Thoughts & Musings for the Week: ATTC Joins a New Network (co-founded by Andrew), Give Weed a Chance?, An Unspoken Throughline of The Bear, Get Out and Dine)
Damn! It’s only installment Number 2, and already I’m late. (In last week’s Comment Card, I vowed to reappear here every Monday.) But I’ve got a good reason, I swear: We ended up scheduling the launch of our new meez Network this past Monday, so I thought I should hold off a minute before publishing this, lest it get lost in the shuffle. And so, here’s what’s on my mind, starting with our big news:
Introducing The meez Network
A few months ago, I was driving from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania, when I had this crazy idea to expand my relationship with our presenting sponsor, meez, and create a new content network. I was so galvanized by it that I called meez’s ceo and founder Josh Sharkey (not coincidentally an old friend of mine), and flew it by him. Well, it took a little while, but yesterday, we launched the network, with an inaugural roster of podcasts, and one newsletter. Please check it out, listen to the participating podcasts, read The Simmer newsletter, and give a follow to The meez Network’s Instagram feed. There are more details in yesterday’s special pod episode, but in short: The meez Network aims to be your one-stop source for a range of content to meet every hospitality professional’s needs. More shows will be onboarding soon, and we would love to hear from you with any feedback, thoughts, and/or suggestions.
Give Weed a Chance?
Poor alcohol. One by one, its purported, too-good-to-be-true health benefits are proving to be just that, at the same time that more and more sober-curious souls have been exploring life without–or with vastly reduced consumption of–wine, beer, and the hard stuff. The most recent major article to sing the evils of alcohol appeared in The New York Times two weeks ago. It read, in part: “Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health; and in 2022, a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health.”
That’s quite the comedown from a decades-long opinion-trend in the opposite direction: In 1980, scientists dubbed the disconnect between the enviably thin waistlines and low-cholesterol levels of many French people–those cheese Hoovering, saturated fat-loving bon vivants–and their seemingly unhealthy lifestyle choices. And for more than a decade now, we’ve been told that one alcoholic drink for women per day, and two per men, might actually offer health benefits.
But now, as happens in the diet and health realms with alarming frequency, the science is doing a 180, which makes one wonder: was it even science to begin with?
Count me unsurprised. Without getting into specifics, I live with a progressive heart disease that was diagnosed about six years ago. I’m lucky: My case is mild and curiously asymptomatic, and also responding so well to medication that (knock-wood) my specialist doesn’t expect it to shorten my lifespan, at least not substantially, or before something else might take me out. Still, I take two medications daily, and see a doctor once a year to monitor it. After being advised repeatedly that the best we could hope for was to slow its progression, rather than reverse it, I got some unexpected news last week when my semi-annual echocardiogram showed that my heart function had improved. I can’t prove it, but I believe this must be due to the one significant lifestyle change I’d made since my last echo: cutting my alcohol intake from 15 to 20 drinks per week to three or four, max.
Anecdotally, the number of people I know who are cutting back or quitting drinking altogether is substantial. Most of them do not have a drinking problem, or a disease; they are making the change for reasons of fitness, sleep quality, and the like. I think this probably reflects an even greater percentage of the general population leaning toward temperance, since most of my friends are in the hospitality business and so drink more than the average citizen.
This creates a tension when dining out: According to the National Restaurant Association, “among fullservice restaurants selling alcohol-based beverages, drinks represent about 21% of total sales.” So it’s no wonder that you can discern a flicker of sadness in a server’s eyes when you ask if they have any non-alcoholic beer, or you order a zero-proof beverage, or just stick to water.
Commendably, an increasing number of restaurants are really stepping up their zero-proof game. In the last nine months, I’ve enjoyed tasting menus at Boka (Chicago), Oyster Oyster (DC), and Aquavit (NYC) for which there were alcohol-free drink pairings available as an alternative to wine. Many pours were novel, and so inherently more interesting than the wine option: kombucha, cider, vegetable juices, dealcoholized wines, and other offerings, in some cases produced in house to complement a specific dish. Fun!
Still, whether it’s a can of N/A beer, a Phony Negroni, or a flight of the soft stuff, these drinks generally and logically priced lower than wine and spirits, and so on the restaurant side of the equation, everybody is taking a financial hit, which is a whole other kind of sobering.
I’m interested to see when and how cannabis enters the conversation. It already has in some places, but even in many states that have legalized marijuana, it’s not legal to add it to beverages, or not to do so in venues that also sell alcohol. (As with the laws governing the sale and shipping of cannabis, the rules controlling its inclusion in beverages are too varied from state to state to delineate here.) But for those who have been allowed to give it a whirl, the results are encouraging.
