop probiotic sodas — “not because I think they’re repairing my microbiome, but because they taste good and hit a Goldilocks sweetness level — meaning sweeter than Spindrift, not Fanta syrup-y,” she said. In that case, perhaps it lives more the realm of mindful pleasure because it’s a better choice than, say, grabbing a Coke or Diet Coke to sate the soda craving. (Tbh, I love ginger-lemon Culture Pop. )

Francis’ bigger problem with functional beverages isn’t so much their snake-oil claims as the fake sweeteners.

“Why are they in everything?” she said. “I can taste a molecule of stevia from across the room. If a drink tastes like a laboratory, I’m out.”

(I could say the same for added sugars in packaged food and beverage as a whole, but that’s for another time.)

The fact that the global functional beverage market, expected to reach a staggering $339.6 billion by 2030, keeps climbing means something is clearly resonating with folks. (Of course, when packaged water didn’t stop at hydration, basically no one called it a scam.)

Indeed and as news reports repeatedly tells us, we’re unwell, overworked and exhausted, which means we’re no doubt hoping there’s a product out there that might patch us up fast or, hell, maybe cure us altogether. It’s an odd thing that we seek silver bullets, which have proven time and again to be as imaginary as the fountain of youth. But brands keep preying on that fantastical inner voice that can’t help but think, Wouldn’t it be nice if I could look a little younger or feel a little less tired and stressed without putting in the precious time I don’t have?

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t expect a single beverage to pump us with a dozen different health benefits, a handful of which we’re probably already getting plenty of. I’d argue that the little ritual of making a basic-ass cup of coffee or tea, or walking to meet a friend for a glass of wine offers a few benefits of its own. You can talk my ear off all you want about the dangers of plain old caffeine and alcohol, but I still maintain that, in moderation, the upsides — tiny rituals, social lubrication, connection, a bit of indulgence and pleasure — are restorative in ways we can’t get from following the Mediterranean diet and sleeping eight hours a night.

Francis, for one, has come around to the fancy latte as a small luxury, jacked with miso and caramel if she so pleases. “I mean, will I ever afford a house?” she said.

Sometimes we drink to forget, OK?

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A while back, a med school student with a passion for food writing emailed me asking to pick my brain. This happens on occasion. I almost always say yes when it’s a young person, especially when that person is a woman. She was in town for a few days on break. I suggested we meet at Swadesi, a beautiful Indian-inspired cafe in Chicago’s West Loop with magical pastries. When I got there, she’d already snagged a table and was sitting there with a notebook and a tiny glass of still water.

Because it was Sunday morning and winter, I’d stayed in bed far later than planned that morning, so arrived at the interview positively famished. I asked if she wanted anything.

“No, I’ll wait till after,” she smartly replied, pen hovering over her notebook.

I marveled at her restraint as I awaited my cappuccino and samosa chaat croissant with spiced potato and sticky tamarind.

Soon after, I found myself deep into a rant about the importance of establishing a writing practice as bits of sev and pastry shard blanketed my lap and lodged themselves into my sweater. (To say nothing of what was probably on my face!) I cursed myself for only grabbing one napkin, as mine was already spent with half a saucy pastry to go. Then again, I thought, perhaps this was a disarming icebreaker move; maybe my informal face-shoveling put this young woman totally at ease.

It seemed like a good time to check in with my friend Lizzie Post (yes that Post!). She’s co-president, author and a spokesperson for The Emily Post Institute and the great-great granddaughter of the etiquette goddess herself.

“In any sort of interview or business meal, the food is secondary,” Post said. “You want to go for something manageable. It’s not the time for a cheeseburger with onion rings and bacon and coleslaw on top. If that’s what you’re gonna order, you fork-and-knife that sucker.”

Of course she was right. But what sort of wiener would I come off like if I sat there sawing little slivers off of my croissant in front of an aspiring food writer? (At least I wouldn’t be covered in spiced potato and pastry or wringing the life out of my poor napkin.) What was even more fascinating to me was that as the technically senior person in this scenario, I was leading by a poor example.

“You’re in the power position as the more senior person there,” Post told me, while my mouth fell open. “You do want to recognize that the other person might be looking to you for clues. Don’t test them.”

Since when did I become an elder? Shit.

I always internalized the responsibility falling on the younger person in these scenarios—to appear poised and engaging, to order correctly, aka boringly. This is because, well, I’d always been the young person, with something to prove and someone more senior to hopefully impress.

Not anymore.

While having lunch at our hotel the last time I was in Dublin, I observed the pre-interview behavior of a twenty-something man. When the host initially tried to seat him at a romantic, curved corner booth, he asked to be seated at the more solemn and business-y banquette opposite. He adjusted the utensil placement and took out a notebook.

Ten minutes later, the elder arrived—holding a briefcase no less! Both ordered the seemingly safe little gem chicken caesar. Unfortunately, due to a 2025 trend beyond their control, the salad arrived as an unwieldy, whole-leaf number doused in dressing and dotted with fat, audibly crunchy croutons. They fought bravely, knife-and-forking the thing while hunks of overdressed green abandoned ship for the now well-sauced table. At one point, twenty-something guy looked like a half-deflated helium balloon, hovering forlornly over his plate. I kept flashing back to similar feelings of face-flushed panic on interviews with elders in the wild. Oh no, I picked a place that’s too loud. I ordered wrong. I’m not adequately filling the silences. It felt like my weaknesses were all on display at once like a sandwich board. I never considered the elder might be having some of the same feelings.

Why on earth do we self-impose such horrid social rules in situations that are already sort of stressful? I often think about this quote from the great actress and comedian Kate McKinnon, said over high tea with the brilliant modern etiquette expert Mariah Grumet Humbert (in a New Yorker article I desperately wish I’d written).

“I’m going to tell you the truth—etiquette makes me sad,” McKinnon said. “It hurts my heart that there is a way you’re supposed to do something and, if you don’t do it that way, people think you’re worthless.”

Humbert’s lovely reply: “What if you looked at it not necessarily as a rule book but more as a road map, to show others kindness and respect?”

Does this exchange make me wince at the memory of my pastry transgression? Obviously. After all, it’s not very kind to shovel in unruly food while someone is asking for your expert career advice. But then, what about after? Should the two parties agree to share the intimacy of a meal—in which they’re possibly opening their maws wide and saucing their faces in harmony?

Post again: “There is space in this world for everyone to roll up their sleeves and dig in because, say, they’re choosing to go to a crab shack and put on bibs and whack things with mallets together,” she said. “In this case, it’s food as an experience because you choose to do it that way. In other words, you’re breaking the general rule for a good reason.”

Ha! So I’m kind of vindicated. I recalled my exchange with the student after she’d asked to get together. I asked what neighborhood she was staying in. Had she been to Swadesi? No? Well, as a fellow food enthusiast I was all but duty bound to spread the gospel of its whimsical pastries, custardy egg sandwiches and magnetic dirty chais!

Now if only I’d followed her lead and eaten after.

