I’ve always wondered that.

When I was heading out to Austin from Clarksdale, Mississippi after a visit last fall, my friend told me I should stop at Shipley Donuts in Greenville if I wanted a quick breakfast along the way.

So I did.

This was the first time I had ever encountered a Texas Kolache. They had two sections of the pastry case — a sweet side with a nice-looking array of the usual jelly-filled and sugar-coated options, but also this donut shop had a savory side. With stuff like this.

There it be. Why isn’t this standard for when you’re hungry for more than just sugary dough in the morning? I bought two different sausage options of the above, which has dough that’s baked, not fried. The poofy puff was super fresh, yeasty-scented, and pillowy soft. The sausage was hot and juicy. One was just a basic hot dog, the other was coarser, with flecks of jalapeno and melty cheese.

The paper sleeve was easy to eat from as I drove along munching. I could just squeeze up my hot dog kolache to get the next bite with one hand. Touching nothing but the paper. Tidy. I can’t think of a better morning on-the-go snack. Two kolaches and a (horrible) coffee at Shipley cost me less than six bucks.

I mean, ok, this was rural Mississippi, but still. Why are we up here messing around with giant crumbly muffins dressed up with tulip wrappers or poorly-aligned pre-packaged, Turbo-Cheffed breakfast sandwiches?

WHY?!!!? That kolache (pronounced "ko-lah-chee.") shown above was $1.99 and it was five times more satisfying than the stupid six dollar Starbucks breakfast sandwich you have to take apart and reassemble so as to properly line up the top and bottom layers before you eat it. While driving. Sandwich integrity is crucial.

As my road trip continued, taking me to Austin, then up past Dallas to Tulsa, I started seeing these savory breakfast handhelds (you can shoulder-punch me next time I see you) everywhere. It’s a whole vibe! There were billboards advertising them along the highways.

I had no idea, Texas! Impressive, actually. Why have you been keeping this to yourself? Kolaches should be a national trend. This, my friends, is the substantial, soul-satisfying on-the-go breakfast snack 2026 USA America needs.

Wowsa! Suffice to say, I was enthused to discover the existence of savory kolaches. A new food thing! This kind of finding makes my month. So of course, I went down all the rabbit holes, visited a few key spots, and did internet research until my eyes got squinty.

The origin story on these guys comes from Czech immigrants settling in Texas and bringing along their taste for kolaches, which are sweet pastries with a dimple in the center containing a smear of fruit—often prune or apricot—maybe some poppyseeds, and/or fresh cheese. Similar to a danish, but with a soft, raised, pillowy dough, rather than buttery laminated layers.

Some history—

These tasty morsels arrived in Texas along with the tens of thousands of Czech immigrants who came through the port of Galveston in the 1850s through the early 1900s. Determined to farm, these new Texans settled mainly in the coastal plain and rich blackland areas of Central Texas, setting up the churches and fraternal organizations that ended up doing such a good job of preserving their heritage. By the latter half of the 20th century, celebrations of Czech culture and the kolache—among them Westfest, in West, and the Caldwell’s Kolache Festival—had become popular annual events. —Edible Austin

So that’s why kolache culture is so strong in the area. Czechs brought their sweet pastry treat recipes and made them for bake sales and church functions, sustaining their cultural traditions in their new country. Soon enough, bakeries started making them too.

But American (specifically, Texas) culinary history was made when someone made the leap and wrapped that kolache dough around a sausage.

That someone was Wendel Montgomery, owner of Village Bakery in West. And technically, the term for these savory versions is a Klobásník (or klobasnek).

From a 2022 piece in Texas Monthly:

In its purest form, a klobasnek (the singular form of klobasniky) is just kolache dough wrapped around a sausage, a savory delicacy that is said to have been first created in 1953 at Village Bakery in West, the little town about twenty miles north of Waco that is widely recognized as the kolache capital of Texas.

Turns out the town of West, Texas (which, counter-intuitively enough, is not in the western part of Texas) is officially known as the state’s “Czech Heritage Capital” and is widely considered to be where the savory kolache was invented.

NPR tells the story thusly:

Mimi Montgomery Irwin owns and operates The Village Bakery in West, Texas. In a town full of Czech immigrants, her father, Wendel Montgomery, opened the bakery in 1952 on a dare from a high school football coach and local priest, she says.

“People thought he was crazy. At that time, in our town of West, it would be like ... selling ice to Eskimos, because everyone made them. But something interesting was happening in society,” Irwin says.

Kolaches, a staple among these Czech communities, appeared at church dinners, bazaars and family gatherings, but were fairly unknown to outsiders. Irwin’s father found a market in traveling salesmen as they stopped in for food and gas. The pastries soon became a favorite of passersby.

Apparently, the concept came to Wendel while he was eating a hot dog. He eventually trademarked this bread encased sausage snack as a klobasniki, a Czech word meaning “little sausage.”

Since they own the legal rights to this official nomenclature, only THE Village Bakery in West can legally sell a klobasniki. So everyone else just calls both the savory and sweet versions kolaches, but with a descriptor to let you know what flavor it is. Which, frankly, seems better than having to learn how to say klobasniki. So….thanks, Wendel? I guess.

When I’m new to a whole genre, I tend to defer to experts.

A traditional klobásník wraps soft, yeasty, milk-and-butter-enriched double-risen dough around smoky, garlicky homemade or Texas Czech meat market–made sausage and is liberally brushed with butter during the baking process.

The dough absorbs the rich flavor of the butter from the outside and the smoky aroma and fatty juiciness of the sausage from the inside in a way that distinguishes the finished product

Village Bakery in West closed for nearly 7 years and underwent a recent change in ownership, but as of May 2026, they’re newly re-opened and back carrying the klobasniki torch.

Village wasn’t open when I was in the area last fall, so I couldn’t sample from the originator, but since kolache culture in this part of Texas is nearly ubiquitous, it wasn’t hard to find plenty of tasty specimens to enjoy in their natural habitat — gas stations just off the interstate.

That line was at about 10:30am on a random Tuesday. The line wrapped all the way around the three outer walls of the square building, not quite all the way to the door. It took about a half hour for me to get up to the counter. Nobody complained. Czech Stop aka Little Czech Bakery is iconic.

Here’s why:

Wow. That’s a lot to choose from. Also, yes, those are fall of 2025 prices. Since I waited a super long time to get up there, I had so much time to ponder what I wanted to try. How do I NOT get a massive freshly-baked pecan roll for $1.79? Very difficult to avoid buying way, way too much.

But I resisted. I took sample bites and didn’t feel compelled to finish even the really tasty items. Because just around the corner was Gerik’s Ole Czech Bakery, which should not be confused with Old Czech Bakery, located directly across the street. Lots of options. Texas-size carb-loading on offer.

Why can’t the rest of the USA have this? Our gas station dining options relegate us to choosing between desiccated roller-grill hot dogs and factory processed crap like Tornado Tacos. [Sad face emoji]

Texas, on the other hand, gets a whole bakery brigade of Austro-Prussian grandmas punching down fresh, buttery, yeast raised dough balls at 6am every morning and stuffing it with apricots and farmers’ cheese so it’s fresh and hot by the time I need coffee. Up north here in “the city that works?” We get an Eggwhite Wakeup Wrap nuked in a plastic tray by an untrained teenager using a cardboard cup sleeve as a spatula.

Not fair.

Why are you hoarding this culinary development, you Texas Lone Star pieces of…. ah. Wait a minute. There it is. Lone Star State culture. Y’all Texans have never stopped wanting to be separate from the rest of America, have you? Maybe you’ll even secede, right? Isn’t that the root of the term “lone star” in the first place?

Fine, then. We see how you, are, Texas. Hiding the kolache town of West, Texas in the northeastern part of your state? Very tricky! Just so you can hoard all these delicious savory kolaches? Just seems like yet another salvo in the ongoing grudge you’ve held against the good ol’ USA since 1845. “Texas is a Whole Other Country”, eh? Wow, that’s petty.

“Don’t Mess With Texas”. Ok, fine, then share your delicious pastry pockets so we won’t have to mess with y’all.

I’m just goofing around. Savory kolaches are a revelation, so of course some enterprising folks have tried to make them work, exporting them far and wide. Thus far, though, they don’t seem to have really caught on much beyond the region.

There’s a chain called Kolache Factory with around 60 US locations spanning from California to Virginia, although nearly all (49 of 60) are in Texas.

There’s also St. Louis Kolache which is known outside that market as American Kolache. And now that I’m researching all this, I’ve learned there was a place called Howdy Kolache (which also went by Howdy Breakfast Buns) here in Chicago but they’re now closed. I missed the boat on that one.

Dang. I snoozed, I losed.

Side tangent — this is just dawning on me — it seems that many kolache shops have multiple names. We’ve got Czech Stop aka Little Czech Bakery. Gerik’s aka Ole Czech Bakery, and the two other double-named spots in the paragraph above.

That seems like a lot to ask of consumers, what with the name of the signature item already being a foreign term most are unfamiliar with.

Not only do I have to learn how to say kolache and maybe klobasniki, but now I have to remember two different names for the same bakery? Perhaps this is why y’all haven’t broken through to mainstream America yet.

(Guys — I do restaurant consulting. Branding, concept development, menu, recipes, connecting these kind of dots. Let’s talk. lakin.ed@gmail.com)

Kick in a few bucks

Anyway, with regard to rolling out the nationwide kolache love, it’s good to see that at least people have tried!

So that’s somewhat of a relief because I feel like these little poofy pastry pockets with sausage and cheese inside are just what folks need. Maybe it’ll take the edge off everyone a bit.

To be honest, reader, [turning to look you squarely in the eyes], a lot of y’all seem way too tightly wound lately, almost like you’re just itching for an excuse to flip the fuck out on some poor cashier, flight attendant, or crossing guard.

I’ve seen how you behave in traffic, Green Subaru Mom. Put down the GLP injector, back away from the Botox and have a warm, cheesy sausage-bread puffy pocket, instead, killa. Dial your bad self down a notch or two once in a while. You’ll thank me, I promise.

Also, as I’ve been pointing out in a number of my recent posts, due to the current challenges in the costing model of many restaurants, carb-driven concepts are super hot right now (Crave/Crumbl Cookies, PopUp Bagels, Stan’s Donuts). So kolaches are still a trend that could very well grab some of that sweet sweet private equity money and become the next doughy carb shop to roll into your friendly neighborhood suburban stripmall.

Let us all hope. For the sake of Green Subaru Mom.

Although, I’ve gotta say, the overly-styled photos of the menu items on the websites of both the kolache chains linked above look far worse than my own photos of Czech Stop, so they may just have corporatized and focus-grouped all the delicious soul out of those tasty puffs during the scaling-up process.

Maybe that’s why they’re not breaking through. They should fire all the coroporate food stylists and marketing firms and bring in a team of Czech grandmas to mix dough and make prune preserves.

Just cause I’m poor. So I’m doing that thing I do when I cancel a streamer, which is hurry up and watch all the shit I saved to My List the day I subscribed but haven’t made a dent in because I was too busy endlessly re-watching Seinfeld and SVU.

toss a few bucks in Ed's hat

Anyway….this documentary held my interest for its full run time, so that’s something. It chronicles the meteoric rise and subsequent fall of ebullient chef and raconteur Mario Batali, but it really serves as more of a primer about sexual abuse and harassment in general. This film presents a grim, blunt example of how rich, powerful, charismatic men have often managed to get away with this sort of ultra-shitty behavior for so long.

Per the film, 70% of women working in the restaurant industry report being sexually harassed. That’s an incredibly high number. 7 out of every ten women I’ve ever worked with have had to deal with this crap. Arrrrgh. I’m sorry for how my industry has failed you all.

The film takes some time setting up the context for Batali’s downfall, showing the cherubic chef’s rise in the early days of The Food Network, chronicling his ascendance within the restaurant scene of New York City, and really laying out just how huge Mario was at the time. He was everywhere in the food world in the early 2000’s with his orange Crocs, a dozen cookbooks, and entire lines of kitchenware. Molto Mario was so passionate, charming and relatable, he even had a daytime talk show on ABC.

It was good to have my memory refreshed. I was a big fan of Batali’s shows at the time and followed his early rise with restaurants like Po and then Babbo. At that time, it was a far less fragmented media universe. This was before the advent of streaming TV, before social media, before widespread internet access, even. When someone broke out as a media sensation back then, it was much more massive.

So I remembered all that. My ears really pricked up, though, when the documentary started delving into what was happening in the mid 2000’s at The Spotted Pig. Apparently, Batali was an investor in Ken Friedman and chef April Bloomfield’s sceney Greenwich Village bar and would often head over there after he finished service at his restaurants to blow off steam.

Spotted Pig made a name for itself by being somewhat of a dive bar or old-school tavern, but with fine-dining chef quality food served late into the night. And with Friedman’s music industry connections (investors included Bono, Michael Stipe, and Jay-Z), it quickly became known as a West Village “see and be seen” hotspot that attracted lots of celebrities and rock stars.

After my son was born in 2005, I stopped paying nearly as much attention to chefs and restaurants, so I wasn’t even aware of Mario Batali’s involvement. I did know of The Spotted Pig because I had heard about Bloomfield’s cooking (especially their famous burger), but I was blissfully ignorant about all the celebrity hype surrounding the spot as well as its famous money partners.

I had actually even made a point of visiting the bar myself, but was once again Forrest-Gump-level oblivious to the history-making events that may have been going on right above me. Who knows what might’ve been going on in Batali’s infamous private third floor “party room” at the very same moment that I munched on my Roquefort-topped burger and fresh-cut frites on a 2012 visit to New York.