I don’t mind sharing that cannabis has largely replaced alcohol for me. At home, when I crave something to take the edge off, I much prefer an edible to a cocktail. And when I want to experience that lifelong link between a beverage and a buzz, or just to participate in the ritual of imbibing when friends visit, I add a few drops of tincture to whatever mocktail I’ve made myself, or pop open a can of one of the cannabis-infused drinks now available at your favorite dispensary.
I think it’s inevitable that as more and more of them are permitted to by law, more restaurants will add a new category to their beverage menu, if only to be able to charge the same, or more, than they would for something spiked. As with mocktails/zero-proof/temperance/N/A, there will likely be a variety of names until one sticks. Canna-tails? Drinkables? Tinctured Tipples? They all work. So get ready to choose your non-poison.
Men, Women, and The Bear
Midway through the current, third season of Hulu’s The Bear, it hit me that a series throughline goes entirely unremarked upon, both onscreen and off: the show’s accurate depiction of the relative behavior of men and women in the pro-kitchen. (I’m deliberately using gender rather than sex as identifiers here, because I think this subject has mostly to do with societal conventions rather than biology. Of course, I could be mistaken.) In Bear World, the characters given to tantrums, toxicity, and tortured artistry are men. The cooler heads, collaborative natures, and consoling abilities belong to the women.
In Season 3’s dazzling opening episode, we re-live Carm’s formative professional years in one, long, unbroken, stream-of-consciousness flashback that lasts the full half-hour. MIxed in among the real-life chefs with whom we see him are two fictional polar opposites: The abusive David (Joel McHale) who embarasses Carm in front of the line, and claims his new dish as his own, and the warm, nurturing Terry (Olivia Colman) who not only maintains a civil tone and environment, but admonishes Carm when he raises his voice to a fellow cook, and even sits him down to help him plot the next stop in his education. (“Have you been to Copenhagen?”).
In the series’ present day, Sydney has assumed the unfair role of longsuffering protégé, absorbing Carm’s temperamental lapses while remaining in control of herself at all times. (Also not remarked upon: Whether or not being a Black American has conditioned her to control her emotions. We’ve also never seen Marcus, played by Lionel Boyce, lose it, a rarity among men in the show.) The dynamic extends across the entire landscape of The Bear: Richie, the late Michael, all the combustible relatives at the Christmas dinner table in Season 2, they are all men. Meanwhile, Claire, Natalie (who has the gentle nickname Sugar) are the stabilizing influences, the caretakers, the cleaner-uppers. You could even say the same about Jamie Lee Curtis’ high-maintenance mom. (Small Spoiler Alert:) For all of her mess, she’s the one who shows up for Natalie at a moment of need when nobody else can be found.
It all reminds me of another often un-acknowledged detail of the industry: Many women do not desire, or even outright reject, the honorific chef. I first had the conversation about a decade ago with my friend, Flea Street Cafe proprietress and Bay Area legend Jesse Cool, who associated the word with “asshole men.” (A funny story goes that when she first had to produce a business card in the 1970s she pondered the title Cooker Person in place of Chef.) Indeed, The Bear‘s creator Christopher Storer has said that two inspirations for Chef Terry were Alice Waters and Marcella Hazan, neither of whom goes by the title “chef,” and who aren’t really chefs in the classic, restaurant sense. I’ve heard a similar sentiment voiced countless times by other women since then. Just three years ago, Reem Assil broke down her thoughts on the matter. I suspect that, whether it’s underscored or not, we’ll see where Sydney nets out on the subject before the series reaches its end.
Just Asking
I’m not looking for trouble by posing this publicly, but it’s been bugging me for weeks, so might as well see if anybody has an answer: Why did the dining critic for the New York Times feel more urgency to write a damning review of the quality restaurant Ilis, just six months after the ambitious (in every way) place opened in October, than to write a presumably glowing review of Blanca, which relaunched with Victoria Blamey as chef in January, and which, less than three months after re-launch, he deemed the second-best restaurant in New York City? Six weeks after the Ilis review, there’s still not been a review of Blanca. (To be crystal clear: I’m not disputing his rankings. I haven’t yet had Victoria’s food at Blanca, but I’ve publicly sung her culinary praises on my podcast from her tenure at Chumley’s right though the residency she did at Blue Hill Stone Barns in 2021, about which she and I even did a special conversation on the pod.) Why not give the former more runway to settle into itself before unleashing the Times’ lethal force on it, and the latter a review that expands on the love that led him to place it so high on the list? Why the rush to judgment and the slow-walk to praise?
Get Out and Dine!
As the long 4th of July weekend descends, metropoli like my home of New York City are morphing into ghost-towns. If you’re an urbanite who isn’t fleeing for the country or the beach, support a restaurant you love, or visit a new one. They need you right now, and you can’t Instagram fireworks for four days straight.
– Andrew
