wow, so interesting!
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grin I had absolutely no idea about the history of aguachile, @aaqjr - as a veg, it’s not something I’ve eaten, but I see a lot of FTC folks talking about it so I had some idea of how it’s made/served now.
Someday, @hanhgry, I shall venture into one of these bubble tea shops and try a glass of it: I am curious!
I love that there’s a whole culture/history around the shops - I hadn’t a clue!
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" New Orleans, as the old line goes, is a city of a thousand restaurants but only one menu. Its celebrated dishes—gumbo, jambalaya, catfish, crawfish étouffée, po’boy and muffuletta sandwiches, red beans and rice—are the products of a glorious culinary sfumato, blending the techniques and ingredients of Spanish and French colonizers, enslaved Africans and their free descendants, Italian immigrants, and Native Americans. The flavors are cayenne and black pepper, toasty roux, smoked meats, the slick deep-greenness of okra, the muscular brine wallop of a Gulf oyster. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the United States, New Orleans boasts its own rich regional culinary tradition, one that is integral to the city’s sense of itself—and famously resistant to change. “For three hundred years, it’s been kind of the same,” Emeril Lagasse, one of the most influential ambassadors of New Orleans gastronomy, lamented in an interview in 2000. “There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn’t changed in a hundred and twenty-five years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?”
By the time the chef Nina Compton arrived in New Orleans, in 2015, the city’s cuisine was no longer so rigidly set in amber. What loosened it was one of the most catastrophic disasters in modern American history: the federal levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, in August of 2005, killing an estimated eighteen hundred and thirty-three people, displacing seven hundred and seventy thousand residents, and devastating entire neighborhoods. In the years after, as the city slowly recovered, an influx of outsiders arrived, drawn by cheap rents and by the romance of rebuilding. Among them was a new generation of chefs proudly cooking the foods of their places of origin. Before the storm, restaurants that cooked outside of the city’s Creole vernacular rarely landed on tourists’ must-visit lists. Now New Orleans was earning attention for new Middle Eastern and Latin American restaurants, farm-to-table cafés, a flurry of serious pizza joints. Compton’s first restaurant, Compère Lapin, opened in mid-2015, in a hotel in the city’s trendy Warehouse District, showcasing the food of the Caribbean, and of her native St. Lucia in particular: seafood pepper pot, cow-heel soup, jerk fish. Her dishes were threaded through with the islands’ smoke and spice and with the ambrosial sweetness of tropical fruit, but they also borrowed freely from France and Italy, the American South, and from the flavors of New Orleans itself."
History, New Orleans, BLM, Covid-19, Katrina …
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“Bic Camera looked like many of the other loud, brightly colored electronics stores I’d seen in Japan, just bigger. Mostly, it was a respite from the cold. The appliances and electronics that jammed its interior gave no indication of its dizzyingly good liquor selection, nor did the many inexpensive aged Japanese whiskies hint that affordable bottles were about to become a thing of the past, or that I’d nurture a profound remorse once they did. When I found Bic Camera’s wholly unexpected liquor department, I lifted two bottles of high-end Japanese whisky from the shelf, wandered the aisles studying the labels, had a baffling interaction with a clerk, and put the bottles back on the shelf. All I had to do was pay for them. I didn’t.
Commercial Japanese whisky has been around since at least 1929, so during my first trip to Japan (and at home in the U.S.), there was no reason to think that all the aged Japanese whiskies that were readily available in the early 2000s would soon achieve holy grail status. In 2007, there were $100 bottles of Yamazaki 18-year sitting forlornly on a shelf at my local BevMo. One bottle now sells for more than $400 at online auctions; some online stores sell them for $700.
Yoichi 10, Yoichi 12, Hibiki 17 and 21, Taketsuru 12 and 17 — in 2014, rare and discontinued bottles lined store shelves, reasonably priced compared to their current $300 to $600 price tags. Those were great years. I call them BTB — before the boom. Before the boom, a bottle of Yamazaki 12 cost $60. After the boom, a Seattle liquor store priced their last bottle of Yamazaki 12 at $225. Before the boom, Taketsuru 12 cost $20 in Japan and $70 in the States. After the boom, online auctions sell bottles for more than $220.