Blech. The burger was quite good but the vibe left an aftertaste of patriarchal abuses of power, systemic exploitation and misogyny I didn’t become fully aware of until a decade later.

The filmmakers of this doc spoke to tons of former employees from multiple Mario Batali restaurants, most of whom appeared on camera and came across as very credible. His first NYC restaurant partner at Po describes offering Mario a buy-out after seeing him snap a young female bartender’s g-string during service. “I can’t have that kind of thing around here”, the guy said. Smart. He recognized the tendencies early and drew a line. He and Batali parted ways.

Other managers from B&B Hospitality Group, the company Mario founded when he partnered with restaurant powerhouse Joe Bastianich, described being relieved when The Spotted Pig opened.

Multiple managers from spots like Del Posto, Babbo, Esca, and Lupa said that the bar served as a welcome safety valve for them and the restaurants they were running. It gave Mario somewhere else, somewhere cooler and more enticing, to go party at the end of the night. A venue outside his own restaurant group that went later into the night. One manager after another talked about how happy they were when it opened.

Because before that, Mario was making a menace of himself in his own restaurants. His lack of boundaries with staff continued and as his celebrity grew and customers wanted face time, he began regularly groping the guests as well. He would have groups of friends come in five minutes before close, order them every dish on the menu, help himself to many bottles of wine, and commandeer the dining room, partying long after paying guests had left. It was all part of his “too much is never enough” larger-than-life schtick. Molto, baby. (That means “more” in Italian, ya gringos).

It became a widely-known thing among the B&B group’s female servers. Great money, places are always busy, amazing food, but stay away from Mario’s hands. He was known to be a serial boob- and crotch-grabber. He’d sneak up behind co-workers and cup both breasts. He’d pose for a photo with a guest and shove his hand down her pants or up her skirt when the pic was being taken, then turn his palms skyward, smile, and mug for the camera like “oh, aren’t I a devilish little imp?”

This was a well-known thing, apparently, that went on for many years, according to at least half a dozen employees interviewed. Like many serial sexual abusers/harassers, Batali had a wide network of enablers to whom he had made himself valuable, so they covered his tracks and took care of problems as they arose.

His partner Joe Bastianich, son of of the patron nonna of Italian cooking Lidia Bastianich, is one of the most powerful restaurateurs in the world with an empire of nearly 30 restaurants across multiple continents. Mario’s wife Susi Cahn, is a wealthy New York philanthropist and heiress to the Coach leather and fashion house fortune. Ken Friedman was a well-connected music industry executive before becoming a restaurant owner. They all had massive New York City-caliber juice and they’d all stand to go down in flames if Mario went down.

The story was researched meticulously by Julia Moskin and Kim Severson, who after getting a sense of what had gone on, contacted hundreds of women who worked at Mario’s restaurants. It all seemed to lead them back to Spotted Pig.

In 2017, the whole thing reached critical mass. Industry insiders knew about the rumors and that journalists were digging. A writer from Eater, Irene Plagianos was actually the one to first break the story. Anthony Bourdain somehow got wind a day ahead of time and tweeted about it.

The Eater piece exposing Mario Batali came out December 11th, 2017 and the Moskin/Severson piece that focused more on the overlapping abuses at Spotted Pig involving Ken Friedman ran in the New York Times the day after that.

Plagianos, Moskin, and Severson were all interviewed extensively for this documentary, and they all discussed how difficult it was for them to wrangle with their feelings about learning that this charming, enthusiastic chef with whom they’d all had enjoyable interactions was actually a serial sexual abuser.

Immediately, Mario’s upcoming new show on Food Network was cancelled and he was asked to “step away from” The Chew, the show on ABC daytime.

The announcement that Batali was departing from day-to-day operations at the restaurant group was made the same day the articles were released, so the PR teams were fully ready and loaded for bear ahead of time. Plans were clearly in place for the armies to mobilize the moment the news became public.

Mario was banned from entering the restaurants he founded or his hospitality group’s corporate offices. Eataly severed its relationship. All the cookware, knives, Crocs, books and jarred sauces were abruptly yanked from Macy’s and Bed, Bath, and Beyond stores nationwide.

Nobody involved was caught flat-footed by this. It may have been a scandal for the principals involved, but for the PR teams, this was a textbook opportunity to hone celebrity brand crisis-management skills. Navy-Seal-Team-level coordination and operational execution was employed. Batali’s people spared no expense on PR crisis management.

The pros probably commanded Mario to go dark and lay low for awhile, so Batali’s first official response to all this didn’t come until about a week later via his email newsletter. As far as these kind of statements go, it was a good, well-crafted statement. He didn’t deny the allegations and seemed to be striking the right tone, admitting to poor behavior, sounding contrite and coming across as earnestly regretful of his actions.

“I apologize to the people I have mistreated and hurt. Although the identities of most of the individuals mentioned in these stories have not been revealed to me, much of the behavior described does, in fact, match up with ways I have acted. That behavior was wrong and there are no excuses. I take full responsibility and am deeply sorry for any pain, humiliation or discomfort I have caused to my peers, employees, customers, friends and family.

“I have work to do to try to regain the trust of those I have hurt and disappointed. For this reason, I am going to step away from day-to-day operations of my businesses. We built these restaurants so that our guests could have fun and indulge, but I took that too far in my own behavior. I won’t make that mistake again. I want any place I am associated with to feel comfortable and safe for the people who work or dine there.

”I know my actions have disappointed many people. The successes I have enjoyed are owned by everyone on my team. The failures are mine alone. To the people who have been at my side during this time — my family, my partners, my employees, my friends, my fans — I am grateful for your support and hopeful that I can regain your respect and trust. I will spend the next period of time trying to do that.”

I mean…this clearly doesn’t erase decades of shitty sex pest behavior, but at least he knows the right notes to hit. That’s a bit encouraging.

Except for one thing. As a post-script to the solemnly-delivered right-note-striking apology letter regarding the many female fans and employees he drunkenly groped and assaulted sexually, Batali signed off with “In case you’re searching for a holiday-inspired breakfast, these Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls are a fan favorite,” linking to a recipe.

He really thought he could just continue on. A week later, just say the right combination of words, come off as sounding contrite, then with a wink and that trademark impish smirk, toss off another recipe and keep the whole celebrity money train a-rollin’. That’s what Mario the serial groping masher thought.

The public responses on then-Twitter to Batali’s tone-deaf response were epic.

MARIO BATALI: How do we address the sexual harassment?

PR TEAM: With a heartfelt apology.

MB: A cinnamon roll recipe should do the trick.

PR: That's a horrible idea.

MB: Yeah, let's go with that.

PR: You need to apologize.

MB: OK. Quick apology and then rolls.

PR: We're doomed.

LOL! Another commenter just said “You can't Martha Stewart your way out of this one, champ.”

One writer published an article entitled “I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter” and it’s glorious, so pardon me for indulging in quoting large swaths from it.

Batali is not the first powerful man to request forgiveness for “inappropriate actions” towards his coworkers and employees. He is not the most high profile, and he is ostensibly not even the worst offender. But he is the only one who included a recipe. And of course, the glaring question is why? Was his PR team drunk?

…The base of the rolls is pizza dough — Batali notes that you can either buy it, or use his recipe to make your own. I make my own, because I’m a woman, and for us there are no fucking shortcuts. We spend 25 years working our asses off to be the most qualified Presidential candidate in U.S. history and we get beaten out by a sexual deviant who likely needs to call the front desk for help when he’s trying to order pornos in his hotel room. Donald Trump is President, so I’m making the goddamn dough by scratch.

Here I am punching down the dough because, according to Twitter, I hate men… I sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon over the top.

I think about the time that I was an intern at a local news station, and assigned to hand out cake while celebrating some milestone (it had to do with the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.) One of the producers I’d been working with closely walked up to the table.

“Do you want a piece?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking me up and down. “Oh, you mean of cake? No thanks.” He and another male staff member laughed while I stood, holding a piece of cake in each hand, dumbstruck.

Batali does not specify how tightly to roll the dough. I do so too tightly because fuck everything.

In short (haha, too late), the pitch-perfect PR apology plus cinnamon roll bonus content didn’t work. Mario got epically skewered and hung out to dry as an example of the kind of arrogant male hubris that allows these kind of dudes to believe they can get away with this doing kind of shit in the first place.

In fact, not only didn’t it just go away, the whole clusterfuck got way worse.

Women who had worked or partied with The Red Menace (a nickname employees actually had for him) over the years read the press coverage and started connecting foggy decades-old dots. Many recalled being in the upstairs private party room at The Spotted Pig (which employees called “the rape room”) and waking up after only a drink or two feeling sore, clothes torn, or with mysterious scratches or bruises. All they knew is that they’d been served drinks at Spotted Pig, then they blacked out and woke up in a strange place with no memory of how they got roughed up or why their clothes were torn or missing.

In 2005, this had happened to a woman named Eva DiVirgilis, who was an employee of Batali’s at Babbo and went with him one night in a limo to The Spotted Pig after their shift. Eva was enthralled about being invited by her celebrity chef boss, arriving in style, and being whisked past the long line, but remembers almost nothing after that except going upstairs and accepting a drink.

She woke up hours later alone on the floor of the party room, sore “down there”, her clothes disheveled. She went to a hospital and had a rape kit done, telling them her story, reporting what she knew and that she thought she had been drugged. She was afraid of reprisal and losing her job at the time, so didn’t follow up and file a police report. She requested a toxicology screen from the hospital to confirm her suspicion that she’d been drugged, but was told they couldn’t do it unless requested by police and it was probably already too late, that any date rape drugs would be out of her system.

After that, Eva DiVirgilis gave notice and left her job at Babbo.

No criminal charges for were ever filed against Ken Friedman or Mario Batali in New York.

In 2019, a Boston woman accused Batali of forcibly kissing and groping her while taking a selfie in 2017 (something many women reported him doing). Natali Tene reported the incident to Boston police and Batali was charged with indecent assault and battery.

“His right hand is all over my breasts, all over my rear end, all between my legs,” Tene said. “His hands were in sensitive areas, touching me, touching my body,” she said. “It was like a selfie, but other things were happening simultaneously … His other hand that can’t be seen is touching my body in sensitive areas.”

There was a trial. Batali waived his right to a jury and his attorneys successfully ripped the victim apart, shredding her credibility. The judge found Mario not guilty.

In 2020, NY State Attorney General Letitia James settled a civil investigation into Ken Friedman and The Spotted Pig, striking an agreement to award $240,000 plus a 10 year profit share of 20% of all future earnings to be split between 11 documented victims.

From Politico: “An investigation found that restaurateur Ken Friedman forcibly kissed and touched workers, made unwanted sexual advances and sexual comments and gestures, and demanded explicit photos, Attorney General Tish James said.”

Unfortunately, the victims never realized any of the profit share, because Friedman closed The Spotted Pig for good only 20 days after the settlement was announced. Don’t have to share profits if that entity isn’t generating any. Scumbags gonna scumbag.

The NY attorney general’s office launched a separate investigation against Mario Batali and B&B Hospitality Group which was settled for $600,000 in 2021.

Eater reported: “The state’s investigation found that Batali, Bastianich, and their restaurants engaged in harassment and discrimination that violated city and state human rights laws….chef Mario Batali, restaurateur Joe Bastianich, and the restaurant group formerly known as B&B Hospitality, has been ordered to pay $600,000 to at least 20 former restaurant employees as part of a settlement reached in the office’s investigation into sexual harassment and discrimination claims.

Two more private civil lawsuits from women who claimed to have been groped by Batali in Boston were settled privately, with undisclosed terms. So that was it. His lawyers and money managed to just make it all go away. Mario never suffered any legal consequences, although he did lose his restaurant and merch empire. His wife never divorced him.

Mario Batali’s current net worth is estimated to be between $20-$25 million. He now lives full time in what used to be his summer lake house on an acre and a half in Northport, Michigan. As of last year, he was still teasing “virtual events” on Instagram and appearing in local online magazine features idealizing the disgraced former TV star’s “Quiet Life in a Tiny Michigan Town.”

The simple life…that’s likely why Mario Batali hides here—far from the noise of New York City and even farther from his former public life. For a chef once known for his larger-than-life persona, the calm quietude of Northern Michigan might seem like an odd fit, but…“Traverse City is the antidote to New York City,” he once told Bon Appétit. And Northport is quieter still, a place to disappear if that’s what you’re after.

Yeah, a place to disappear is pretty much exactly what you’re gonna be after when you go down in massive public flames for being a serial sexual assaulter. Please feel free to disappear permanently from the planet, you utter and complete piece of shit.

So, politics being what it is, it was inevitable that some schmoozy local gladhander would try to score a few points off the whole phenomenon.

Standing Friday outside his favorite local beef spot, Pop’s Beef in Chicago, State Rep. Rick Ryan said he was filing a bill to name the Italian beef sandwich the official state sandwich of Illinois.

“The Italian beef sandwich has long been a staple of Illinois meals,” Ryan said in a statement. “It’s our most well known sandwich, and I’m excited to see this officially named as our state sandwich. It really represents a part of Illinois culture that so many of us enjoy.” —State Rep. Rick Ryan, via NBC 5 Chicago News

Ok, Rep. Ryan. We see you. Fun stuff, buddy. A state sangwidge? Pretty good PR. Go stand outside a beef stand in your district, cut a ribbon, dip some rolls in da juice, take a couple photos, try not to get grease on your tie…everybody’s happy.

I’ve written extensively about Italian Beef sandwiches. Count me a fan. It’s definitely up there with the Chicago Hot Dog as the city’s most iconic and well-known sandwich. (Yes, I do view a hot dog as a sandwich. It’s fillings between bread, so how’s it not? Come at me, HDSC!)