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I spent a lot of last year thinking about dining out etiquette, because I briefly took over Bon Appetit’s Code of Conduct column covering the same. I still mentally live there whenever I go out to eat—meaning I often process the experience of a restaurant through the lens of how human beings communicate with and treat one another in these spaces, how we respond to the structure of the place and its menu, how we handle it when things go wrong.

Why does a waiter say they’re taking care of rather than serving us? How come younger servers love to respond “Gorgeous,” when I tell them sure, I’ll take a glass of that natty Chard, or no, I don’t have a food allergy or dietary restriction. What do diners hide when they’re in public (that they love drinking mudslides)? What do they show and show off (that they loved pinot noir blanc before it was trendy)? And why is everyone so damn impatient?

My former editor, the brilliant Elazar Sontag, now the restaurant critic at the Washington Post, loved and encouraged this kind of thinking. (Oh boy is the Post lucky. Ownership better not fuck it up!)

Elazar and I used to have occasional, deliciously fun calls during which we’d unpack these kinds of topics in the nuanced detail befitting of two people who dine out more than is healthy.

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Hi. It’s been a while—four months to be exact! I probably don’t need to recap what a disastrous time it’s been for America’s most essential institutions—journalistic, governmental, constitutional. I’m frightened and angry. I sleep like shit, whose detrimental under-eye effects I try to hide via a hyaluronic eye serum and a whisper of black eyeliner. (Look at the eyeballs! Not the puffy skin holding them in!) Last night I ate cereal for dinner for the first time in … years? While doing so, I moaned that Grape-Nuts (spinoff) Flakes should absolutely not contain 7 grams of added sugar, because the sort of person who willingly buys Grape-Nuts has already committed to eating cereal that tastes like wicker furniture; and therefore does not need said furniture glazed with fucking sucrose.

As a result of such concerning developments, I’ve decided to revive this little newsletter to provide a space for joy and small resistance in a relentlessly dark and exhausting time.

There is some bad(?) news. I am going to paywall a lot more of this content, because it’s hard as hell to make a living as a writer in 2026! But I’d like to know what you’d like to read more of, that you might even be willing to throw a couple bucks at someday. Cheeky (not cruel) restaurant and bar reviews? Oddball observances and related tangents, as you will soon read below? Candid chats with fellow writers? I will not tarnish this sacred space with listicles of any kind, I’m sorry. But I wanna hear what you want because that will make this more fun and interesting for the tiny crowd of us assembled here on this journey that I temporarily abandoned.

Just like Michael Jordan (except for the sports), I’m back, and I’m not a quitter!

Letter to the guy on a scooter with a pre-ordered McDonald’s bag

For several miles we drove alongside you, guy on one of those (fucking) electric scooters (that I hate). You clutched a McDonald’s bag as we passed one another in turn, through the harrowing gauntlet where three major throughways intersect, in 25-degree temperatures. Such high-risk lunch retrieval! What did you have in there? A Big Mac and fries going limp in their little cardboard sauna? Or maybe the iconic Sausage Egg McMuffin and hash brown?

We passed one great burger joint (Redhot Ranch), then three more (Gretel, Bar Parisette, Best Intentions), and one excellent breakfast sandwich (Middle Brow). Sometimes the slush piled a little ominously in the gutter, forcing you to weave directly into traffic, bag billowing in the breeze. We blew by El Fogon Tapatio, with its luscious lengua and succulent carnitas tacos. You kept motoring past Central Park, in the direction of one of my favorite Mexican restaurants in the city, Minna’s, where they hand press tacos and picaditas from fresh masa and heap them with tangy nopalitos, diced onions and crumbled cheese, or crunchy chicharrones. A half mile north of scooter guy’s Mickey Dee’s and about 30 minutes earlier, Allez Cafe made Sean and me two hideously delicious egg sandwiches—piled with a silky omelet, oozing gouda square, thick-cut bacon and a house-made hash brown on an achingly soft roll smeared with onion aioli and jalapeño jam.

There are 41,800 McDonald’s across more than 100 countries. Anytime of the day or night that I pass one, the drive-thru line overflows with vehicles. When I wrote a burger book last year (due in April!), it was one of the must-include entries. McDonald’s menu items are beloved and have sprung too many copycats to count—many by fancy chefs who publicly declare their love for this fast food chain with its own cheeky “Big Mac” economic index.

Yes, it’s inexpensive. Yes, it comes out mind-numbingly fast. Yes, it always tastes the same (except that time I stopped at a highway oasis McDonald’s in some kind of crisis because the Egg McMuffin was lukewarm and haphazardly assembled as if amid a tornado).

Is cheapness and salty nostalgia all we’re really after, day after day after day?

Maybe scooter guy was hungover. Maybe he’d been craving it. Maybe it was his first time eating it. Maybe he wasn’t getting paid till the following Friday.

I guess I’m just tired of cheap, bad food that gets to control supply chains and supercharge greenhouse gas emissions and carry cultural currency in order to keep spreading the way jellyfish do in our increasingly nutrient-bereft oceans. I’m tired of CEOs like McDonald’s Chris Kempczinski raking in $18.2 million in a year—1,014 times what the median McDonald’s employee earns in the same timeframe, mind.

Meanwhile, many of the little indie joints that make our neighborhoods beautiful and special and singular, that try to pay employees a living wage and serve us food made with more of the stuff we should be eating fight to keep the lights on.

Anyway, don’t take it personally, scooter guy. I have a lot on my mind.

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Dearest subscribers!

I am writing to let you know that I’m discontinuing this newsletter for the time being. As I’ve watched the evolution of new media through outlets like Substack, I’m finding—a little ironically—that I’m most concerned about the survival of our journalistic institutions right now. So I’m shifting my attention to getting as much quality work as possible into the outlets that are under attack due to so many forces, including our own federal government and weak, capital-obsessed tech overlords betting that our collective attention spans and ability to think critically are going by the wayside.

This is not to say that Substack, which started as a haven for writers by writers, isn’t capable of producing excellent, important writing and reporting. I maintain at least half a dozen paid subscriptions to newsletters that I love and value deeply. I just don’t think adding my voice to an already crowded space that’s increasingly dominated by corporate-aligned talking heads seeking profits above all else is doing much good right now. (How much more Opinion writing do we really need?) Plus, I’m tired.

To my paid subscribers: I am eternally grateful that you valued quality storytelling enough to lend financial backing to this oddball space I created for food-focused creative nonfiction. Feel free to unsubscribe, or else I’ll unsubscribe all of you by the end of this week.

To everyone: Just in case you don’t already, I’d encourage you to consider paid memberships to NPR and PBS and subscriptions to local and national newspapers and magazines that are doing everything they can to speak truth to power, while our neighbors and our country’s real history are disappeared before our eyes, while our free speech, essential public services, healthcare systems and entire democratic experiment are in danger of being utterly destroyed by a deranged pack of cruel, greedy, racist, misogynistic losers. We need the fourth wall to hold.

I am proud to tell real, inspiring stories about my hometown, to observe and report on the weird ways humans behave in the semi-public spaces where we gather to eat and drink. I am proud to offer people a little shoulder drop if they need it, with a silly story about how lettuce leaves in restaurant salads have gotten inexplicably oversized. I am even more proud do to that as part of institutions that strive to offer a complete package of news and cultural enrichment to their citizens.

