Perpetual reinvention

Brenner Report #3: Creating virtual food halls, rooting out toxic culture, empowering muckraking journalism and other stabs at solutions to F&B's great problems

Jul 20, 2020

Happy Monday!

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Food hall takeaway

As a person who spent a good portion of the last three years working on food halls — particularly an international food hall in Southern California I was helping to create — I’ve been thinking a lot about what will happen to all those projects. You know, the ones that were meant to animate mixed-used developments and breathe exciting new life back into shopping malls. There are a jillion such food halls out there, and there were many more in development when Covid-19 hit. What is their fate?

I can’t help but feel there’s a way to achieve the exhilarating cultural buzz that the best international food halls deliver to visitors (and the elegant efficiencies they bring to operators), but with breathing room. I’ve taken pencil to pad to sketch out ideas, and found some inspiration hither and yon.

One smart New York City entrepreneur, Brian Berger, found a way to merge the idea of a food hall with the idea of a ghost kitchen — one of those restaurants without dining room that exists for delivery only. He didn’t do this as a response to Covid, however; he launched his “virtual food hall” — Sous Vide Kitchen — way back in 2017. In an interview with Forbes last year, Berger explained that the traditional food hall model is not ideal for groups who want to dine together but still want to take advantage of a food hall’s variety. Those parties must split up, everyone waits in separate lines, pays separately, and so forth. Each member of a group may get their food at different times. His solution was to put several interesting concepts together, with one-stop ordering and payment kiosks, so everyone could stay physically and temporally together.

In his model, a centralized kitchen relies on sous-vide cooking, streamlining operations. The delivery piece of it turned out to work elegantly as well.

Last year in Houston, other entrepreneurs — Steven Salazar and Gabriel Medina — debuted Click Virtual Food Hall. It’s a similar idea, as explained a story in Houstonia by Timothy Malcolm last October, but set up for take-out and delivery only.

If the reasons for such concepts were compelling pre-pandemic, now they’re irresistible — which is why Washington, D.C.-area restaurateur Aaron Gordon plans to open what he’s tentatively calling DC Ghost Kitchen next month, according to a July 7 story by Ann Limpert in Washingtonian. It will, she writes, offer “a roster of carryout options from different DC chefs ranging from high-profile names to ambitious startups.” The Washington Post followed with a story on Saturday. It seems to me this kind of curation is key.

Meanwhile, a look at NYC’s Sous Vide Kitchen’s website shows a smart Covid-19 update: an array of food kits, sure. But here’s the brilliant part: There’s also a menu of what can be thought of as dish components: building blocks like sous-vide proteins by the pound, roasted mushrooms and sauces — things that let you have the fun of cooking, creating and assembling a dish, without all the shopping and prep. The menu items are like hybrids between grocery items and restaurant dishes. Clever!

Rooting out toxic restaurant culture

Meanwhile, what a week it has been. Last month whether or not a person wore a mask in pubic announced one’s political affiliation. Now it’s what brand of pinto beans you buy or boycott.

And what happened in L.A. just a few days ago — namely the implosion of Sqirl and Jessica Koslow’s fall from grace — feels like old news already. The story, of course, was bigger than the mold that grew on jam. It’s about toxic restaurant culture — something that needs to be addressed and eliminated as we all work toward reinventing what a restaurant is, and could be, and should be. (And “we all” includes not just those of us in the industry, but also those who patronize it, which is to say just about everyone.)

The New Republic weighed in with a thoughtful piece from Kate Telfyan, who shines a light on other stories of kitchen abuse, including at her former place of employment, Mission Chinese Food. (Telfyan was head chef at Mission Chinese Food’s Brooklyn location until it closed due to Covid.) She also cites the example of the acclaimed chef-owner of Chicago’s Fat Rice, Abe Conlon, who was called out by former employees in June for abusive behavior, bullying and racism.

Central to her story, though, Telfyan raises an interesting question: How responsible is the food media for the unfettered reign of the toxic chef?

Decisively, she concludes: “In its consistent, uncritical celebration of chefs and owners later revealed to be bad bosses, and in its refusal to reckon with its own role in facilitating their rise to the top, the food media has failed us.”

She continues:

Building a better food industry starts with recognizing the complicity that binds celebrity-hungry chefs and click-hungry writers. It means encouraging a style of journalism that peeks into kitchens rather than lounging in the dining room, waiting to be fed. It requires treating restaurants not simply as vehicles for the delivery of food but as social institutions—and moving from there to build a culture, in both kitchens and newsrooms, premised on thoughtfulness, care, consideration, and quiet pride in good cooking.