But in the wider context of the whole state of Illinois, is an Italian Beef the state’s sandwich? I’m not seeing it, actually.

It’s pretty difficult to get a passable beef sandwich in further-out areas that are still considered Chicago suburbs, even, so I wouldn’t trust anyone south of I-80 to do it decently. As soon as you get down around Bourbannais, Kankakee or further, that’s more biscuits and gravy or even grits territory if you know what I mean. You switch gears from city to country grubbin’. Smart diners will adjust expectations accordingly.

(On a side note, while an Italian Beef sandwich is great, the real pro move at a good Chicago beef stand is to get the combo sandwich, which is a grilled sausage nestled lovingly inside of an Italian beef, as pictured above. )

My go-to order is a combo sandwich, dipped, hot peppers. Johnnie’s (the near-universally-agreed-upon gold standard) grills their sausage links over charcoal, so they’ve got a distinctive char flavor as a result. Then they’re held hot in the gravy for a time which gives them a more tender bite once they’re snugged up into the bun with the juicy beef. Adding the sausage takes the sandwich to a whole ‘nother level, both in terms of texture and flavor. We’re truly spoiled in the near Western ‘burbs.

However, as is bound to happen with any issue involving politics (or food), some contention with this proposal has developed amongst a contingent of downstate legislators. In the area around Springfield (where the Illinois state capitol is located), there’s a somewhat hyper-local specialty called the Horseshoe Sandwich that’s quite legendary.

And while nothing was ever passed in an official capacity by the state legislature, the Horseshoe Sandwich has long been known as being the state’s official sandwich to the point that it even appears as such on state-run tourism websites.

The horseshoe sandwich is a Springfield delicacy that features two thick-cut slices of toasted bread, a layer or more of juicy meats, and a small mountain of crispy French fries, all piled together and lavished in cheese sauce. Throughout Illinois, the horseshoe sandwich is a meal of legend. — Enjoy Illinois

The above isn’t really true, of course. It was probably written by someone who hardly ever traveled much beyond St. Louis. I grew up in Chicago’s Northwest ‘burbs, lived in the city for decades, went to college in Champaign-Urbana, and have traveled all over the state and I’ve barely ever encountered a menu offering a Horseshoe Sandwich.

Springfield seems to be using its platform as the seat of state government to inflate its own iconic sandwich to legendary stature if you ask me. The delicacy is found in and around the capital city and hardly anywhere else.

And, as expected, downstate politicians oppose the changes being suggested by the Chicago contingent. The young guns from the big city are trying to come in with their newfangled ways and supplant how things have been done for generations in this here state. Conservatives vs. progressives. Old guard against new blood. It’s turning into a real tale for the ages.

Sort of a sandwich showdown. Something of a microcosm of the urban vs. rural political divide that’s got 2026 America so twisted. Perhaps how we deal with this small local sandwich question can serve as a model for how to solve the more serious disagreements we have going forward?

Can we employ a new kind of diner diplomacy? We can hold talks at Camp David, maybe a picnic. Call it the sandwich summit.

Since I was basically raised on Italian Beefs and have also recently had a Horseshoe Sandwich, I feel that I can perhaps bring a degree of objectivity and bipartisanship to this controversial debate. I’m reaching across the bread aisle and throwing my chef hat into the ring to serve as Mediator of Meals or Snack Czar. Whatever it takes to try to get this stalemate resolved.

First off, what the heck even IS a “horseshoe sandwich”? I’m glad you asked, dear reader. Here’s a pic of the one I ate last fall at Charlie Parker’s Diner in Springfield.

Basically, it’s a piece of toasted white bread topped with “choice of meat” (I chose a burger patty that you can barely see here) covered with a pile of french fries, then smothered with chili and cheese sauce.

Hard to go wrong, I suppose. That’s bound to be tasty. Is it even a sandwich, though?

First off, no. It’s totally not a sandwich. There’s only one piece of bread and you’ve got zero chance of being able to pick it up and eat it with your hands. So, to me, it’s already disqualified from State Sandwich contention just on that technicality alone.

Apparently, the original horseshoe may have been built on a ham sandwich base, rather than just the piece of toast that I received. The Visit Springfield page explains —

Signature Horseshoe Sandwich was created in 1928 at the Old Leland Hotel by Joe Schweska. The idea came about with the help of Elizabeth, Chef Schweska's wife, after he came home saying he was in need of a new lunch item for the Leland Hotel Restaurant. The name "horseshoe" was derived from the shape of the cut of ham used in the original sandwich. The French fries represent the nails of the shoe, and the sizzle platter represents the hot anvil.

Classic. Guy’s wife does all the work, him and his employer get the credit.

There’s a plaque on the side of the hotel site to commemorate the creation of the whole deal and the city even promotes a “Horseshoe Trail” app they’ve launched allowing users to check off spots after they chow down on a ‘shoe at any of 31 different eateries. All in and around Springfield

Hm. Oh…kay? I guess….? To be honest, guys, I’m not feeling it. You couldn’t even find one to recommend anywhere else in the whole state? But you think you’re the state sandwich?

What I’m thinking is that it sounds like someone took inspiration from nearby Louisville, Kentucky’s famous Hot Brown — another “sandwich” that is not actually a sandwich at all that originated in a hotel. Also billed as an “open faced sandwich” and served in a skillet. A Kentucky Hot Brown is a similarly delicious pile of diner delicacies covered in melty cheese sauce to the point that a knife and fork is required. And it’s also most decidedly not a sandwich.

The closest thing to either that I was ever aware of seeing in Northern Illinois was a dish from Diner Grill on Irving Park. They call it The Slinger, but that one’s really more breakfast-oriented, being constructed atop a base of hash browns and eggs. Plus it’s not billed as being a sandwich, although it does come with toast on the side.

Even with as many drunks came through that place and ate Slingers at 3am, I doubt anyone ever tried to pick one up and eat it like a sandwich. Wouldn’t work.

So while a pile of buttered toast, fried potatoes, and meats covered in chili and cheese is likely to be tasty regardless of where it’s served or what it’s called, it’s not a freakin’ sandwich anywhere. Therefore it’s going to be pretty difficult for me to endorse it for official State Sandwich of Illinois.

The esteemed Rep. Ryan of Evergreen Park apparently agrees with me on this and is making the same argument.

"Unfortunately for the Horseshoe, their time has come and gone," Ryan said. "They're not actually a sandwich. It's actually, an open faced thing with one piece of bread. You can't pick it up and eat it. In my mind, it's got to be a something you can hold in your hands to be a sandwich."

First off, I really enjoy how he refers to a sandwich as “they”. As if it’s some sort of industry lobbying group or maybe an organized crime family.

“They’re not actually a sandwich”.

Subject verb disagreement aside, it’s difficult to find fault with the man’s reasoning, given that I just made the exact same observation a bit upstream. The Italian Beef is clearly the superior choice for Official State Sandwich of Illinois.

The stupid Horseshoe isn’t even a sandwich! It also looks nothing like a horseshoe. WTF?

Screw the idiots down in Springfield, right? Those yokels don’t know good eatin’! They’re still pushing Burgoo, for crissakes. So dang backwater, they don’t even know that a sandwich requires two pieces of bread! (or at least a hinged bun)

C’mon! Who’s with me?! Team Italian Beef all da way!

Haha, well, this is why I’m not a politician, guys. I’m too opinionated to actually broker these delicate negotiations after all. I guess I will officially withdraw my name from consideration for Emissary of Entreés or whatever.

But hang on a sec. Rather than copping this sort of adversarial posture, Rep. Ryan has gotten creative and come up with what might actually be an acceptable compromise.

"I do have a colleague that's going to make [The Horseshoe] the official open faced sandwich of the state of Illinois because there is a difference," Ryan said. "And it's a regional thing down in central and southern Illinois that they're very proud of. So I don't want to take that away from them."

Smart. I was totally ready to take that away from them because they’re clueless hayseed bumpkins who serve frozen fries covered with canned chili and processed cheese sauce like it’s something special. But, hey, I’m judgemental like that.

But Rep. Ryan’s respectfully conciliatory compromise is the wiser choice. He’s right. There is a difference between an open-faced sandwich and a sandwich. It’s a regional thing that they’re proud of.

It doesn’t impact me negatively to acknowledge that, I suppose. An open-faced sandwich. We don’t need to take that away from them. Mm hm.

Ok. Fine. This is why he’s got a cushy State House seat that pays $128k/year plus health insurance for 72 work days a year while I’m in here beggin’ y’all to “Buy Me A Coffee” counting my $5/month subscribers against my 5G bill.

Buy Me A Coffee - Offset My 5G Bill

Incredibly enough, this is all 100% true. Look it up. You’ll find that an actual bill has been winding its way through the Illinois legislature proposing to make the Horseshoe Sandwich the official open-faced sandwich of the State of Illinois.

Will this be enough of a consolation prize to allow the downstate Horseshoe-eaters to swallow the reality that Chicago Italian Beefs are the REAL official State Sandwich of Illinois?

Time will tell. But this is a model of how creative framing might be all that’s needed to arrive at mutually-agreeable solutions where nobody has to feel like their side is losing. Perhaps there’s hope for applying this same model to the division that exists in our politics at the national level?

Who knows, maybe using the approaches we employ towards recognizing our favorite foods is the way to finally break through the partisan logjam in Washington and enter a new era of mutually respectful compromise. It could happen. As Seinfeld famously said, “look to the cookie.”

A maximizer is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that their every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. The way a maximizer knows for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task, which can become even more daunting as the number of options increases. The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. A satisficer has criteria and standards, but a satisficer is not worried about the possibility that there might be something better. (This last paragraph is lifted from the Wikipedia page about the book).

As you may have already deduced, I am a maximizer, especially with regard to food. I have the compulsion to ensure that whatever I'm cooking or eating is the best possible incarnation of that thing that can be had for the money I'm willing to spend and the time/effort I'm willing to put in.

Working as a chef for a dozen or so years has only served to increase that tendency. After working somewhere that bakes 20 dozen chocolate chip cookies every day, and spending hours of my week walking by said cookies right as they come out of the oven, having multiple opportunities to eat them free of charge while they are at their most perfect state, gooey and still warm from the oven, how can I possibly be expected to eat a three day old cookie? Especially when the person who made that cookie probably didn't compare thirteen different types of chips and work on the recipe for weeks before settling on The One.

Same with bread. Restaurants get fresh artisan-quality bread delivered daily. It's around all the time, readily available, cut up and ready to be slathered with delicious house-made garlic-herb butter. I almost never eat bread that hasn't been baked that day. I'm spoiled for bread.

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Recently, since I have a three year old son and we're doing various outdoor winter activities, I've started making hot chocolate for us to have when we come inside. I don't think I really ever had hot chocolate before, at least since I was a kid. I kind of always looked at it the same as tea--it's a hot beverage, but it's not coffee? So what's the point? Does it have caffeine? No? Ok, then...I'll stick with my coffee.

So, for my first taste of hot chocolate, I just had whatever we happened to have in the house, which was Safeway Select hot cocoa mix from Jewel. It was bleh. Not bad, mind you, just not the blast of chocolately, creamy goodness, the intensely thick and rich cup that I envisioned that hot chocolate *could* be. *Should* be. If I applied myself.

kick in a few bucks towards my 5G

Now, some improvements are easy. My wife made that first batch, and I found out later that she used water, not milk. So for batch #2, I used milk. Skim. Which is what we had around. Not much of an improvement.

Next try, I used half and half. Much better. A marked difference. Now we were getting somewhere. We also had some whipped cream that someone brought over (the kind that comes out of a can), which we happily discovered melted nicely into the hot chocolate, improving the texture dramatically. I took note. Whipped cream needs to go on top of the idealized version of hot chocolate that I was now officially seeking.

But the flavor provided by the Safeway select stuff was lacking. It had that distinctly powdery flavor that you get from using cocoa powder rather than actual chocolate. It was also very difficult to get fully dissolved into the hot milk, even when I whisked it in a pan on the stovetop, making a thick paste at first and then diluting with more hot milk. No matter how much I tried, it would always have those dark globs of the hot cocoa mix floating around in the cup. Bleh.

As luck would have it, reinforcements were on the way. I had mentioned my quest for the perfect hot chocolate to my equally-maximizer-minded father, and the next time he dropped by, he graced us with a canister of ridiculously expensive Williams-Sonoma hot chocolate mix. Now, this is more like it, I thought as I checked the ingredients--bittersweet Guittard chocolate, soy lecithin (a very commonly used emulsifier) and pure vanilla. Better yet, this mix wasn't a powder at all, but consisted of little curls of actual shaved chocolate.

The package calls for a shamefully decadent five tablespoons of these micro chocolate shavings for each 8 oz. serving, which means that the entire twenty dollar canister makes eight servings. For the mathematically-challenged, that's $2.50 per cup just for the mix. Once you add in the milk, cream, and/or marshmallows, you're talking upwards of three bucks for a cup of hot chocolate that you make yourself. So this stuff had better be damn good.

It was. It melted almost instantly into the hot half and half and yielded a very smooth, rich, creamy finished product. It lacked that 'powdery' flavor that I noted above, and delivered a wonderfully velvety feel. And it tasted good. Chocolatey. But it didn't give me that 'smack-me-in-the-face' hot fudge flavor that I was dreaming about.

So my quest must continue.

I'm thinking what I need to do is simply buy some good quality chocolate--I'm a big fan of Lindt--and use my microplane to create shavings similar to the WS mix. Better quality chocolate, especially if I use chocolate with a higher percentage of cocoa, should result in a stronger chocolate flavor.