After I wrote a story about how restaurants are embracing real candlelight again for The New York Times' dining section this summer, a longtime musician and writer named Christine Lavin wrote me an email telling me how she once got to guest-host open mic night at the famous New York jazz club Birdland and accidentally burnt the list of performers on one of the tabletop votives. She never told the owner and shared a picture of the burnt list.

She also urged me to start archiving my work, which is something she’s coming to terms with as someone on the cusp of retirement.

“I have made 26 solo albums approximately 270 original songs,” she wrote, “ -- and though I was oblivious to it, I've been writing the soundtrack of my life. I was just writing and doing the songs for audiences -- but now that I'm near the end of my career I can finally see what I've been doing all these years.

“I encourage you in the best way possible to keep all your stories organized somewhere and the day will arrive where you can see them all as a part of something much bigger. Whatever possessed you to write about real votive candles as opposed to the battery operated ones? What a weird idea for a story, and judging by the comments, so many people can relate.”

It was so meaningful to read that, and to be reminded of the importance of documenting the moment we’re living through however it makes the most sense to us.

We won’t—and can’t—be silenced.

Love you,

Marge

Hi there.

I got a lot of new free subscribers over the past couple of weeks, probably because of this Eater article and the occasional restaurant reviews I’ve started doing with the marvelous Dennis Lee over at The Party Cut.

That being said, I feel the need to clarify something, first of all: This Substack is not really a place for restaurant content. I started it more as an incubator for the creative food and culture writing I don’t get to do during my day job. I’ve struggled to find an identity for this thing though, because things will come up in my work life that I wanna talk about. For instance, last February I wrote about what I make as a freelance writer, which remains the single most-read thing I’ve ever done here. I’ve also written about why I hate restaurant best-of lists (and still included one like a fucking coward!). Unsurprisingly, that one performed really well, too.

My favorite pieces are generally the least read and least engaged with: missives on pigeons and roadrunners and the horrors of having teeth. I don’t really care about that, and I suppose it’s because people don’t know or care about that part of my writerly personality. But this brings me to the second half why I’m writing today: to share that I need a break from this particular machine, which from time to time amasses chunks of followers who are mainly looking for things I don’t provide, like guides and roundups. There are so many people who do that well and have genuine enthusiasm for it. And the weird sense that I’ve gained momentum for false reasons confuses me.

About a month ago, my dear friend Ari Bendersky (aka Mr. Something Glorious!) and I gave a talk on food media for some high schoolers at Ari’s alma mater. By the way, they all wear sweats now, every single day, which they like to ice up with rad sneakers and layers and layers of Mejuri jewelry. I even heard a story from a mom who said her daughter called it “sad” when a new kid started school there and wore jeans on her first day.

When we asked the students how they get their “content” at the start of the panel, they pretty unanimously replied TikTok and Instagram. Someone else may have said Reddit. They don’t really read, except when they have to for school. And, from what I understand, assignments to read full-length novels are less common in high school English classes nowadays anyway, as we continue to prioritize standardized testing and bow to the inevitability of shortened attention spans.

Of course, we ended up having a great time creating tiny food-centric narratives together. Ari and I presented a series of food-related objects on the table (a lemon, an onion, Takis, Peeps, a Starbucks cup), then asked the students to write down their observations, memories, critiques, etc. of each item. Their responses were perceptive, often sweet, and really funny. One kid said his dad eats lemons like apples, and I will never be the same.

There have been moments in time when we as a society have collectively feared for the survival of reading. Right now, I fear most for the survival of quality, long-form storytelling. What’s even stranger about that is that I am getting fairly steady work doing just that at the moment. But it all feels increasingly tenuous—through the crappy fees I get, the inconsistency of the gigs, the shrinking sizes of editorial teams, blah blah blah—right?

Most of the engagement I get on stories I write has to do with the headlines (seriously, people lose their shit over headlines) or the cute caption slideshows we writers make nowadays to entice people to read our work. Folks will complain that my New York Times and Bon Appetit stories live behind paywalls (or, more often, they simply don’t bother reading them). I’m proud that these outlets are finally asking that readers value the work that goes into digital as well as print work. But then I ask a group of young people what they’re reading and they look at me like I’m insane. (Then again, they might just think I’m insane for not wearing sweatpants all the time. Like what kind of fool does that?)

I don’t know that the answer is necessarily Substack, which has become so incredibly saturated that I’ve lately found myself unsubscribing from ’stacks I genuinely like that I just don’t have the time to read because there are so. fucking. many. All of them want paid subscribers, all of them are trying to churn out regular enough content or build a strong enough community to achieve some critical mass of followers. It’s hard to hustle so hard only to have five or ten percent of people value the content enough to pay for it. It makes this feel like yet another zero-sum game that we are all losing.

Then again, I never even played it; I post so infrequently here. I currently have five drafts sitting on my dashboard. One is about spoon cake, which is a really unphotogenic dessert for people who don’t like baking (or refuse to practice it because they have a weird insecurity about it). There’s another I started about whether that delivery robot Coco has the right of way at crosswalks, and one that’s blank except for the words: “el músculo de salero salt shaker muscle.”

I don’t want to make people pay for this content. I want them to inherently see its value as part of their cultural enrichment and entertainment, like a streaming service. Maybe it’s not that anymore, or maybe it never was. I’m going to take a wee hiatus from little stories to think about whether my voice on this particular platform is still necessary. To the handful who have supported it financially, please don’t feel the need to keep doing so, but know that it has meant the world to me.

P.S. Fuck trump. Preserve Words.

A few hours before we went for dinner, I interviewed chef and owner Ethan Pikas, not about Cellar Door per se, but the fact that his restaurant (and its tight-knit kitchen crew) recently provided the backdrop for a music video shot by the Chicago-based hip hop artist Ben Glover, who raps under the moniker Blvck Svm. (It was published on WTTW.)

In 2023 Ben had the brilliant idea to make a rap album that sounds like a tasting menu. His aptly named michelinman dropped in November. Even more brilliantly, he and his small production crew released a companion series of “Bvck of House” music videos, in which Ben raps at a vintage mic in the kitchens at fine-dining restaurants around the U.S. and Canada.

For Ben, the light went on while he was experiencing his first-ever tasting menu at Atelier in Lincoln Square: The way dishes flowed into one another, the colors that popped on the plate, the invigorating palate cleanser that signaled a transition to the meal’s denouement. I just ate an album, he thought when it was over. I’m going to make a rap album that sounds like a tasting menu.

The thing is, it does. Between jazzy strings and melodic beats, he raps about consumption and prestige on a lyrical scaffolding built out of of fine-dining’s luxurious larder and meticulous attention to detail. He samples chefs demystifying Iberian ham and sardonic lines from “The Menu,” and repeatedly pulls at the threads culinary arts share with consumer goods and rap. He even drops in a “palate cleanser” track in homage to a life-altering black currant sorbet interlude he tasted at Rge Rd in Edmonton, Canada.