She’s right, of course; journalists should not coddle their subjects, as so often happens in the food world. Telfyan’s plea for peek-into-the-kitchen reporting brought me back 20 years ago to 2000. That was the year I spent at New York City restaurant Daniel, mostly in the kitchen, as I reported out The Fourth Star: Dispatches from Inside Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated New York Restaurant.

When the book was nearly ready for publication in 2002, as a courtesy I gave a galley to chef Boulud, who had bravely given me unfettered access to every part of his establishment. There was a chapter he objected to — not because it was inaccurate, but because it revealed more than he wanted — and he respectfully asked me to remove the entire chapter. I respectfully declined, and the book was published as written. The chef may not have been entirely thrilled with everything in its pages, but he handled the situation with grace and goodwill.

The no-kid-gloves approach does not always go that smoothly; not every chef has the professionalism, poise and self-confidence of a Daniel Boulud. The kind of public verbal abuse, character assassination and even threatening, years-long cyber-harassment that was unleashed on me when I critiqued the work of chefs with more fragile egos and explosive natures is not, I’m here to tell you, for the faint of heart.

Still, there are no doubt any number of serious food journalists out there who are as interested in pulling back the curtain as they are about getting the first taste of something delicious, paid for by the publication that employs them. A more pressing question might be whether those publications can afford to continue employing them, or even stay afloat at all, and if not, how such work will be financed into the future. Before Covid, ad sales were already in free-fall and business models in dire need of reinvention. The pandemic has made the situation much worse, and journalists at all kinds of publication are faced with furloughs, reduced pay and often lay-offs.

🐞

Quick, some good news!

• Interesting story on NPR about how germicidal UV systems might help restaurants, retail and nursing homes rid circulating air of viruses. High ceilings are a must.

• The farm bots are coming! Farmer Georgie writes on Medium about weed-killing robots that could make pesticides obsolete.

• Californians can buy foie gras again, ruled a judge, as long as it is produced out-of-state. However, they still can’t order it in a restaurant. Eater LA adds color.

• The Quinault Nation is constructing log jams that mimic nature’s work — helping to bring back blueback salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest. Excellent story by Lucia Whalen in Gastro Obscura.

• This too, from Gastro Obscura: In Saitama, Japan, Itsuo Kobayashi — a former cook in a soba shop — draws what he eats every day. His illustrations are gorgeous.

• If you are interested in cookbooks, check out Paula Forbes’ newsletter (also here on Substack), Stained Page News. Forbes does a fabulous job of staying on top of what’s just been published, what’s about to be published and why it matters. Her excellent links led me to Gastro Obscura. 😊

What’s cooking?

[Baked kofta with eggplant and tomato from Falastin]

• In something like four months of cooking NEARLY EVERY DAY, the dish that has probably been my favorite is an easygoing Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad Bowl that you can top with skewers of pork, chicken, shrimp or beef, or a simple grilled fish fillet, or marinated grilled tofu and vegetables. It’s from Andrea Nguyen’s latest cookbook, Vietnamese Food Any Day. Every time I think about the dish, I crave it anew.

[Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ skewers from Vietnamese Food Any Day]

• Here’s a way to conjure a Mexican beach vacation without leaving your home: Put together Olivia Lopez’s Shrimp Aguachile and crack open a coconut. Lopez is Chef de Cuisine at Billy Can Can in Dallas.

• So many good things in Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s new cookbook, Falastin, about the cooking of Palestine. I’m working on a review for Cooks Without Borders. Spoiler alert: I’ll highly recommend it.

• Just started cooking from La Buvette: Recipes and Wine Notes from Paris, by Camille Fourmont & Kate Leahy. I generally steer more toward savory than sweet, but when I saw a recipe for Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés, I jumped. Astonishingly, I had on hand enough dried apricots, as well as dried rose petals. Meltingly tender and buttery and unusual, they were one of the best cookies I’ve ever made. Also weirdly, I had purchased too many duck breasts for our dinner for three, when I spotted Fourmont’s recipe for Cured Duck Magret. Those two extra magrets weighed 12 ounces — exactly what she calls for. The breasts are curing in the downstairs fridge, expected to be ready in 10 days. Will report back!

On my plate

• Just diving into Hooni Kim’s My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes — very enticing.

• A number of dishes from Bryant Terry’s 2014 book Afro-Vegan have caught my eye. Scheming how to work them in.

• Meanwhile, I am very behind. I have original recipes for Tinga Poblano Con Pollo, Shrimp and Andouille Gumbo and Ochazuke that I need to get posted. Coming soon, I hope!

Have a great week. Please share your thoughts about anything in this post!

Brenner Report