I'm also interested in trying to do a Mexican-style hot chocolate, using the abuelita tablets (or similar products) that you can find in the Hispanic foods section of most grocery stores. This is basically chocolate with cinnamon and sometimes ground almonds added. Even the mainstream brand (which is made by multinational food mega corp Nestle) contains only basic ingredients like sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, emulsifiers, and flavorings, so if I hunt around for some more artisanal brands, I should be able to find something pretty darn good.

So, the quest continues. My maximizing urges will not permit me to settle for packets of Swiss Miss or spoonfuls of Quik. I will view each and every post-winter-fun mugful as an opportunity to improve my recipes and techniques until the ultimate hot chocolate formula is achieved.

I know...I'm nuts. Believe me, my the eye rolls I get from my wife as I arrive home from the Mexican market with a pack of Moctezuma tablets or the bemused eyebrow raises I receive as I peruse the internet for some fancy French hot chocolate mix ensure that message comes through loud and clear. But...there are worse things to spend one's time and energy doing. And, look! There are people out there as crazy--perhaps even crazier--than I am!

I'll keep you all posted on my progress. And, in the meantime, I should probably start a concurrent obsessive search into the world of fancy gourmet marshmallows. (Actually, I'd probably just be better off making my own.)

I’m not a fan of tightly-planned itineraries. Instead, I prefer to go with the flow and allow happenstance occurrences to unfold. Meaningful or cool experiences seem somehow superior when they’re unplanned. It’s probably got something to do with my expectations.

That being said, I’m also a huge believer in planning ahead so that I’m ready with the intel when situations arise. Where should we go? What should we do? I’m hungry! Friends always ask me for restaurant recommendations. I’m that one guy in the group that always seems to know a legendary spot that’s just around the corner when the craving strikes. Hang on, let’s see if they’re open.

Intuition is sometimes part of that, but I also do the work, people. I keep current with this shit. This is my industry, I take it seriously. Much reading is done. I’ve got a pretty long list of local food writers, bloggers, and restaurant reviewers I follow and keep up with, whose personal tastes I’ve found over time, trial, and error, are pretty well aligned with my own.

Sometimes it takes me years to get to a certain area, but one day when I’m chasing down a limited edition G-Shock on Facebook marketplace and I’m in LaGrange or wherever, I’ll whip out my map, open it, and be thankful I don’t have to settle for the next drive-thru.

The technology is great. If you’re not familiar with Google’s My Maps feature, you should check it out. What I like to do is edit the map on my laptop. You can categorize places by type of establishment, what food it’s best known for, and then tag them all with color coded logos that show up on the map so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for in the moment by just zooming in.

“Arrrrgh! Me need pizza.” My irritable impatient hungry brain can just point at the red triangle icon, click, and navigate. “[Robot voice] Recalculating…starting route to…Ignotz Rist rontay.” Thank you, technology! Even though sometimes I hate you, I do love you so much at those moments when you actually fuckin’ work.

I also break the map out into “layers” so I can simplify it depending on where I’m at or what I’m looking for. Each layer can be ticked on or off, so if I’m not looking for a new spot to try in the northern burbs, I’ll turn off that particular layer and my map won’t show me all that visual clutter.

This way when I’m out and about, I can open my custom made map on my phone and really hone in straight away on what I’m after. What’s that one taco place Troy told me to try in Elgin again? Boom. Spread my finger and thumb apart a few times and there it is. Never would’ve remembered the name, never would’ve been able to go back into Troy’s texts and find it.

This helps me avoid making desperate choices based on Yelp reviews or random map searches in situations when I’m somewhere unfamiliar, hungry and impatient.

As a special bonus THANK YOU to all you wonderful subscribers who generously send me your hard-earned money to support my writing, I am making this decades-in-the-making personal food-map available to you. This a pretty monumental and significant event, I must say. Let’s not understate the importance of what this means in terms of our relationship.

Think of it as the food version of me offering you a drawer.

A link will follow after the paywall wall but here’s a screenshot. Any of you non-subscribing freeloaders want to take some guesses at which restaurants on are the map based solely on the logos and locations?

Ha! Bet you can’t! Tell ya what, anyone who guesses correctly (email me, as non-subscribers won’t be able to comment) will win a free 6-month subscription to this here Substack blog newsletter.

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Most of what I’ve seen, reaction-wise, is folks making comments that gushingly explain how their experiences at Alinea were incredibly memorable. Commenters recall the many times they’ve dined there, mention specific dishes they enjoyed, occasions they celebrated, often naming Alinea staff members who they felt a connection with, etc.

And all that’s great. Amazing. This is a chef whose artistry has clearly spoken to a lot of people and played a part in their lives in deep, meaningful ways. They wanted to salute and honor him as he announced this major pivot in the restaurant’s identity.

My personal response to the article was very different.

As I read the article, where Chef Achatz described the agonizing decision-making process that brought him, over the course of a number of years, to make this announcement, I could literally feel him shrugging off a massive weighted shroud that had been pushing down on him for decades.

Everyone was responding to the Chef’s post like it was a funeral or the end, somehow, of this iconic trailblazing entity that has meant so much to so many in the culinary world. The moment was treated almost universally with an air of solemn acceptance.

“Yes, Chef, ” everyone seemed to say, keeping a stiff upper lip and soldiering on. Respectful thanks and condolence-like remembrances were quickly dispatched across the internet in serious, hushed tones. Me? I felt so happy for the guy.

Success can be a tricky thing.

When I first started my restaurant, Edzo’s Burger Shop, in 2009, I took my fine dining background and applied it to the Chicago hot dog stand template. We offered dishes like fresh-cut fries with white truffle and parmesan, lobster fries with saffron aioli, and a market burger special each week featuring seasonal produce, farmstead cheeses, and freshly-ground grassfed beef from a nearby family ranch.

Thanks in no small part to a write-up that appeared in the New York Times only 12 days after Edzo’s opened, my little 50-seat greasy spoon was soon consistently running a half-hour wait all day long. Lots of regular customers, articles, and tv appearances followed.

Which was all awesome! No complaints. We sold a lot of burgers. Totally how I wanted it to go.

One of the interesting side effects I noticed once the exposure really started kicking in was how such a high percentage of customers would order the exact items they saw mentioned in an article or on TV. When we were featured on WTTW’s Check, Please, a local show with a big following at the time, the customer who reviewed us on the show ordered a milkshake that was a combo of two shake flavors on our menu — banana and Nutella.

We didn’t have a specific “banana-Nutella” shake on the menu, but after that show aired, you’d think it was the only option. It was suddenly our most popular seller by far. Not that this was a negative thing. I just found it interesting. It’s funny how one customer’s combo can create such a snowball effect. The option was always there and we maybe sold one or two of that particular special request a month. Then the lady on the teevee told people it was tasty and — boom— overnight, we’re selling six a day.

Which, as an operator, creates small logistical concerns that need to be addressed. Since I didn’t use banana syrup or extract, I was getting fresh bananas. I didn’t sell enough banana shakes to bring in a whole case of fresh bananas with my produce order, so I would stop at the Jewel on the way to work a couple times a week and grab a couple bunches of bananas. That was my system for years.

Suddenly, that model didn’t work. With the increased banana demand, I was running out every day. Now ordering a case made sense. Okey dokey. Adjustment made.

Again, I’m not complaining about this. I felt super-fortunate to get the exposure and the extra business that came from it. I’m just kind of noting, really. When articles get written about your restaurant, when specific menu items are featured on television, sometimes that can result in things kind of taking on a life of their own. In ways that you didn’t anticipate.

I didn’t plan on menuing a Banana-Nutella milkshake, but because of the turn of events that took place as a result of how one customer decided to customize my menu and spread the word about it, a Banana-Nutella shake was what I would be making 63 of each week for the foreseeable future.

if the whole world's singing your songs
And all of your paintings have been hung
Just remember what was yours
Is everyone's from now on

— Jeff Tweedy

When you make food, write a song, or paint a picture, it’s a extension of yourself. Hopefully. Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m not equating me dumping two things into a milkshake cup to composing Hey, Jude or painting the Guernica. Please don’t hear this as that kind of self-important pomposity. My humble burger shop mashup creations aren’t anywhere close to being on the same level of those iconic pieces of art or with Chef Achatz’ Black Truffle Explosion.

But the phenomenon I’m talking about is the same.

If you’re fortunate enough to create something that you’re happy with, you put it out into the world and people respond favorably, that’s amazing. Nobody is going to complain about that. What a blessing! People want to buy my stuff. The thing I’m making that I’m passionate about, that I’ve worked my ass off for years to become good at, is resonating with folks. Enough of them that I’m busy and I’m actually making some money, even! Fuck yeah. Living the dream, baby.

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It’s great. But like with my logistical banana supply issue, there are unforeseen consequences that inevitably arise from expectations that form as a result of this success. Once you’re on TV, you’re not just some funky little hot dog stand that happens to offer interesting milkshake flavors anymore.

Now you’re “that place with the supposedly amazing milkshakes we saw on that one show. Six bucks?! I guess we’ll have to go see for ourselves how good they really are.” Expectations have been built up. Chips have been placed firmly on shoulders. You lose the elements of surprise and novelty — of discovery. Put out one over-mixed watery milkshake today and a TikTok review ripping you as overrated goes viral tomorrow.

Another dish my restaurant got kind of low-key famous for was our Lobster Fries. It started because the guy delivering seafood to the restaurant next door had an extra case of lobsters and offered them to me for a good price as I was passing by in the back hallway.

This was in early September, if I remember correctly, prime Maine lobster season when they’re plentiful and least expensive. Ok, I figured. Let the ingredients be the inspiration, perfect. I walked into the kitchen and plopped the case on the counter in front of my assistant manager (a CIA graduate). “New special! Let’s do something with these guys.” He did this.

And it was good. Think lobster roll, but with fries in place of bread. Hard to go wrong.

People responded favorably to this butter-tossed crispy spud stack topped with chunks of real lobster meat and chopped chives for which I charged an outlandish (at the time) $10. We got a bunch of write-ups and social media mentions, and soon it was the special I didn’t dare take off the board. The moment I ran out of lobster and erased it, I’d piss off six people a day who’d made the trip specifically for their Lobster Fries fix.

I tried to explain; “this is a seasonal special, guys. That’s why it’s not on the regular menu. When lobster is in season and the prices are good, it’ll be back.” They weren’t having it. People were viscerally MAD at me. They’d slam down the phone when I apologetically delivered the bad news.

I hated it. It created a moral conflict for me. My whole approach was to bring my fine-dining principles to the everyday humble burger shack menu and that required adhering to seasonality. Would Eric Ripert compromise by bringing in frozen lobster out of season? Hell, no! Then neither would I, dammit!

“As if,” my other inner voice would counter. “Nice try, burger boy. Get real. This is the hospitality industry and your overarching purpose is to make tasty food that brings people moments of restorative joy, and sell it for money. You made a dish that strikes a chord with folks. So? Play the hits, bro. Just get whatever dang lobster, charge the price required to make it work, and give the people what they want”.

Ok. That’s valid, other inner voice. I can’t deny it.

Both arguments have merit. Then you get into this inner debate about being a “sell-out”. If I abandon my commitment to seasonality and ethical, responsible sourcing, if I settle for inferior product, am I really any better than Guy Fieri barfing out processed-cheese trash-can nachos for incessant hordes of Times Square tourists?

drop a fiver in Ed's hat

There’s a boundary that needs to be established. At what point does my work stop being about my own vision and start being more about what other people have (for whatever reason) come to expect from me? If I compromise my values or change course because I’m worrying about people’s reactions or about the logistical concerns caused by the uptick in demand, doesn’t doing that essentially undermine the very approach that brought me the success in the first place?

For instance, sometimes people broadcast stuff out into the internetosphere that is just flat-out wrong. One blogger guy did a write-up saying “….interesting fries they had on their menu called Lobster fries that was deep French fries with bacon/caramelized onions, cheddar spread, crispy fried onions and BBQ sauce.”

BZZZT! That could literally not be more wrong. Anyone with critical thinking skills would wonder why a dish containing no lobster would be called “Lobster Fries”, of course. But that’s the kind of “intel” that bounces around out there. As operators, we read these errors and cringe.

Somewhere, right now, someone is seeing that and forming present-tense expectations that will inevitably not be met the day they show up at my restaurant. And I’ll be the one who has to deal with the fallout and their disappointment. Probably when I’m I’m hungover, down an employee, or haven’t eaten yet.

Anyway, that was a very long, meandering ramble, but all this writing, rambling and recollecting is the process that helps me better understand why my response to the Alinea article was so different from everyone else’s.

For me, the piece landed as a disclaimer. Kind of a heads-up to the world. “Hey Guys—my work probably won’t meet your expectations from here on out” is what I heard the man saying. Not so much an apology, but there’s definitely an element of “sorry, I know this is going to disappoint a lot of you, but…”

My take is that this was a really hard thing for Chef Achatz to convey. Almost like he was passing along the news of a recently-departed mutual friend we’d all miss. Or maybe like telling your brother that you drove by the house you grew up in and saw it being torn down.

Like I explained above, I get that. It really resonates with me, and probably with anyone in hospitality who earnestly cares about providing an experience that creates wonderful memories for guests. Chef was shrugging off more than a decade of laboring under the weight of huge expectations that were created by his own massive success. That took a genuine effort that I could feel in his words.

The piece didn’t read like a eulogy to the Alinea experience, but that’s how it seemed like a lot of people interpreted it. I ate there once, experienced a bunch of the iconic dishes. Chef Dave Beran even shattered nitrogen-frozen passion-fruit orbs for us tableside. But reading chef Achatz’ piece didn’t inspire me to fondly recount my past dining experiences as nostalgia or some kind of rarefied social currency.