To say I struggled mightily to write this story would be a gross understatement. Music isn’t my language, after all. Every time I strayed into the weeds of song composition or lyricism, I felt lost, like trying to carry on a complex conversation in a language that wasn’t mine. Then I’d get back to the food and the word bank would refill like a reservoir.

In any case, music was acutely top of mind when we took our seats at one of Cellar Door’s blonde-wood tables that evening. The playlist started somewhere in the 1980s: Billy Idol, Wham, and—was it me—or did “Private Eyes” by Hall & Oates play twice? There’s something hilariously discordant about romantic vigilante pop-rock accompanying the delicately muted colors of pre-spring on the plate.

But no matter! There was springy sourdough bread with its thick crust and almost custardy, cobwebbed middle, followed by creamy, vinegary boquerones lazing in preserved tomato water slicked with olive oil.

Suddenly, a jarringly familiar electric guitar riff fell in.

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock,” sang Bobby Helms in the eponymous 1957 Christmas song. “Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring.”

Never mind that I loathe Christmas music outside maybe five weeks in November and December. I believed at first that this was intentional—a performance art piece, maybe. Or perhaps it had become cool to ironically slip holiday songs onto playlists out of season, the way oversized Santa Claus belt buckles seem to be fashionable accessories to women’s trousers. Such is the creative gravitas of this place, I suppose.

“The music is doing weird things tonight,” said Ethan, thoroughly unbothered, as he deposited a salad of the fattest endive leaves we’d ever seen, which were draped with lacy sheets of shaved manchego and set over a puddle of kumquat vinaigrette.

“Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet!”

Soon everyone in the place was laughing and the song got cut off. Just like that, things returned to aging-hipster-restaurant normal, under the gentle crooning of Belle and Sebastian and early Cat Power. Aside from a small cohort of us, no one would ever know that unwarranted Christmas music briefly jolted CDP into an alternate reality.

As expected, Belle and Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field” made for a dreamy sonic backdrop to the mussels escabeche, which hid beneath a billow of nutty-sweet celeriac espuma. Each plump mussel we excavated from beneath that buttercup-hued cloud dripped dots of brown butter on the way to our mouths. Would I have noticed the same details if I’d eaten this dish while, say, listening to “Silent Night?”, I wondered absently.

It’s not easy to keep on making the fearless, probing kind of art that the small crews behind Cellar Door and Blvck Svm make, to stay in a place of raw creativity, iteration and risk taking. So many things try to beat you into capitalist, mass-market submission, like investors and fickle consumer attention.

The same night Ben got the idea for the Bvck of House music videos, he fired off hundreds of Instagram DMs to restaurants around the country with a pre-proposal for the series, though he had yet to release a single song from the album. Finally, three restaurants said yes, and the thing could begin in earnest.

“If I hadn’t gotten those three yeses, I don't know if I would’ve had the confidence to pursue this idea and make a full album,” he told me.

The “faustian” video at Cellar Door was one of the last the crew shot, in December. When I asked Ben about his meal there, he said he can’t stop thinking about the salad he had—frisée with verjus vinaigrette. “Every time I have a salad now, I always end up comparing it my head to that one, and I’m disappointed.”

I can relate to the unforgettable Cellar Door salad, though—this time—for slightly different reasons.

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The first dentist appointment I made during pandemic lockdown was an emotional affair all around. After a few months of reassuring emails from the office saying they were deploying onsite rapid testing and air purification, and that staff would all don hazmat suits and full face shields, I booked my teeth cleaning for September 2020.

As weird as I felt about leaving the house for any reason at all, I quickly reverted to my old pre-checkup habits: flossing aggressively and using my electric toothbrush for long enough over two minutes so the computerized smiley face gets stars for eyes. You see, I love getting praised for good dental hygiene.

The moment I walked into the office I started crying, then profusely thanked the receptionist for her brave service (like I said, an emotional affair). When the hygienist came to collect me, I immediately mentioned how helpful my mouthguard was. Having refused to wear it for the first six months or so, I’d since taken a liking to it and now couldn’t go to sleep without it, like a security blanket.

“Everyone who comes in these days is clenching or grinding their teeth,” she replied. Then she turned and smiled at me wryly through her face shield: “I can’t imagine why.”

A few minutes later, as I sat at a forcible recline gazing directly into that blinding lamp while the hygienist scratched plaque off my teeth, a patient walked by.

“Anything bothering you?” another hygienist asked him.

“Yeah, I think I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep.”

“Told you,” mine said. “The human mouth is a crime scene.”

I suppose she intended it as a precautionary tale not to ignore the signs my gaping maw tells me everyday without words. All the same, her words chilled me to the bone.

Until that moment, I figured the main crime we regularly committed against our poor mouths was burning them over and over with volcanic pizza, coffee and soup. (The dentist once called me out for having a “burnt palate.” I found this utterly mortifying.)

I’m well aware that I’ve eroded my gums from decades of overzealous brushing (which feels like not my fault when they kept telling me about the dangers of plaque). I’ve probably also worn my enamel down to nothing because I seem to prefer criminally acidic foods and beverages over all else.

But that’s all just child play. Stress, insomnia, cancer, sleep apnea, dementia: the mouth knows.

When I lived in New Mexico, the dentist I went to actually told me that my teeth were crowding out my tongue. “See those toothmarks on both sides of your tongue there?”

He told me I probably had sleep apnea and I might one day swallow my tongue in my sleep. He prescribed the book, 6-foot Tiger in a 3-Foot Cage, and I started crying right there in the dentist chair. I switched to a new dentist that very same day.

A couple weeks ago, I found out that the standup comedian Liza Treyger has a “geographic tongue,” in which harmless, sometimes painful patches resembling smooth, red islands appear on the tongue. Liza mentioned this in a hilarious Grub Street piece detailing her unhinged eating habits while celebrating the debut of her Netflix special, Night Owl.

“A dental hygienist once told me it was the reason I can’t handle spice, but I’ve been pushing myself and have made great strides,” she said, adding that she does so mainly by ordering jalapeños on her nachos.

I appreciated her can-do willingness to commit the fiery mouth crime of inflicting peppers on her poor geographic tongue. So what does that say about me?

Maybe it’s like that Seinfeld episode said. We’re all just a bunch of anti-dentite bastards who refuse to give due credence to this field. Or maybe we’re just tired of learning about yet another indicator that our bodies are stressed and overtired and unwell and that it might be due to some other, more sinister reason than a global pandemic or the fact that our democracy is now being hijacked by a handful of corrupt, loser wannabe-dictator billionaires.

WHY OF COURSE WE ARE GRINDING OUR TEETH DOWN TO NUBBINS ALL DAY AND NIGHT!

Not me though. I got the mouthguard just like they told me to. So I guess that counts as meeting them halfway. Now give me my praise and my travel-sized Pronamel and let’s don’t say another word about it.

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In 2021, I collaborated with Margaret Pak and Vinod Kalathil on a self-published recipe zine about sadya, the traditional vegetarian feast that hails from Kerala, in southwest India, where Vinod’s from. At the time, the couple were running a perpetually sold-out series of boundary-pushing Indian food pop-ups, which would eventually give way to their award-winning Keralan restaurant, Thattu.