Before the boom, Karuizawa casks sat, dusty and abandoned, in shuttered distilleries. After the boom, a bottle of Karuizawa 1964 sold for $118,420, the most expensive Japanese whisky ever sold at auction, until a Yamazaki 50 sold for $129,186 the following year, then another went for $343,000 15 months later.
Before the boom, whisky tasted of rich red fruits and cereal grains. After the boom, it tasted of regret.”
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So i guess this falls in the category of future long term food writing! But i thought of you follow this thread it might interest you 
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“The meal cost $400 and came with rules. No. 1: No using cellphones, except to document the dinner and the chefs preparing it. “Please do the Instagram, the Facebook, the Twitter; give me the fame, I need the fame,” said Gaggan Anand, whose restaurant bore the same name. Clad in black, with a booming voice that suited his hulking figure, he stalked between a vast kitchen island and an L-shaped table for 14. “Those of you with good cameras, if you can take a photo of me scratching my ass, you get a bottle of Champagne.”
Rule No. 2: “If this is on your ‘Things to Do in Bangkok’ list, you’re in the wrong restaurant.” Anand wore his hair in a messy bun; he sounded like a principal scolding a group of wayward adolescents. “If you are here to judge me, you are in the superwrong restaurant, because we are [expletive] judging you.” He went on: “This is not a, what do you call it?” — his fingers curled into air quotes — “ ‘fine-dining experience.’”
More rules preceded each dish. (There would be 25.) No smoke breaks. “I’m not antismoking,” he said, “but my nose is very particular, and your smoke will change my nose.” Limits on trips to the bathroom. “The first hour is all belted in,” he said. “After that, we will not give toilet breaks” — the meal would last the usual five hours — “but if you have to, just go quickly and come back. Think of this as a nonsmoking flight with no Wi-Fi, no network, and it’s an Indian airline, so nothing works and it’s very turbulent. You might be crashing soon, so you’d better enjoy.””
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Thank you, @aaqjr! I had read about this project in Australia - no idea where or how I stumbled on it - hadn’t heard it was coming to LA!
According to the site, Kato is the first restaurant in the series; needs 100 orders to print and details are here:
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Nice! and I love that Ken from Now Serving is picking the places. Such a nerve wracking way to finance a book but hopefully that means we’ll get a good diversity of content.
22$ I didn’t realize the price was so reasonable. I was on the fence about getting one but at that price point it’s worth it for me
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“Randy Shields looked out at a sea of cattle at the sprawling Wrangler Feedyard — 46,000 animals milling about in the dry Panhandle air as a feed truck swept by on its way to their pens.
Mr. Shields, who manages the yard for Cactus Feeders, knows that at its most basic, the business simply takes something that people can’t eat, and converts it into something they can: beef. That’s possible because cattle have a multichambered stomach where microbes ferment grass and other tough fibrous vegetation, making it digestible.
“The way I look at it, I’ve got 46,000 fermentation vats going out there,” Mr. Shields said.
But this process, called enteric fermentation, also produces methane, a potent planet-warming gas that the cattle mostly belch into the air. And with about 95 million cattle in the United States, including more than 25 million that are fattened for slaughter each year at feedlots, the methane adds up.”
doesn’t really belong here but didn’t know where to put it
I enjoyed the two recipe club episodes he did on the the Dave Chang show. Hopefully it holds up to weekly content, especially since he’s doing two other episodes a week for DCS.
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That’s a surprisingly pro-feedlot article. Mentions a lot of resource capture and environmental benefits I hadn’t heard about. Would have liked to hear more specifics about where all the waste ends up.
Related - if cow feed includes seaweed, methane can be cut by more than 50%. And milk production increases.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-cows-to-belch-less-methane
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Wow that’s a fascinating article.
Two (now three) interesting pieces …
https://www.southernfoodways.org/how-sur-mex-took-root/
All courtesy of José R. Ralat.
Now I’m wonderfully hungry and pondering the flavors of these melding cuisines.
Btw, if you haven’t already, this series from Eater makes for fascinating reading:
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Seems like a false thesis. Food media are always looking for new and little-known regional cuisines to cover. Which is sort of what that article finally concludes.
While food media, in general, may be looking for “new” the book publishing world seems reticent to put the funds toward production of such publications as they’re unsure there is an audience willing to purchase.
More to the point, the idea that a cuisine is “new” - when it may have existed for centuries but not be generally known about in the US/UK - is problematic.
Obviously “new and little-known” in that context imply “to their audiences.”
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