It prompted me to feel really happy for the guy.

He was making an announcement that was clearly difficult for him to make — that he would no longer feel obliged to keep playing his greatest hits in order to meet people’s expectations. He was moving on from all that. Re-establishing the boundary line that defines why he gets up every day and keeps doing the work.

When you’re public-facing and successful, people are going to have their own feelings about you and your efforts. They personalize it. They make it about themselves, their special occasions and bucket lists, their own online clout. Expectations loom large. It’s complicated. Once you create something and put it out there, who knows? It could be another Charlie Manson co-opting Helter Skelter. That crazy shit had nothing to do with The Beatles but due to their massive success, the song they wrote came to take on a dark connotation of its own.

Once you publish, upload, or serve it to a diner, it doesn’t just belong to you anymore. What was yours is everyone’s from now on.

And that's not wrong or right
But you can struggle with it all you like
You'll only get uptight

—Jeff Tweedy again

So viewed from that perspective, what I saw chef Achatz doing was, as Bono famously said “…takin’ it back.” Chef is drawing that line in the sand for himself and his own future work. Freeing himself from the weight of everyone else’s expectations of what he should be producing, the work he’s obligated to be doing…who he should be.

Fuckin’ A. I was happy to see it. Not an easy thing to do. We can all take some inspiration from seeing a talented artist make such a difficult choice, but even more, from the straightforwardly authentic, even vulnerable way he went about explaining it.

Ah, dear readers… I’ve already regaled you with my sad tales of scrabbling all around the world wide web trying to establish a few multiple meager revenue streams for myself as I figure out my post-Edzo’s era.

Your Donations Help Too

As an independent restaurant owner forced to figure it all out from the dawn of social media through Covid, I wore many hats. This expanded my skill set, so in addition to a chef, burger, guy, and online ponderer, I’m now also a social media content creator, an event coordinator, and a press release releaser. Sure, why not?

As such, I’ve been helping a friend promote his foraging tours. Listing them on local events pages, sending out media requests, posting stuff in Facebook groups. Rabble rousing, basically. Getting the word out. Need someone to talk a lot and be loud? Yeah, I think I can help you with that.

Dave Odd is a professional forager and edible plant expert. He organizes and hosts foraging events all around the Chicago area. Some are brief 2-hour forays and others combine the walk with a chef-cooked meal that includes part of the haul from the foresty forage flora. There are even a couple intense-sounding full-on back-to-nature ecology weekend campouts.

As the season has been approaching, I’ve been sending out emails to writers who cover the Chicagoland food scene in hopes of getting Dave’s foraging tours media coverage. And we’ve gotten a couple nibbles, which…great.

One writer responded to let me know he was out of town and wouldn’t be able to cover it. However…he said he knew about Dave and his foraging and had been meaning to do a story about him. This writer also volunteered that he had read and enjoyed my recent rant about restaurant pricing, complimented my writing, and asked if I wanted to write the Dave Odd piece for his publication. For pay!

For context, the writer in question is Mike Nagrant, a very well-established and respected name in food journalism who has been covering Chicago restaurants for at least 20 years. He was food critic for the Sun-Times back in a past era when newspapers used to actually pay people to write about food. He’s served as a judge for the James Beard Awards and a contributing author in the Alinea cookbook. His very successful Substack, The Hunger, has more than 7000 paid subscribers and is on the Top 100 list for food writing.

The dude has an orange check mark!

So this was a say yes immediately and dance around the house for a few minutes kind of moment for me.

I did pause for a moment about this being somehow unethical. Is it? I just got paid to pitch a story that I then got hired to write. The story I will be paid to write is about a guy who is paying me to get stories written about him.

Is this double dealing? Self dealing? Payola? A vertical monopoly? I wasn’t sure, of course, because when you wear many hats and do many jobs that you just figure out how to do on the fly, nobody teaches you The Rules.

When I replied to Mike thanking him for the opportunity, I raised these concerns. He said he knows I wouldn’t represent Dave if I didn’t think highly of what he’s doing (which is true). He said he knew I wouldn’t just write a vapid fluff piece hyping up Dave just based on the monetary relationship (which is also true). Further, I’ve been reading Mike’s writing long enough to know that he wouldn’t offer me this guest contributor slot if he didn’t think I’d cover it objectively. So?

Game on. We discussed the ethical concerns and agreed to disclose all the relationships in the post, have everything be transparent, and make it happen. I went to Dave’s foraging event this past Sunday, nibbled all the bitter little weeds he found and chattered on about, and wrote the piece. It was published in The Hunger last night. You can read it here.

Mike’s Substack is well worth the subscription fee. His writing is informed but irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and peppered with silly Gen X pop culture references, yet he takes restaurant criticism seriously enough to remain independent, anonymous, and pay for his meals.

Super fun. I just wanted to share this little glimpse into the process because I thought the “self-dealing” aspect of it was ironic in the current internet DIY everything content creation era. I’m wearin’ so many hats, I’m literally outsourcing work to myself over here, people! Thanks for reading!

As a small independently-owned restaurant owner, Restaurant Depot was my last ace in the hole.

It meant hustling. You have to show up. But if you get up early, get in, push that skid around, grab what you need, wait in line, check out, load your car, get to the restaurant, unload, and put everything away yourself (since staff haven’t arrived yet), you can save a few bucks off the prices you’ll get from the usual vendors and be spared their delivery/fuel fees.

You’ve got to stay current on your Certificate of Resale too or they’ll suddenly start charging you sales tax. Every year that has to get updated with the Depot’s home office. By fax.

These are the side roads, the long routes and workarounds that one takes to carve out a little extra profit every week.

What I would do was try my best to play a few vendors against each other. I was in touch with reps for Sysco and US Foods, sometimes Gordon as well, and then I’d go to Restaurant Depot with my little list of my 10-12 key items, things that comprised the bulk of my food cost, and I’d compare prices.

If the Depot’s price was lower (it usually was), I’d use that info to try and negotiate with my vendors to get them to match the lowest price.

In the early days (before everything was updated online constantly), I could even bullshit a bit, shaving a few cents off of the best price I found to see if a rep would fail to check me on it. It worked occasionally. Mostly it didn’t. Now it’s all online so nobody’s fooling anyone.

Except the companies that have enough money to buy up the competition. They’re fooling everyone. They’re gaming the system.

This is why Sysco is buying Restaurant Depot. To remove this option from the toolbox of small restaurant owners. Oh, they’ll dress it up in all sorts of BS language about “expanding their footprint so as to better serve small communities” or whatever, but the bottom line is that they want to take away this option so little guys have no choice but to pay what Sysco thinks they should pay. Sure, it’ll still be cash-and-carry, but it won’t be a cheaper option.

In fact, what they’ll do to the smaller accounts is start charging them extra for deliveries. Over and above the fuel surcharge, I mean, which always gets added during energy cost spikes but then never removed when gas prices fall.

Like how airlines used to include a checked bag with your ticket but now it costs extra. It’s shrinkflation, but with services. Offering a self-serve option then raising the price on the full-service that everyone’s become accustomed to having.

But many will still hustle. They’ll find alternate sources, they’ll drive across town. They’ll stuff out the back of a truck. This is how restaurants try to eke out a bit of profit on those razor-thin margins, boys and girls. A profit margin of 5% isn’t bad at the moment for restaurants. If you’re not familiar with running a business, that sucks! So the math matters massively.

A good week for my restaurant was doing a gross revenue of $25,000, so 5% profit on that would be $1250. See what I’m saying? That’s a lot of economic activity and the work associated with it to end up making just $1250.

But, ok…I’m not getting rich on that but if I can take home that much every week, I’m a viable productive member of American society. I’m not even going to work out what that works out to per hour. Too depressing. But that’s $5k a month so… I can mostly pay my bills.

If a cooler breaks down, though? Time for exhaust hood cleaning? Someone out on paid vacation that week? I have to pay a manager overtime to cover me because I have a kid home sick? That $1250 becomes $800 and then $400 and then zero real quick.

So if Restaurant Depot has my boneless beef chuck clods for 8 cents a pound less than Sysco and I’m buying 500 lbs of beef a week to generate that $25k in sales, that $.08/lb. works out to an extra forty bucks or so.

Not much. But that’s just on one spec. And if I can get my Sysco rep to knock the price down just by mentioning it to him, that’s a win. Stacking those little wins is how us little guys try to squeeze out a bit more profit.

I had a list of stuff I bought enough of to watch prices this closely. Bacon, Nutella, fryer oil, plastic cups, cleaning products, Frank’s hot sauce… If Sysco’s pricing on those items started to creep up and RD’s didn’t, I’d check in with my reps and they’d make an adjustment. Even after the fact in many cases, they’d issue me a credit. Sometimes the Depot would have a sale price I knew Sysco wouldn’t match and I’d load up.

So Restaurant Depot has for a long time served as an alternate option — a side hustle workaround — to the big boys. One that small business owners could use as a negotiating lever against the mainline distributors.

Suddenly that’s all changing.

Make a One-Time Donation

There’s been all sorts of analysis the finance blogosphere about whether it’s a good deal from the perspectives of the companies’ shareholders and how stock is faring since the announcement. And there are political movements afoot to try to lobby the federal government to block approval of the deal.

But I just wanted to relay my personal perspective, from the standpoint of someone who bought product from both companies for years. I know what this means.

Now’s the time in the blog post when I might tell you all the worthwhile things you can Do About This Problem. I’d usually be giving you links to click to petitions to add your name to, groups to join, members of congress to write. And you can. They’re out there. People are actively pushing back against FTC approval for this massive deal. As they should.

Leave a comment

If you want to find them and work with them, you should. I might. Not sure. I don’t have much faith left that it’ll make any difference and I don’t think doing it will make me feel any better about this.

Maybe writing this post has helped me a bit with that. Not currently having a restaurant to run and an empty meat bin in my walk-in cooler to fill feels like a blessing in this current environment. It’s hard out there for a (food) pimp.

What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the financial analysis around this acquisition is saying that it’s simply a bad deal for Sysco. They’re taking on a lot of debt. They’re citing all the “new marketshare” this will give them, but everyone seems to know that it’s really not new. It’s mostly just independent restaurant owners like me who are already well aware of Sysco. In other words, it’s the same customer base they already had. They’re just eliminating their customer base’s options so as to more effectively squeeze that extra $40 a week out of them.

I’m not making it up.

As I’m researching something, or I learn about a momentous and historical moment in modern culinary history, I suddenly realize — wait…I was there. Then. For that.

And yet somehow I completely missed knowing about it.

This started when I was doing research for a post I made last year about eggplant, oddly enough. I recounted a story of how I was in London in 1998. Here’s that excerpt:

When I was in London in the 90’s, I went out of my way to go to Chelsea to eat at a restaurant called Aubergine. I had heard a lot of good things. Important Food Writers at the time were saying that the cocky young chef who ran the place was going to put London back on the culinary map…The restaurant had two Michelin stars at the time.

…legendary badass chef Marco Pierre White had recommended a brash young ex-footballer cook from his brigade to the owners of London’s two-star Aubergine, and that was who they hired …

That young cook’s name was Gordon Ramsay. And I was pumped to try his food.

It’s actually a pretty wild story that all happened to unfold right around the time I dined there for a solo lunch in May of 1998. Of course, like with so many things that turn out to be something meaningful, I was completely clueless about all that was happening behind the scenes that would eventually make this a pivotal moment in culinary history.

But somehow from reading Frommer’s and Fodor’s travel books in the Borders bookstore cafe, I knew enough to know that this was a scene I wanted to go check out for myself firsthand while I was in London.

The story is famously told in “Boiling Point”, a 4-part documentary series that aired on the BBC in 1999, tracing the story of Gordon Ramsay opening his eponymous restaurant after leaving Aubergine.

In the first episode, the Hell’s Kitchen host recounts how, just a few days after I happened to have my lunch there, he organized a walkout amongst the staff of two of the restaurants owned by the group. I’m fairly sure I had nothing to do with it.

Apparently, a sous chef Ramsay supported had been unfairly sacked (that’s how Brits say fired) so Ramsay decided to stage a protest by organizing the walkout and fully resigning his position, dubbing the walkout “black Friday”.

The famous chef never returned to the pass at Aubergine, so I’m glad I got in while the getting was good. Weeks later, a mysterious all-black-clad motorcyclist wearing a helmet entered the restaurant, grabbed the reservation book off the host stand, dashed out, and sped away.

Wild shit!

Ramsay ended up taking most of the staff as well to work at his upcoming solo venture. Both parties sued each other, the Aubergine partner group accused Ramsay of stealing the reservation book, which he denied and tried to blame on Pierre-White. Later, Chef Ramsay admitted in an interview that it was in fact he who stole the reservation book.

“I nicked it. I blamed Marco. Because I knew that would fuck him and that it would call off the dogs... I still have the book in a safe at home.” — Gordon Ramsay

Marco Pierre-White would eventually sue Gordon Ramsay for libeling him by accusing him of being the motorcyclist reservation book bandit.

This was truly a high drama moment between some of the greatest chefs in the world that I obliviously wandered into, not knowing what the word aubergine actually even meant.

I only learned much later about the fact that this all this cheffy soap opera drama was unfolding right around the time I dined there, and I could’ve never grasped the significance of this particular culinary moment at the time, without knowing how famous and influential Ramsay would end up becoming.

So, after just recounting all that a few months ago, imagine my surprise, dear readers, when I came upon another important socio-cultural culinary moment I barely refrained from cluelessly stumbling into in the 2010’s — a 101-couple gay wedding in Miami to celebrate Florida lifting its ban on same-sex marriage. Guy Fieri flew in from Flavortown to do the honors.

Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t somehow wander up to the altar, slosh my drink on the brides’ dresses and make a longwinded inappropriate toast.

Because I was there! And not the CGI graphics supervised by Robert Zemeckis kind of there. The real kind.

Here’s how it went down — the year before, I won a “battle of the burgers” competition outside of Tribune Tower pitting 30 of Chicago’s best burger-meisters in a cook-off to crown one us Chicago’s burger champ.

The grand prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to Miami to stay at the James Hotel during the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, an event that’s been co-branded with The Food Network for years and prominently features their bubbly on-air personalities.

Well, guys, all the cool food teevee kids were there and it was all happening right outside my hotel room! So fun. There was a constant flow of programming in the courtyard right below my balcony — a poolside flambé tutorial with Geoffery Zakarian, a Ted Allen cocktail hour, nunchaku ice carving demo with Ming Tsai, on and on.

Not long before all this, Chicago schmoozer extraordinaire Jeff Mauro did a segment about my restaurant on his Food Network show, The Sandwich King. I figured he’d be there, so I sent him a DM and told him my buddy and I were down in South Beach for the fest. Whattaya know, Jeff came through! He got us onto guest lists for all the swanky celebrity chef tasting parties.

My friend and I bopped around at will all weekend, feeling like bigshots. We hit up Michael Symon’s Beach BBQ, got muscled out of Rachael Ray’s Burger Bash, there was a Big Gay Ice Cream Truck Social with Art Smith, and a poolside paella powwow with Jose Andrés. I half-remember a brief make-out session in an elevator with Ree Drummond.

(Kidding about that last part. It wasn’t brief.)

But, as I now understand to be fully in character for my Forrest Gump self, I was utterly oblivious to the history-making gay nuptial event with Mayor of Flavortown Guy Fieri presiding over a mass wedding ceremony to legally conjoin 101 same-sex couples for the first time ever in the state of Florida.

Chef Art Smith promoted the event on Twitter (which was still somewhat novel at the time), specifying 101 couples as a snarky Cruella de Vil reference. The former Oprah chef was giving side-eye, comparing Florida’s attorney general, who was at the time actively blocking gay marriages in the state, to the notorious villain from Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.

That attorney general? None other than a Palm Beach lawyer by the name of Pam Bondi.

After saying their “I do”s at the big fat gay wedding, the newlyweds even got to snack on wedding cake made by Ace of Cakes’ Duff Goldman. So everyone really stuck it to Cruella DePam Bondi, TV Food Network style!

Pretty cool, right? Momentous times.

Unfortunately, none of this historic culinary-world history even slightly penetrated my consciousness as I wandered around South Beach aimlessly, happy as a clam nibbling XO hamachi collar riblets, snarfing down free fruity rum drinks, and ogling all the exotic supercars and topless sunbathers along Ocean Drive. Derrrrrrrrr.

But, hey, I had fun. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Drop a Buck in the Hat

Anyway, weird, right? Coincidentally being present for, and yet also completely oblivious to, these landmark watershed events in the culinary world. I mean, I’m so close. I’ve put myself in these situations, I’m in this industry…it’s all right there.

And yet…. I Gump it every time.

The last one goes back to northern coastal Spain circa 1998.

I was living in Barcelona, doing stages in restaurants, taking train trips to different cities and regions of Spain. Learning everything I could about it’s culinary traditions. Eventually I got a job in a humble workingman’s bar helping the older woman who ran its kitchen. I would go with her to the Boqueria market every morning, carry stuff for her, manage the Rolser, then we’d go back and prep a small traditional Catalan menu of 6-8 different dishes each day. When they were gone, the restaurant was out of food.

My interest was in learning Spanish regional cooking. I wanted to understand the differences between Catalan, Basque, and Castilian cooking, learn about specific Spanish product. I wanted to learn how to source and work with stuff I wasn’t familiar with. Bacalao, fava beans, cuttlefish, percebes.

So I fully immersed myself.

But I also missed home, of course, and my favorite familiar foods. One of my regular haunts was a cafe called The Bagel Shop. Obviously, with the name being English and the availability of bagels drew me in, but I soon came to discover they also had peanut butter — crema de cacahuetes — fairly unheard-of in Europe back then.

Soon enough it became my daily ritual start to walk through Plaza Catalunya, hang a quick left, and grab myself a hot toasty bagel slathered with peanut butter to go with my morning café con leche.

Right at that same time, mad scientist culinary innovators the Adria brothers — Ferran and Albert, who had been running a little two-star Michelin spot just up the Costa Brava called El Bulli — began gaining global notoriety in the culinary world. You may have heard of it. Of course you have. Everybody has.

Ferran Adria and El Bulli basically blew up that year. There were articles in every major food publication and the Adrias teamed up with Joël Robuchon, who declared Ferran his successor as Best Chef In The World.

Since El Bulli closed down in the off season for months, this culinary hall-of-fame team opened up, unbeknownst to me, a in-town “workshop” in Barcelona’s Barri Gotic they called elBulli “taller” (workshop) right near the same market I was doing my daily shopping with my Señora.

I wasn’t consulted. They just did it. Rude.

Here’s a map. My bagel shop was at the top right, just off the large plaza south of Carrer de la Canuda. elBulli taller, where the most ground-breaking culinary innovation in restaurant history since Escoffier developed the brigade system was happening at those exact moments while I sat munching my toasted bagel, was just a few blocks away on Calle de la Portaferissa.

It’s the next major street you see, about midway down the map. La Boqueria market, where I shopped alongside the Adria brothers, evidently, would be just off the bottom of the map to the left of La Rambla.

Molecular gastronomy was just about to break big worldwide and these guys were essentially the inventors of the genre. Liquid nitrogen, spherification, olive oil powder, “meat glue.” De-constructed everything, gels, precise geometrical forms, siphon-bottle foams and tasting menus running more than 15 courses became the norm.

These guys were destroying the established paradigms and accepted norms on a daily basis. The would distill the flavor of a dish into it’s single-bite essence and suspend it from a wire. They’d manipulate textures so hot things could be served frozen and cold things could melt. This was Willy Wonka-style high-concept culinary mind-fuckery.

Some chefs who worked there include Redzepi, Bottura, Andrés, Achatz, so… you know. Nobody good.

My reaction?

Nah. Not for me. I don’t go in for all this modernist nerdy chemistry set stuff. It’s a passing fad!

Instead, I was running around Barcelona tasting every baguette and tortilla española. Learning how to clean cuttlefish and fold bechamel into recipes you would never know had bechamel. Eating all the croquettas, trying to see the green fairies in Van Gogh’s favorite Absinthe bar, tripping out on the roofs of Gaudi buildings, and drinking in the places with the best pintxos.

I was having a blast that summer, eating long brie/jamon sandwiches from Pans & Co. and watching the World Cup. The tournament was being held in France that year and when the games were on, it was like the entire city shut down. Every little bar, tabac stand, and hardware store would drag card tables out onto the sidewalk, spill out on the street, and rig up extension corded tv’s to watch the game communally outside.

Whatever game was on, it didn’t matter. Everywhere you walked all over the city, little groups of people of all ages, locals, were sitting around getting excited about all this for weeks.

I wasn’t a futbol fan at all. I barely understood what the whole deal was with the World Cup. I definitely did not grasp the cultural significance of the event. But I knew that it was special because normal life was stopping and everyone was losing their minds for 6-8 hours a day.

So? When in Rome Barça right? I’d wander around, happen upon a fun-looking scene, grab myself a rickety, unstable chair, and order some snacks and an Estrella Damm.

Manchego in oil, briny white marinated anchovies on little toast rounds, feathery ribbons of the hand-sliced ham that sits in a special rack on every bar in Spain. Or sometimes I’d just munch on some of those crunchy habas they give you for free at most places there. Chex mix but with beans.

Nearly 30 years later, reading about the groundbreaking culinary history that was happening just a couple blocks away, I can’t help but picture myself walking around taking photos of Gaudi buildings or heading into work when a random curly haired thin guy all in black beckons and presents me with a modern silver tray, offering a free sample of sea urchin espuma from a pipette.

“No grathias,” I’d say, sliding by like he’s another Rambla street performer, “I’m here to learn about jamon and paella, amigo.”

So? Oh-for-tres, as they say in España, eh?

No, they don’t actually say that. I manage to instinctively put myself in position to somehow be involved in these pivotal moments in culinary history and then…?

Whiff! So close.

Go back to the culinary dugout and take a seat on the bench. No espuma for you! Oh well. It’s like Forrest said…

"I don't know if we have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I think maybe it's both.”

People all over Italy have widely varied accents and often speak regional dialect from back in the days before Italy was a unified country (which didn't happen until about 1870 or so). So when you travel around, not only will you hear unrecognizable dialect in places like San Gimignano and Siracusa, but you'll also hear Italian spoken with vastly different pronunciations.

Sicily is a prime example. They often change the 'o' sound on the end of a word to a 'u' sound--so lo Siciliano, which is the proper Italian for "the Sicilian language" becomes lu Sicilianu. To make it even harder on those of us with a passing knowledge of guidebook Italian, locals will often switch back and forth mid-sentence between dialect and "proper" (read; Florentine) Italian.

Local dialects are an incredibly insightful window into the history of a region. Siclian dialect is peppered with words derived from Arabic, Greek, Spanish, French, and even a little German thrown in, reflecting the many inhabitants the island has known over the years.

Up north, in Trentino-Alto Adige, for instance, the influences are primarily from Austria, and along the northeastern border of Italy, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, you start hearing Eastern European and Slavic influences in the dialect.

Here in Chicago, however, we have an Italian dialect all our own, which I sometimes refer to as Caputiano, in reference to Caputo's, the well-known Italian produce market and deli on Harlem Ave. in Elmwood Park where any real Chicago Italian worth their salt goes to do their shopping.

An informational aside: There are now many grocery establishments calling themselves Caputo's. The original Caputo's are now known as Angelo Caputo's Fresh Markets. The other chain--Joe Caputo and Sons--is decent, but it's not as good as the original, and then there's Caputo Cheese Market in Melrose Park, which is noted to be "Owned & Operated by Wiscon Corporation. Not affiliated with any other Caputo".

Anyway, Caputiano is a unique dialect of Chicago area American-Italians in which the last letter of words (and it's usually limited to names of foodstuffs) is dropped entirely. O's also change to U's, reflective of the Sicilian heritage of many Chicago-area Italians.

So mozzarella becomes mootzarel, scamorza become scamorz sometimes even smooshed down into skmorz, and sopressata, puzzlingly, becomes supersott.

The more you listen, the stranger it gets. Hard 'C' sounds are softened, to the point that they start to sound more like a 'G'. So capicolla sounds like gavigool. Throw in all the nicknames, hand gestures, and typical Italian non-verbal sign language, and you've got something really fun to be a part of.

Which brings us (finally) to the topic of this post. My family is blessed enough to know an Italian-American family who generously includes us in the annual Easter blowout they hold at their home. In typical fashion, they go all out for this party; bunny and chick-shaped candies are everywhere, there's a lamb-shaped cake, big Easter baskets and stuffed animals for the kids, a mad-dash Easter egg hunt out back promises plastic eggs filled with half-dollar and dollar coins (along with the occasional one filled with dirt!), and, of course, a massive spread of great food.

The main event and centerpiece of the Easter blowout, though, is Big Mikey's frittat.

A frittat is, basically, a frittata, of course. But it's oh so much more than that. It's the frittata to end all frittate. It's the frittata that ate Melrose Park.

Big Mikey (in typical Italian-American fashion, "Mikey" is about 6'7" and 280 lbs.) is a pro at this by now. He's got a special pan he uses just for the frittats, which is the biggest, deepest sauté pan I've ever seen in my life. The day before, he loads up on imported salseech and salumi--soopersatt, gavigool, mortadell--cheeses like fontina, scamorza, and rigoat, which gets drained through cheesecloth, and a case of eggs. On Easter morning, he gets down to work.

Big Mikey occupies his corner of the kitchen all morning, cranking out one frittat after another while talking, greeting guests, playing with the kids, eating, and yanking people's chains a little. He likes to play up the fact that I'm a chef and ask me if he's "doing it right", confident that he's in his element and, in his kitchen, I'm the novice. Of course, I give him his respect and bow down to his frittat skills.

It's a great, raucous affair. There are always tons of kids running around stuffing themselves on candy, there's a really interesting mix of old-school Chicago Italian-Americans, Polish and other more newly-arrived Eastern European immigrants, and a Jewish contingent as well, so the buffet runs the gamut from lox and bagels to cannoli to hot, garlicky borscht. The guys usually have a few TV's on, tuned to the Hawks game or the Masters, talk business, and will step out side to smoke cigars at some point. The women dote over the kids, catch up on gossip and push everyone to eat more, and a good time is generally had by all.

Make a One-Time Donation

Our family is truly honored to be included every year, and it's really great to see how thrilled our hosts are with our kids. They shower them with gifts and Easter candy, but, even more meaningfully, with attention and genuine affection. Italians, in general, have a really deep appreciation for young children. As a parent who sometimes gets fed up with the day-to-day drudgery of raising two kids, it's a refreshing reminder of where my priorities and focus should be.

It's one thing to prowl the neighborhoods of the Chicago area, eating in restaurants, shopping in ethnic markets, and doing the legwork to discover unknown delicacies and food traditions, but it's another thing entirely to be invited into someone's home to share in their family's personal culinary culture. Every family, regardless of region and cultural history, is different, and does things their specific way; a substitution grandma made along the way due to her personal preference, or adjustments made due to limitations of a specific kitchen, equipment, or what's available at the time often become codified and manage to stick for generations.