This is how the peppery drinking broth rasam came into my life. No, scratch that. Rasam roared into my life, as a steaming cauldron bubbling madly on the range in Vinod and Margaret’s old West Loop apartment.

Rasam was one of the last dishes Margaret and Vinod tested on the second and final day of our marathon cooking fest to finalize the zine lineup. Vinod told us that rasam, also known as milagu tanni (meaning pepper water), is the precursor to the famous Indian-British hybrid soup, mulligatawny. A thin, albeit spicy and tangy curative, rasam is traditionally made from tamarind, chopped tomatoes, warming spices and aromatic herbs, and served with rice. As its name suggests, the real star—the engine behind its restorative fire-breathing properties—is black pepper. (Did you know that black pepper is native to Kerala, which is affectionately known as India’s spice garden? I didn’t until that day.)

“Rasam’s gotta be spicy,” Vinod said. “It needs to wake you up, like a taste explosion.”

Margaret tore a small ball of tamarind paste into pieces and soaked them in hot water. She minced garlic and diced the tomatoes (“They have to be romas!”). She fried black mustard seeds in coconut oil till they sputtered and popped, then added the tomato and savory asafoetida to the pot. The sweet-and-sour tamarind water went in next, with a handful of warming cumin and coriander seeds, the peppercorns and more water. My stomach growled.

Lunch appeared to be imminent, but I knew better. Testing and writing recipes with Margaret is a beautiful and maddening thing to experience, because the tweaking and iterating never really end. That’s because she will keep on learning forever—meaning the ultimate, perfect recipe probably doesn’t exist.

As the soup gurgled and steamed to a rollicking boil, she seemed to relax a little, having never made rasam before that day. Perhaps Margaret—who’s Korean-American and thus prefers eating soups so volcanically hot that they’re still bubbling when they reach the table—is simply most comfortable operating at a raucous boil.

“MORE PEPPER!” she cried between sips as she calibrated it toward a conclusion that would satisfy the the couple’s exacting standards and taste memories—for now at least.

My own first sip raced down my throat like tangy, umami-rich magma. I roared an invigorated “Ahhhhhh!” as tears poured from my eyes. By sip three, my nose was running too, as the rasam tingled and sparked its way through my whole being.

“MORE PEPPER!” I howled.

When we finally sat down to lunch, Vinod scolded us gently for not allowing everything time to come to room temperature, as is custom with these vegetable dishes, which are typically prepared hours in advance of the feast. Fortunately, this did not apply to the rasam, which steamed evocatively next to pretty little heaps of squash eriserry, lentil-and-vegetable sambar, multi-colored avial dotted with fresh curry leaves, pale-green cabbage thoran, and snow-white olan flecked with black-eyed peas. I picked up the rasam and swirled it to awaken the cracked peppercorns, which had settled to the bottom for a rest after exhaling their earthly fire.

“You can pour it over the matta rice and scoop it with your fingers,” Margaret suggested, right as I gulped the rasam down in one go. The tangy umami of the tomato and tamarind! The leek-ish savoriness of the asafoetida! I helped myself to a little more, which I greedily bolted down again, this time noticing how the citrusy pungency of the coriander held its own against the vociferous fire of the pepper. Margaret’s right, I thought. You might as well not bother with this if you don’t like cilantro.

I finally got a hold of myself by cup three, and poured the rasam over the mottled, nutty pearls of red rice.

Margaret sent me home with a pint container’s worth, along with about six others brimming with various dishes from the past two days. The following afternoon, I reheated the rasam and drank that too without telling Sean.

I’ve made rasam only once since then. I was living in New Mexico, quite lonely and needing a shot of fortifying bravery to the arm. As the cauldron raged, I yelled “MORE PEPPER!” to no one before dropping in a few more crushed peppercorns. I thought about Margaret and Vinod.

About a month ago, amid the slow, disorienting week between Christmas and New Year’s—made infinitely more disorienting by the incoming administration—a friend and I went for lunch at Thattu. I knew what I was getting when I woke up that day: the chorum kariyum, or veg thali, a platter of earthly delights that comes with a little sidecar of rasam. I told myself this time I’d prolong the rasam by pouring it over the accompanying pile of rice. But when it arrived, I drank it in two gulps. Its tiny power coursed through me, grounding me in joyful nourishment. I exhaled a long “ahhhhhhhhh,” and swore I saw smoke.

Later Margaret gave me a quart-size container of it to take home.

“Don’t forget to stir it,” she said. For now, the peppercorns piled quietly at the bottom like innocent pebbles. But I knew their magic was far from spent.

Rasam, from Everyday Sadya

As expected, Margaret has had several small epiphanies about rasam in the eons since she first made it for us in 2021. Most notably, she says it doesn’t require a garnish of fresh curry leaves, but only a consequential sprinkling of cilantro. She also generously upped the dose of coconut oil, as rasam benefits heartily from a little extra fat. It will harden into pinkish icebergs when you store it in the fridge. Break them up a little before reheating, if you do so in batches.

• 1 oz (lime-sized ball) wet tamarind paste

• 1-3 Tbsp coconut oil

• 1/2 tsp black mustard seeds

• 1 cup diced roma tomato

• 2 tsp salt, and more to taste

• 1 generous pinch asafoetida

• 2 cloves garlic, chopped

• 1 tsp cumin seed

• 2 tsp coriander powder

• 4 tsp crushed black peppercorns

• 3 Tbsp roughly chopped cilantro

To make tamarind juice, take the wet tamarind paste, tear it into smaller pieces and soak it in 6 Tbsp of hot water for 10 minutes. Squeeze out the tamarind juice and discard the pulp. Reserve 1 Tbsp tamarind juice for this recipe.

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, heat the coconut oil, and add the mustard seeds. Once they start sputtering add the tomato, 2 tsp salt and the asafoetida.

Once the tomato starts to soften, add the garlic and cumin and stir. Add the tamarind water, coriander powder, and 4 cups of water. Mix well, cover and bring to a rolling boil.

Add the crushed peppercorns, and continue boiling uncovered for 5-6 minutes. Check the seasoning, and adjust. Don’t skimp on the salt; you want an intense flavor. Just before serving, add the cilantro. Pour into a small bowl, then garnish with a little more cilantro. Drink it hot or pour it over rice.

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I signed up for a restorative yoga class a few days after New Year’s Day. It had been probably six years since my last class, but I decided 2025 me should re-embrace stretching in public.

“A lot of new faces in here today,” said the instructor, whose floral sleeve tattoos peeked out from beneath her tunic sweatshirt. We’d gently contort ourselves into a series of easy poses and hold them for several minutes each, she said, so we should space ourselves out enough to stretch our arms wide on either side. We should also grab several blankets and props, because today we’d be supported. (Nice, isn’t it?)

I built a little fort around the edge of my mat using two foam blocks, a huge bolster pillow and a few rolled-up Southwestern blankets. I tried to empty my mind of thoughts like, “How often do they wash these blankets?” and “How long does bacteria live on microfiber?”