So it's a rare honor to be included in a family's Easter feast. It's become a tradition for us; we go every year now and, although we don't usually see Big Mikey, Grace, and their family much during the rest of the year, they treat us as if we'd just seen them yesterday and there's never a hint of that awkwardness that sometimes goes along with seeing people only occasionally, for the big holidays.

Once the kids' faces start showing a flush from running around after having eaten too many Peeps, we know it's time to head home. We say our goodbyes, give and receive kisses on the cheek and hugs, and Mikey packs three or four massive slabs of frittat onto a foil-covered paper plate for us to take home. Usually we're so loaded down with gifts, Easter loot, and leftovers, we have to make two trips to the car, and then the hugs and goodbyes start all over again.

So, humorous Italo-American Chicago-style slang (aka paisanics) aside, Easter, for us, is a wonderful opportunity to be a part of another family's traditions and enjoy friends, family, and Big Mikey's frittat! Happy Easter!

People have a lot of feelings about tipping lately.

I don’t blame them.

Back in the day (I love being old enough to say this and sound like a cliche), it used to be pretty well-defined who was supposed to be tipped. Over the last 20 years, though, and especially since digital payments have become so widespread, the space has become extremely confusing.

Articles are everywhere about how out of hand it’s gotten. Two-thirds of Americans say they’re experiencing “tipping fatigue” and nearly half say they tip in situations where it’s not customary and they don’t know why. If you read the comments in these articles, pretty much everybody is pissed and most folks don’t really have a clear sense of what they’re mad about. They’re just OVER it.

We’re now presented with the option to tip on nearly every transaction we make. The problem — the reason it’s stress-inducing — is that we don’t know what the rules are, so we’re faced with having to make a decision in the moment about it. Every damn time. Does THIS transaction qualify? And if so, how much do I need to tip? That’s a lot of mental work to do, day in, day out, every time, every coffee, meal, haircut, or dry clean pickup.

It’s annoying. It can feel socially awkward. It can evoke feelings of shame, guilt, anger, or resentment. And it’s a just a lot to process considering how many transactions we all make every week, every month. That’s a lot of extra decision-making. It takes a cumulative toll on our minds. A lot of heavy lifting of mental baggage.

Because, let’s be real, there tends to be a lot of emotion behind these decisions. People make all kinds of assumptions about what the person showing them a tip screen might be thinking or expecting. Then they make choices based on those assumptions and subsequently carry around feelings that get stirred up based on this whole inner imaginary exchange. Based mostly on mind-reading, assumptions, and inner dialogue.

I’ve had many customers in the restaurant make remarks when I flip the screen towards them to finish the transaction. “Ha ha, I guess I’d better give a good tip since you all haven’t made my food yet,” is along the lines of what we usually hear.

Wild. So the assumption is that counter staff is eyeballing the tip and then communicating with kitchen staff about how to adjust the preparation of their order based on the tip? When I try to assure folks that nobody would ever do that, the response is usually an eye roll accompanied by something along the lines of “yeah, right”.

Guys, we struggle with getting the cooks to read tickets thoroughly enough not to leave the bacon off five burgers a day, but you think we’re adding spontaneous micro-adjustments based on factoring in what you tip? Trust me, we’re not that organized. Couldn’t pull that off if we wanted to.

Truly folks, I’ve been in foodservice for 30+ years and nobody would ever do that. With servers, do customers who have tipped poorly in the past get worse service? Sure. Do servers prioritize and give better, quicker service to tables they hope to get better tips from? Of course. Yes, that happens. Does that extend to the guy at Dunkin’ or Subway shorting your order on purpose because you hit the “no tip” button? No. Again, trust me, their brains don’t have time for that sort of pettiness. They’re just trying to get the order out so they can double-tap that screen and move on with their work.

At the same time, I can’t deny that this mindset is out there. Customers feel this way. I can’t change that. There’s an adversarial mindset. It’s pervasive, actually. We’ve all become so cynical and beaten down by the transactional nature of relationships lately. It makes me sad. It’s terrible. It can take the warmth out of so many of these services, which defeats much of the point of paying for them.

How can we improve this?

Rules! We need order and structure here. Categories.

Make a set of rules so all the decisions about tipping are pre-determined ahead of time. Remove the need to make those decisions in the moment when it might be socially awkward or you might be in a poor frame of mind for decision-making. Put every transaction into a bucket. Rules.

Here’s how I break it down. First we need to start by understanding the landscape. Who makes what? Which jobs depend on tips to bring in something close to a living wage? By this, I mean workers who are paid a reduced hourly salary by law. Tipped wage employees only.

Into this bucket, we put the servers, bartenders, valets, delivery people, taxi/rideshare drivers, and golf caddies. I’m probably missing a few but you get the gist.

The second bucket contains workers who get paid an hourly (or maybe even a yearly) salary but who probably don’t make as much as what we’d like to consider a living wage. Also, these tend to be folks whose services are more face to face and feel personal.

The jobs they perform often involve touching us or our stuff. We tend to feel more compelled to tip when someone is closer to us physically, because that can make it feel more like a personal relationship. These are folks who do stuff like cut hair, give mani-pedis, massages, other spa, aesthetic or personal grooming treatments, hotel employees, personal trainers, airport skycaps, tattoo artists, movers, doormen…

It’s a weird line. We’re letting these people into our world, our personal spaces, our rooms, maybe even touching our bodies, so feelings around that creep in. We want them to like us. They’re also doing menial work to provide what is often a luxury or pampering type of service. We don’t want them to hate us.

Feel guilty reading for free? Tip me!

Or we don’t want to FEEL like they resent us. We don’t want to feel bad about the nature of the relationship. How would I feel if the situation were reversed and I had to slather herbal aromatherapy seaweed botanical scrub all over some fat hairy dude’s stretchmarks for the sixteenth time this week? Would I want a tip?

All of that can enter into that momentary decision-making moment when you’re showed a tip screen. Seeing that right after your hour long hot stone massage pretty much immediately cancels out any relaxation the service may have provided. You’re immediately shaken from your foggy bliss by being presented with this unpleasant choice, these buttons on a screen reminding you of how much you just spent and then asking for even more money.

Now, in some of these cases, your massage therapist might be the person who owns the company you’re paying. Or they just work independently. To me that’s different from when the person giving you the massage works for a salon or a massage place and you’re paying the company. In the former case, I wouldn’t tip. In the latter, I would and I’d be sure to bring cash. I figure if I’m just paying you, go ahead and charge me what you need to make the service worthwhile for yourself. If you’re an employee, I realize you don’t set the price and don’t get to keep all of it, so I want the tip to go directly to the person. In that case, I put cash into their hand.

Third bucket: people who work as part of a service team with a tip jar or “pooled tips”. Hey, y’all! Keepin’ it fun, making the coffee, boppin’ along to the tunes, cranking out those drive-thru orders. Cool. I like the vibe in here. Thanks for brightening my day a bit.

I’ll toss my change and maybe another buck into the actual tip jar, or round up a bit if I’m paying electronically. These are the fast food places, baristas, bakeries, food trucks, stuff like that. I’m aware that these people are all probably making at least $16/hour here in Chicagoland. Probably closer to twenty.

And that seems like a decent enough wage for the job in question, so I tip in these situations only if I feel like it. When I feel so compelled. Giving me smiles, good vibes, an extra flourish, that will often spur me to tip, but if I don’t have the right change in my pocket, I don’t worry too much about it. I’ll get you guys next time.

Or maybe I won’t. And that’s ok too.

So that’s my informal tipping guide for the modern American consumer in 2026. Did I miss some situations? Please let me know in the comments. I tried to break it down in a way that’s simple enough to comprise a mental shorthand, but it’s by no means comprehensive.

The key is to be able to not overthink the whole question during the times when you’re maybe stressed, tired, hungry, distracted, emotionally unstable, whatever. Make your tipping rules or go ahead and adopt mine. It doesn’t matter as long as you have them and you feel ok about them.

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A flawed metric, obviously, since it depends on fantasy, but nonetheless. It’s part of my job search process. Is that weird?

I wrote a post more than a year ago - wow, didn’t realize until I looked it up that it’s been that long - where I referenced going down this winding daydreamy pathway after I clicked through on the application for on-call field chef at World Central Kitchen. I had a couple video call interviews, ultimately it didn’t pan out.

Obviously. Duh. I probably would’ve mentioned it here if I was coordinating and cooking meals for thousands in a disaster zone out of a tent kitchen.

Anyway, the whole job-search fantasizing tangent it’s kind of a fun way for me to virtually try on a bunch of career hats. I play out the application and interview process, get more details about the job, and try to read between the lines based on what I’m seeing from the organization or the people interviewing me.

I consider what my life would look like on a day to day basis. The new routines, my commute, places I would encounter going back and forth to work, how many hours I’d be logging. What type of people my co-workers would be. All of it. I envision how it would feel being in that job a year or two later. Fully invested in the mission and my role.

Another aspect of the situation that makes it interesting is how totally in flux my life is at the moment. After having established deep roots in the Chicago area since I returned from living in Europe in 2001, I’m suddenly remarkably untethered.

My kids are just about empty-nested, my 15-year restaurant space now has a new tenant, and the home that I’ve spent the last ten years of my life in suddenly feels too big for just little ol’ me. I’m considering the prospect of taking jobs that would take me away from the Chicago area, which really ups the potential for the fantasizing.

How about a kitchen manager job at an Arctic testing station basecamp full of NOAA scientists? I clicked. Didn’t apply. No need to waste anyone’s time.

Head of culinary for a group in Montana that runs a cattle ranch, brewery, and multiple restaurants? I had a couple interviews. Exec chef gig for an uber-trendy soon-to-open “all day” spot downtown on the river? After a couple interviews, I think everyone mutually agreed it wouldn’t be a good fit. But I looked into parking.

Obviously, anything life-changing, life-encompassing like that would have to be a job that I’d be genuinely excited about, rather than just something offering a decent paycheck. Or doing it just to do something. To take this kind of leap it would have to be something I care about and want to really dedicate myself to doing well.

But I’ve had a few that sent me down some good rabbit-holes..

Like that WCK job for which I imagined myself MacGuyvering disaster-zone field kitchens, cranking out massive kettles of paella. Serving meals to victims of disaster and war alongside my rag-tag international band of pirate raconteur lifer cooks. Arrrrrgh! Pass the paprika, Rico!

That one really prompted me to go down a fantasy pathway for a couple weeks while the interview process played (and then fizzled) out.

Enjoy my posts? Leave me a tip.

It’s fun! Nothing ventured, right? I don’t consider this to be wasted time or energy. It widens my experience set. Informational interviews are a totally legit endeavor and every interview is informational if you don’t end up getting the job.

I don’t get my hopes up or get too deeply-invested in any specific opportunity, obviously. I enjoy the idle mind-wandering daydreaming exercise for what it is, in and of itself. It takes me places that I think somehow prepare me for future experiences. Real ones, I mean.

A new opportunity just popped up last week.

It’s a job serving as culinary manager of an educational working farm for a large public land trust conservancy in New England. The farm has restaurants, a store, a farmstand, a schedule of food-related events, cooking classes, and gardening workshops that engage with visitors to translate the farm’s mission into meaningful experiences. I would be a part of educating both children and adults about where food comes from and how to make better-informed choices.

Essentially bringing folks in — school field trips, restaurant diners, senior groups, attendees of events, and using those contact points to deepen folks’ understanding of the horticultural and culinary processes involved in getting food grown and to our plates. It’s about connecting people in the community to traditional farm food culture. Shrinking the understanding and knowledge gap. Encouraging a more holistic understanding of the role our food choices play on our overall well being and that of our community and our planet.

It’s a job I could definitely get very excited about and start coming up with tons of ideas for. Not saying I did already, but… well, there’s a spreadsheet.

And all that mental work helps move the process forward.

Well, maybe not THE process, but a process. Some process. It’s probably just as much about emotionally moving forward and getting over disappointments of the past. Letting go of the previous eras. And maybe getting myself ready for when an opportunity that’s a good fit does come along, so I’ll be mentally prepared to move into that new phase. I’ll know it when I see it.

Because the previous phase of my career seems to be gone. It’s starting to feel like a distant memory. This photo popping up in my feed didn’t help. Or maybe it did help. I don’t even know. It definitely stung.

So? Onward, upward. LL Bean-wearing New England farm chef Ed fantasy-life this week, next week…who knows?! You guys can count on me to keep you posted.

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The main motivator behind that was I wanted to remove the paywall for nearly all posts while still leaving a few locked up to serve as a meager benefit to folks who subscribe. So now every post except my series on The Bear and posts containing a recipe is open for everyone to read.

But that format still didn’t sit right to me. I wanted it to feel like tossing a few bucks into the guitar case of a street busker - a spontaneous act of kindness motivated by the moment of enjoyment. And that doesn’t require commiting to a monthly subscription.

Thankfully, someone messaged me and filled me in about BuyMeACoffee dot com. It’s a site/platform that allows for exactly what I wanted - for readers to be able to make a one-time spontaneous donation of whatever dollar amount they feel inspired to give.

Like everything else in the world of apps and the internet, it was a rabbit hole. But I went down it for you, dear readers.

Actually for myself, if I’m being honest, cause I’m out here a-hustlin’ in the hospitality hyphenate work world. and I can’t review burger spots for y’all if I don’t have money to go eat burgers. Hence, I present to you…the “buy Ed a coffee” button.

Buy Ed a Coffee

Hey, there it is. Looks official, no? Nah, anyone can set it up in five minutes just like I did. As easy as opening a guitar case on a subway platform but with less urine smell.

I haven’t tested it, but I think it’s all set up and working. You can click through and make a one-time donation of any amount you choose. Go ‘head. Click it. You know you wanna.