Moments before class began and just when I’d started feeling secure in my little rectangular sanctuary, a man with chin-length hair and culottes arrived, shrugging a little apology toward the instructor.

“Good to see you!” she replied. “Sit anywhere.” He unfurled his extra-thin mat maybe two feet to the right of mine—much shorter than his arms! I scooched myself a few inches to the left, but he didn’t seem to notice. In fact, the instructor had barely started her welcome spiel, granting us the empowerment to take our own shapes and move at our own pace, when he flopped onto his back, arms wide—fingers grazing my mat—with a weighted mask over his eyes.

I spent the next hour pretending to focus on my breath while playing limb Tetris with a man who couldn’t have cared less what was happening. If spatial awareness ever existed to him, he let it go when he emptied his mind of all thoughts, knees splayed directly in the path of my overhead stretch. At one point, I think he might’ve fallen asleep. Well, somebody did; I heard gentle snoring during assisted child’s pose, while my nose was smushed deep into the bacteria-ridden bolster.

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A few hours after class while folding socks, a charley horse grabbed hold of a muscle in my upper-middle back. The spasms hobbled me for the next day or two, then lessened into a knot. Maybe this means my back got more flexible, like a sunburn turning into a tan. In any case, I haven’t been back to yoga.

2025 me also adopted a pescatarian diet for the time being—well, except for the occasional meaty sins I commit in the name of my silly job. So far, I have already housed a couple of duck carnitas tacos to honor Chicago’s dearly departed Taqueria Chingón (which I’m told is probably resurrecting some time soonish anyway) and a bacon-flecked onion tart (for research purposes!). There was a plump, illicit roast chicken in delicious cold sauce made from crème fraîche, rinsed shallots and dill, and something heavenly called toast royale, which is essentially sourdough French toast griddled in beef fat so it tastes like a truffle burger without the beef.

For the most part though, Sean and I are cooking a lot more, which is great. So far this included pancetta-less carbonara with caramelized brussels sprouts, pecorino and lots of lemon; oil-packed tuna and grain salad with pistachios and mint; black bean and hominy stew with dried New Mexico chilies; broiled salmon encrusted with miso, honey and grapefruit; deconstructed pesto and white bea—

…God, cooking is fucking monotonous isn’t it? Everyday I wake up shackled anew to this burden of feeding myself and my loved one. We burn through fresh produce like rabbits, and my hands are so dry from washing that they resemble bird talons. Plus, by the time evening rolls around, we feel like a couple of walking farts from all the extra fiber. The other night, Sean denounced the diet for giving him “digestive issues,” as if to say, “The beans know what they did.” (Um, help keep us regular?)

And in case you’re wondering, no. I’m not doing Dry January. I’m not sure my poor body can take much more betterment.

Sending love to all creatures affected by the devastation in L.A. ♡

By way of preamble: Unlike almost everything else on this lil Substack, I made this post paid. In a way, it’s a cheeky experiment to try to understand what media consumers consider to be of enough value to pay for. For instance, many of you may rely on the occasional listicle to help you decide where to get a topnotch burger or superb cocktail. More than likely you didn’t have to pay to read that bit of service journalism, but instead found it for free on an online food or lifestyle magazine or blog. Aside from relying on the generalized expertise of their authors, many of these listicles don’t undergo a super rigorous vetting process. Hopefully, the writer visited a handful of the spots mentioned within the past year. Others they included because a PR agency representing the place told them about them, or someone they know and trust vouched for them, or another writer covered them beforehand. Because lists get a lot of clicks and engagement, publications keep churning them out. But writers don’t get paid enough or have sufficient time to put in the work to make them truly valuable, rendering them nearly on par with AI-scraping of existing information. I struggle mightily with this disconnect, so today I wanted to share a blueprint for how we as an industry might (slightly) better tackle this service, based on a recent experience I had. Thanks for supporting me and little stories.

I get a fair number of requests to write clichéd Chicago food and drink listicles. A guide to Italian beef! A roundup of the best hot dogs! A tour of Chicago’s mob-style bars! I said no to all three of these in recent months for the following reasons:

1. At the moment, I have nothing left of value to say about Italian beef, not least for $350;

2. Chicago food writer Dennis Lee wrote THE definitive guide to Chicago hot dogs in 2022. I wouldn’t dare attempt to supplant this unless I had sufficient budget to eat at every damn hot dog stand in the city, full stop;

3. I had just finished a massive, on-the-ground wine guide and was too burnt out to take on another listicle on quick turnaround for too little money.

In October I got an email from a national drinks publication editor to write a listicle summing up Chicago’s 10 essential bars. I politely declined at first, saying that I can’t justify writing such a comprehensive guide without ample time and budget to experience a dozen or more places. (Internally, I screamed: Why on earth would I do my hometown the injustice of so woefully underrepresenting its finest watering holes out of roughly 900 total, many of which I’d never even heard of, let alone darkened their doors?) Do I sound like a broken record on the sorry state of freelance service journalism yet? Good.

The truth is, beyond the aforementioned shortcomings of the listicle genre as a whole, I find these sorts of undertakings exhausting in this era of online media.

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Should a chocolate chip cookie ever appear in the shape of a footlong sub? I thought about this as I stood at the bus stop in front of a Subway window decal displaying its latest 12-inch-long food addition. Dough is moldable after all, and we thrill at cookies formed into things like trees, cats and dildos. An oversized (round) cookie is a whimsical delight to behold, like a gargantuan pair of glasses or a huge hat. So how come I don’t feel the same when I look upon a ciabatta-shaped cookie the length of my forearm? Maybe because it seems like a lazier bit of manipulation, the dough-shaping equivalent of giving up.

I do like that a churro comes in a tube shape, which makes it portable, fun and easy to dip in warm chocolate. Each identical bite delivers maximum enjoyment—airy, crisp and sugar-dusted outside, melt in the mouth inside—till it’s gone in a flash.

I don’t mind when a bagel is twisted into a braid. It looks even more impressively handmade than the traditional ring shape, though still recognizably like bread, because, you know, challah. More importantly, one can still theoretically saw said bagel braid in half and smear each piece with cream cheese.

It’s cute when pizza is pinched into a heart shape for Valentine’s Day, or perhaps in the hilarious shape of a football field to indicate that it’s extra-large, as one of my favorite (bygone) tavern-style pizza joints used to do. Even better, we had to specifically request “stadium pizza” when we called to place the order, which had a powerful humbling effect.

I like when I order a side of rice at some Mexican-American restaurants and it’s tightly packed into a cup then overturned on the plate to retain a cylindrical shape. It’s a satisfying moment to hack into it with my fork and send rice kernels flying like a mini Godzilla flattening a rice building. Other times, I’ll go at it more daintily, scooping off a small corner to see how long I can keep the rice house intact.

I also enjoy little sculptures made out of butter: a flower, leaf or cheeky little cow. There might be nothing more soothing than watching an internet video of someone slicing into a tiny couch they made out of butter. I could say the same for sushi shaped into penguins, cabbage dogs, and rugby shirt soba noodles. (What would we do without @sibatable?)

I don’t love illusion cakes that resemble other prepared foods (read: BLT, Salisbury steak, baked potato, pecan pie). I do love the kind that look like fresh fruit and vegetables. I also love the kind that look like a human foot wearing a strappy shoe.

When I was in culinary school, I learned how to carve apples and tomatoes into swans. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up working on a cruise ship, nor did I have the foresight or discipline to start a carved produce Instagram account, so this tenuous skill quickly fell by the wayside.

Decorative whimsy aside, certain foods assume uncommon shapes for better functionality. Consider the cup-shaped tortilla chip for salsa scooping (which always cuts the roof of my mouth), or the meatloaf, which one slices into individually portioned slabs and serves with mashed potatoes. I can’t conjure any functional uses for a footlong cookie beyond portability (which cookies already are by nature) and easy, non-whimsical, sharing (which I did not test out on the bus that day because I didn’t buy one).

I guess it’s not all Subway’s fault that it’s best known for making things long and sub-shaped. Maybe it feels compelled to keep product line expansions consistent at the expense of creative satisfaction. After all, if the cookies aren’t a foot long, we might forget we’re at Subway.

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Anxious people shouldn’t chew gum. I can’t remember when or where I first heard this preachy maxim, but I think about it every time the anxiety’s at 11 and I’m chomping on gum. Yesterday I chewed a small wad almost to a powder. But being a woman painfully aware of the atrocity of being seen with white gunk at the mouth corners—even when alone in the house but for my husband upstairs (the male gaze!)—I snapped to and spit out the gumpowder.

Anxious people shouldn’t drink coffee. I didn’t heed this yesterday either, pits ripe and palms drenched, eyes darting between a story I was writing and my inbox. From: The New York Times, Subject line: Tr*mp….. DELETE NOT ARCHIVE! The vigilance and speed seemed to help. I thanked the coffee and made a second pot.

Anxious people might find relief from repetitive, small tasks. For me, this usually includes making a grocery list, shopping, cooking. As a woman with no hobbies to speak of that aren’t food related who’s simmering in a rage-stew of nausea and helplessness, I felt in a slight bind. I abandoned the shopping list and heated up leftover lentils for lunch. I chopped two radishes and a small pile of herbs into the leftover raita. Making garnish is a repetitive, small task that also offers a sense of control. Look, I’ve gilded this sustenance! I’m still a person. An hour later, I noticed a dried-up drip of starchy lentil liquid on my sweatshirt the color of Exorcist vomit.

On the eve of Election Day, my husband decided to bake chocolate chip cookies to ease the nerves. We were a little disorganized and don’t have a microwave, so I softened the butter on top of the preheating stove. Most of our bowls were dirty so Sean measured the dry ingredients into a decorative soup bowl.

“Do you think turbinado sugar will work instead of granulated?” he asked.

Anxious people don’t do well with adversity.

Using our only clean wooden spoon—a sushi paddle—I vigorously creamed together the grainy turbinado and molassesy brown sugars with melty-edged butter that was still hard in the middle in an oversized, garish-red serving bowl.

Anxious people should engage in regular physical activity.

The dough seemed stiff so I dribbled in a little water. It felt good to say, “Maybe the larger granules don’t absorb the moisture as well,” out loud. I’m still capable of light deduction!

The first batch baked up pale, probably because we accidentally turned off the oven when the timer went off. I thought they were underdone. Sean was casually steadfast, as he is every time he bakes cookies. We bagged them and froze all but six, which we left on the counter.

In the morning, on Election Day, a few of them had cracked right down the middle. But they still tasted good.

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A few weeks ago, I sat in front of a blinking cursor on a blank Google Docs page for probably the thousandth time. But on this particular morning, the looming deadline proved no match for my wandering mind.

I should compost those coffee grounds and brew another pot. The bathroom sink really needs to be wiped down. When was the last time I updated my website portfolio?

Whenever I’m in a procrastinatory state like this, I don’t like to self-impose the pressure of starting a story at the beginning. After all, writing a hook is intimidating. It’s the first impression! The only chance we get to capture then keep the reader’s attention! Sometimes it’s gentler to start a little further down in the story, where the proverbial aromatics and spices have already been sautéing. I can pick up this stage of the storytelling formula with my eyes closed: Pop in a few malleable supporting quotes, transition into the lesser points I want to make without straying too far from the larger theme. This is the meat of the thing, where I fill in and explain details before building to a dramatic, nicely garnished conclusion.

Today, however, this strategy isn’t working. So I move onto scrubbing the shower tile. I mean, since I’m here I might as well clean the whole bathroom.

Then suddenly, a single phrase pops into my head. I rush back to my desk and that impatient cursor and type the following phrase: “Oh no, did I make enough?”

The story I’d been avoiding was one about our human tendency to cook too much food for the people we love. (Some of you can perhaps relate to this, whenever you examine a box of pasta that boldly claims to contain enough for you and the three other people you’re having over for dinner.)

I’d already interviewed psychologist Meryl Pankhurst to help me unpack this fascinating, knotty question and its root causes, during which she told me she could’ve written a dissertation on it. In fact, she’d provided such a wealth of possible explanations—a culture that normalizes excess food, a generations-deep scarcity mindset, a need for approval from family and friends or to tangibly articulate love—that I found myself becoming overwhelmed by the topic, even briefly questioning my fitness to tackle it.

Returning to this simple question enabled me to regain control of my place within this story, because it was where the idea was born. “Oh no, did I make enough food?”

Suddenly, I’m back inside a familiar scene—doling out pasta for a small dinner party. The doubt creeps in quietly, then escalates as the coiled heap in the pot diminishes. Before long, I’m redistributing individual noodles among the bowls, convinced someone will nonetheless feel slighted. No matter that everyone already ate crab delights and cheese and slabs of bread smeared with tapenade. “I don’t know if I made enough for everyone to seconds!” I moan to my husband. Yet as I repeat this ludicrous behavior yet again, I know there’s bigger stuff going on. Why do I always worry about making enough? Where does this fear come from? What’s the worst thing that could happen if I didn’t make enough, like, really? How do I unlearn this habit?

Reclaiming my place in this story grounds me in another sense, too. That another empty page is not something to fear, but to fill with answers (or more questions) to our weird little questions, and offer reassurance that other weirdos are asking the same ones. More importantly, does a box of pasta really feed four? I guess as a primi course maybe.

There’s a small, counter-service Lebanese restaurant in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood called Taste of Lebanon that makes the purest, most satisfying lentil soup: starchy, half-disintegrated pulses lazing in savory broth seasoned with salt, cumin (maybe?) and plenty of pepper. It comes in a shallow styrofoam bowl with a folded-up triangle of markouk bread for sopping. I bolt it down every time—gulping with abandon like I haven’t been so gloriously nourished in weeks. Good soup does this to me. 

I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to recreate Taste of Lebanon’s lentil soup many times. I know I’m missing a trick or two seasoning-wise; perhaps there’s something to the broth they cook it in, a sneaky spice they deploy or a certain seasoned pot they use. In any case, I eventually gave up on this quest, deciding instead to delight in this excellent reason to leave the house and hop on my bike to grab lunch. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t cook plenty of lentils. My favorite application of late is this golden-hued, curried red lentil soup. Red lentils are a terrific lunchtime pulse because they cook in less than 30 minutes. You can substitute also-quick-cooking brown lentils, but I like the sweet, nutty red most in this application; they beautifully complement the coconut milk. They also fall apart readily, thickening the soup as their deep orange color fades to autumnal yellow—a deliciously maudlin moment for those of us who relish fall, whenever the hell it decides to get here.

Cooks’ note:

If you’ve lost touch with our old, vintage friend, chicken bouillon powder, I’d suggest getting reacquainted. (I wrote a love letter to it one time!) An umami-rich dusting of this golden stuff supercharges the flavor of nearly everything it touches. Given its high sodium content, I don’t use much when cooking, and cut back on the remaining salt.

Golden lentil soup

serves 3

Olive oil, as needed
1 shallot or ½ a small onion, minced
3 or 4 fat garlic cloves, minced
¼ tsp salt, plus more to taste
Freshly cracked pepper, to taste
2 rounded tsps curry powder
½ tsp cumin
¾ tsp chicken bouillon powder 
1 cup red lentils
1 can full-fat coconut milk
3 cups water
1 lemon, cut in half
Optional: ½ cup cooked white rice, for serving
Cut lemon wedges, for serving

Method:

1. Heat a heavy-bottomed saucepan or Dutch oven over medium, and add a few good glugs of olive oil. When the oil slides easily around the pan, add the shallots, garlic, salt and pepper. Sauté the aromatics for 2 or 3 minutes, until fragrant. 

2. Add the curry powder, cumin and bouillon powder, and cook for another 30 seconds until you can smell the spices. Stir in the lentils, and cook for another 30 seconds until they’re shiny from the oil and well coated in the aromatics.  

3. Add the coconut milk and water, using a portion of the water to rinse out the can over the pot. Squeeze in the juice of half the lemon. 

4. Cover and bring to a boil, then turn down to medium low. It’s a good idea to taste at this point and see if you’re on the right track, or if you need a touch more curry, bouillon, cumin, or olive oil for velvety richness. Simmer the soup for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the lentils are soft and fuzzy at the edges. Stir frequently throughout cooking to prevent the starchy pulses from sticking to the bottom of the pot. 

5. Just before serving, squeeze the remaining lemon half over the soup, and stir in the rice (optional). Taste, and adjust the seasoning again as needed. Ladle into deep bowls, drizzle with olive oil and crack some more pepper over the top. Serve with lemon wedges.

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The day Sean and I moved into our apartment at the end of June happened to be the second day of service at Bar Parisette, a pretty French bistro at the end of my new street. We shuffled in just before 9 p.m., freshly showered, which did little to mask the defeated stink of two people with no living room couch and eight hundred boxes to unpack. We split a bottle of Alsatian Pinot Noir/Pinot Gris, which owner and sommelier Matt Sussman decided might reasonably complement the smorgasbord we’d ordered from chef and partner Madalyn Durrant’s whimsical opening menu: whitefish rillettes with housemade brioche, sunflower (aka sunchokes, sunflower shoots and powdered, toasted sunflower seeds) and wax bean salad, tomatoes stuffed with merguez and couscous, and a pan-roasted half chicken with carrot caramel and crunchy snap peas and radishes. (Matt was right.)

Over an hour into our reviving meal and nearing closing time, Matt brought out two tiny cups of Madalyn’s luscious salted vanilla soft serve. He sank into a chair at the next marble-topped table over, has face aglow in flickering candlelight. In the time we’d spent moving our life across town, Bar Parisette had been pummeled with an unexpected crush of customers and endured a four-hour power outage. Matt still had undecided art to hang, furniture to swap out in the dining room; he’d built a makeshift wine cellar and had yet to establish a watering schedule for the plants. Aside from a woeful potted palm near the entrance that predated Bar Parisette, I never would have guessed a single thing had gone awry in this beautiful room, with its assuredly unique bistro cooking and relaxed service.

“Your cilantro is starting to bolt on the patio,” I added unhelpfully.

“Take some of it!” he replied.

When we finally left a half hour later, feeling thoroughly nourished, Matt called out, “Bye, neighbors!” I dutifully pinched off and pocketed a few handfuls of cilantro, which I stirred into my chickpea curry for lunch the next day.

A week later (was it only a week?), Sean and I sat at the bar and shared Pernod-soused mussels draped in soft fennel and a superb rare burger with soft, smoked onions and twice-cooked fries that shattered pleasingly between our teeth. I sipped a Biarritz Cola, a refreshing, lemon-spiked cola facsimile assembled from whiskey, sweet vermouth and spicy Luxardo Amaro Amano, which GM and partner Diana Benanti recommended for easing on into the evening (she was right). A famous local food personality came in with his wife, and I told him to order Madalyn’s sunflowers.

“I think she’s a wizard,” I said.

As the weeks went on, Bar Parisette the organism and those who coax it to life and wind it down each night became fixtures of my daily life, too. I passed by Diana heading into work one hot, soupy afternoon on my way back from mailing a letter. When the heat wave abated a few days later, I spotted Matt pushing the windows wide to let in the fresh breeze as I walked to the grocery store. The restaurant had just started filling up. From their tabletop perch, the plants looked well-nourished.

One weekday afternoon, I stopped by a darkened Bar Parisette to taste through chilled red wines at different temperatures with Matt for a story I was writing. Eventually, we got to talking about how he prices wine here—essentially charging retail plus a corkage fee. It’s rare compared to the typical finer restaurant markup on wine, which can reach several multiples. But it reflects the overall ethos of this real-deal neighborhood bistro, which is priced such that people can reasonably eat and drink here once a week or more (hence a $7 house salad, $16 burger and entrees topping out around $30).

“I sure hope we keep filling this place up,” Matt said.

I’ve lived within walking distance of plenty of restaurants throughout my years in Chicago: A reliably decent Thai place; a charming, quiet pizza-by-the slice spot that was unfortunately replaced by a less-charming, trendy burger joint; an Italian-American standby; a bar with decent enough pub food. None has magnetized me quite so insistently as Bar Parisette these past two months. Has this place at the end of my street cracked the neighborhood restaurant code? Or is this just the sort of sustenance I’m after at this particular moment in my 40-something life? A couple fresh oysters, some vegetable wizardry and easygoing kindness; impeccable roast chicken and a few glasses of good wine.

One evening Sean and I snuck into Bar Parisette with an hour to spare before an obligatory dinner to slurp a dozen oysters and respectively sip a French 75 and a vodka martini—perfectly calibrated by bartender Charlie. I discussed the joys of linen summer suits with Christi, who had now served us twice and who has a gift for carrying out an evocative conversation across 2-minute intervals. It was the decadent, 30-minute respite we needed just then, calling to mind the etymology of “restaurant,” from the Latin “restaurare,” meaning “to restore” or “to renovate.”

To restore to a former (nourished) state, to devour fleeting joys, to talk, laugh and feel a little fancy. What a gift to have such a restaurant living the end of my street. I can’t wait for the block party.