Problem-solving like this makes me feel so accomplished. Maybe I should start one of those Substacks about how to optimize your Substack, there seem to be 17,593 of those.

Thanks in advance for your support!

I referred briefly to my recent visit to Peoria Packing in my review of the bacon I bought there, but didn't really get into the whole experience of the place itself, which is a real trip and very thought provoking.

Most Americans are pretty squeamish about meat, despite the fact that we eat more of it than any other country in the world. At this point, we are really insulated from the process. Meat is fully broken down into only the most desirable parts, fully trimmed, and ready to go from the shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray right into the pan. Or fully cooked on the plate, if consumed in a restaurant. It's been like that forever, for most of us, and we really don't think about it too much.

Until we're confronted with something different, like a European market where piles of offal or whole animals are just out in the open, for all to see. Even for someone like me, a chef who's been dealing with larger primal cuts of meat for years, these cruder, more "real" displays represent an off-putting paradox, because I find myself curiously attracted and also, at the same time, repulsed.

I think this is true for most Americans, with varying degrees of attraction/revulsion, of course, and most simply avoid the revulsion side of the equation, which results in a sad state of affairs. We've managed, as a society, to hide and sanitize the reality of meat. Perhaps that's why we eat so much of it.

A visit to Peoria Packing will cause one to ponder these things, because once you enter the butcher shop wing of this small grocery store across the street from their commercial packing house, you will be confronted with MEAT in a way that not too many Americans are accustomed to.

PP's meat section is a large refrigerated room with big long tables running the length of it. The various cuts of meat are just piled onto the tables and customers (wearing the required latex gloves) just kind of rummage through the piles until they find what they're looking for. The meat is very fresh, very inexpensive, and they carry cuts that are difficult to find elsewhere. I went specifically to get "packer cut" brisket for smoking. I also picked up some pork bellies (to make homemade bacon) and a few other things.

A lot of people have trouble handling this set-up. The online reviews of PP are mixed, with quite a few folks stating they'll never go back due to the way the meat is just right out in the open for anyone to sneeze or cough on. This is true, of course, but I didn't see this happening and I like to believe that people have enough sense not to do that. Most people do a pretty decent job of covering their mouths and not coughing or sneezing directly on me, so I'm not sure why expecting them to do the same in a roomful of meat is any more of a leap.

I think this sort of revulsion is how people deal with the fact that they are just not used to seeing meat displayed this way. It is jarring, I will admit, and seeing whole cow's feet, pig's heads, and other less common animal parts is definitely a bit of a shock as well. I think a lot of people are simply put off by the sheer real-ness of it, and so they use the "unsanitary" claim as a rationale for their revulsion, and as a justifiable reason to avoid that experience in the future.

Revulsion, however, is natural when confronted with meat. Revulsion is normal. Meat is a dead, decaying animal. It's bloody, gruesome, and serves as a reminder of our own mortality. Yet most people eat it every day. I'll go out on a limb and say that NOT feeling revulsion at the sight or thought of meat is what's, in fact, abnormal.

We're so unaccustomed, though, to this feeling, because the meat industry has done it's level best to eliminate any and all reminders of death, blood, and the idea that these are animals we're eating. And they've been very successful, with the full compliance of a willing populace, who values avoiding the cognitive dissonance of feeling both hunger and revulsion far more than it values coming to terms with our carnivorous impulses.

Up until recently, the luxury of not getting to know one's meat up close and personal just wasn't a real possibility for most people. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've acquired this new found squeamishness, which has gotten to the ridiculous point where some people act all grossed out even by chicken served on-the-bone, or with skin. Grow up, folks.

The conflict intrinsic to eating meat has long attracted deeper thinkers. Cultural anthropologists and sociologists like Mary Douglass and Claude Levi-Strauss have written reams on this fascinating subject. It's human nature to be both repulsed and attracted by meat, and people have been dealing with it since back in the hunter-gatherer days. It's just that here in modern-day America, we've made a new art form out of figuring out ways to avoid dealing with it.

The flip side of this is the head-to-tail movement that's been steadily gaining momentum among chefs. In Chicago, chefs like Paul Kahan, Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds, and Paul Virant have been sourcing whole animals direct from the farmers who raise them and utilizing all of the various cuts, including the organs. There is no better way to pay tribute to an animal that has been slaughtered for food, these chefs say, than to ensure that nothing goes to waste.

These chefs feel it's their responsibility to close the awareness gap created by the commercial meat industry, and they're bypassing it entirely by going direct to farmers, buying whole animals, and doing the butchering themselves in their subterranean restaurant prep kitchens.

So the head is used to make pâté, the cheeks to make guanciale or braised for ravioli filling, the neck for coppa, the bellies are cured for bacon, and the feet used for cotecchino or for their natural gelatin. Blood sausage, tripe, and kidneys are making a comeback among foodies.

Before you wince and get all squeamish, stop and think for a moment that the bacon you enjoy is also attached to lungs, a heart, a head, and feet, and ask yourself what happens to all that stuff once you've eaten your ribs and bacon. If you're not a vegetarian, animals are being killed to support your meat habit, and if you're not eating anything but the prime cuts, you're wasting big chunks of the animals that were killed to feed you.

The Reader's Mike Sula did an extensive piece called The Whole Hog Project (scroll to the bottom and check out the reader comments to get a taste of how strongly people feel about the subject) which documents the paper's purchase of a rare mulefoot pig, and follows Dee Dee's (yes, they named it) life over the course of a year and a half, culminating in its slaughter. It was a fascinating and courageous exercise in journalism which cut right to the heart of America's schizophrenic relationship with meat, and it was recently nominated (along with Mike Gebert's Sky Full of Bacon video podcast that accompanied the Sula piece) for a prestigious James Beard Award.

It's extremely thought-provoking stuff, and it's a subject that most people would prefer to avoid thinking about. But it's also perhaps a subject that we must consider more often, considering our love/hate relationship with food, the growing national obesity issue, the extent to which we consume highly processed foods and fast foods, and the myriad other ways in which we're all dysfunctional in our relationships to what we eat. Myself included--I'm certainly no exception.

I'm not claiming, mind you, that I have the answers here, or that a visit to Peoria Packing will solve all your problems. But I do think that burying our collective heads in the sand and continuing to buy grocery store trays with shrink-wrapped beef tenderloin and BSCB is the exact wrong thing to do.

So, instead of mindlessly purchasing your animal proteins from the grocery store, take a trip over to PP and check the place out. Bring your kids and do your part to kind of de-mythologize the process for them, and start closing, if only by small increments, the awareness gap that the meat industry has spent decades building in their attempt to try and insulate us from the inner conflicts that are inherent in being carnivorous.

I was actually somewhat concerned that it might bother Henry, my four year old son, who made the trip with me, given that, in many of the books we read him, piggies and cows are cute barnyard animals that talk, sing, or drive the school bus. But it didn't. After we got back, my wife asked him what he liked best about the place and he said, enthusiastically, "the pig heads!"

Henry, 4, surveys the carnage

So there you go. This little field trip can be an opportunity to start grappling with these deeper issues of morality, mortality, and animal rights, or you could just look at it as a good, cheap option for bulk burgers, hot links, and ribs. Either way, Peoria Packing is worth a visit. Don't forget to bring a cooler.

Yeesh. Too many thoughts at the same time. Lemme try and stay on track and keep it brief for once.

Official Announcement: I’m restructuring my Substack.

The main takeaway - I removed the paywall for nearly everything. The only posts that will be paywalled now are my series about The Bear and posts with recipes (which I famously disdain). To facilitate doing that, I tagged all the posts and created different categories that appear at the top of my SS’s homepage for easy clickability.

Secondary takeaway - Since most of the content is now free, asking folks to subscribe is more like passing the virtual hat for donations. So I’m lowering the cost of subscribing to be more in line with what you’d expect to actually toss out to a street performer or a singer/songwriter in a bar. Five bucks a month.

A yearly subscription is less too, only $50/year now. There’s also a new tier, “founding member” which I’ve set at a firm price of one thousand dollars. Click through on that one and I’ll come to your house and cook you dinner. No joke. I’ll even do the dishes afterwards and bore you to tears with my ramblings. You’re welcome.

Sure, your eyes may glaze over when I launch into another 1200 word etymological history of arcane culinary terms, but who else is going to take on the newest food trends and call them out as the poser bullshit we all know them to be?

So I’m putting out the word - please help if you can. Thanks for considering.

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Guys, I’m out here chomping on the cud of food culture in America every day, for better or worse. Sharing my thoughts, trying the new trends, sometimes taking one for the team. I’m doing it not for glory, fame, or to get rich, but simply for the love of the game. For the thrill of being in it. And also for my undying love of a good sandwich. Deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you know you need me on that wall.

And now you’ve got me. So chuck five bucks into my guitar case and help me pay my damn 5G bill, wouldja? Please-n-thankyou.

Thanks for reading and considering contributing.

—Eddie

Not because I’m so blown away by someone charging $20 or more for a fried chicken sandwich, especially in New York City, but because of the satisfaction gap between the top-tier chicken sandwiches of the world at $20+ and the basic-grade fried chicken sandwiches that cost $5-$8 at Wendy’s or Popeye’s just isn’t all that wide.

Yes, I’ve had a few fried chicken sandwiches I’d pay $20 for and feel afterwards that it was worth it. Not that many, but a few. I can also get a low-quality-bordering-on-sketchy-yet-perfectly-edible-in-a-pinch fried chicken patty sandwich off of Jewel’s heat lamp deck. They’re sitting there ready to self check-out, tucked in their foil sleeves next to the rotisserie chickens for a dollar, emblazoned with the visage of Jewel’s inexplicably creepy mascot, Jo-Jo. Just, WHY?! Glad I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Anyway, that cheapie Jo-Jo sandwich costs just one single American greenback dollar bill. It comes with a bun and a pickle slice and everything. I mean, it sucks, sure. But does it suck 20 times worse than the top tier contenders?

Burger pricing tiers are similarly fucked.

As a guy who founded a “better burger” spot in 2009 and featured locally-raised beef brought in directly from local farms that I ground fresh every day on site, I fully recognize that thoughtfully created, hand-crafted versions of everyday cheap eats can and should cost more. I completely believe in the notion that you get what you pay for.

I also think it makes sense to eat fewer burgers or chicken sandwiches day to day, but then make sure that when I do decide to indulge in one, I’m being thoughtful about it and making high quality choices.

For me, eating the cheap easy convenient option often just makes me want the pricier, more well-executed version even more. The itch doesn’t get scratched and then I end up going to get the good one the next day anyway. I know it’s better to resist the cheap drive-thru impulses and make a point to slow things down and treat myself to top quality stuff when time allows.

So I’m not one to shy away from high prices, especially when a spot communicates what makes their version special. Besides using locally-sourced beef or grinding on site like I did, burger spots might bake their own buns, use dry-aged or grass-fed beef, feature burgers ground from more expensive cuts like brisket or short rib…whatever. Chickens for fancy fried chicken sandwiches might be sourced from local Amish farms, brined for days, hand-breaded, who knows? There are lots of valid reasons prices can be high.

But, guys, shit is currently OFF.

The price discrepancies should at least make sense and they don’t. Today’s pricing gaps don’t seem to accurately jive with the quality differentiation tiers the way they used to.

Let’s take a look at burgers for a good example.

Maybe 10-12 years ago, it used to break down about like this:

Super cheap gas station or low-tier fast food burgers were $1-2. Upper-tier fast food or “quick serve” (the term was just starting to emerge) was maybe $4-6 for a basic single burger. Local pubs or bar/grill burgers would be maybe $9-10 and come with fries, but you’d have to leave a tip, so let’s call it $12. A nicer sit down casual restaurant would maybe charge $12-15 and then a fancy steakhouse or high-end spot would maybe be $17-19 at most.

Now? Casey’s (a gas station) sells a “Black Angus” (yeah, right) quarter pound Cheeseburger for $5.49. Current entry level price at McD’s and BK QPs are around the same. Wendy’s is about $8 for a quarter pound double.

At the nicer quick serve spots (Shake Shack, Smashburger) individual sandwich prices start around $10. Local pubs and bars now will be maybe $15-$18 before tip including fries. So will decent quality casual sit-down restaurants.

A high-end gussied-up burger at a steakhouse, trendy spot (the kind that brings you those tiny adorable ketchup and mustard bottles), or fine dining bar menu now seems like a bargain if it comes in under $25, with quite a few of the pricier ones bumping up around the $30 range (Chicago’s most iconic burger, Au Cheval’s double embellished with bacon and fried egg rings up at $31.49 before tax, tip, or dirty martinis).

So let’s compare. 10 years ago or so, the very best burger you could find around here cost about eighteen times more than the cheapest possible burger. Now, the top tier is only about 6 times more expensive than the lowest. The middle tiers have similarly compressed and are all bumping up against each other as well.

Many people online report that getting a meal consisting of a burger, fries, and a drink at McDonalds, Burger King, or Wendy’s these days costs about ten bucks.

But if you look at the casual dining chains like Chili’s, Red Robin, or Buffalo Wild Wings, they’re all offering burger meal deals for around ten bucks too. And that’s for a sit-down dining experience. They’ll often throw in extra incentives as well, like free chips and salsa, bottomless fries, or unlimited pop refills.

So if you’re willing to get out of your car and be in a room interacting with other humans for an hour or so, it becomes a much better allocation of your dining dollars. Sure, you might be tempted to spend a bit more if you order a beer, and you’ll have to tip a server. The point is, there’s practically zero differentiation price-wise between these two distinct tiers that had a clear pricing gap just a decade ago.

Quality-wise, the lines have blurred as well. Red Robin’s food is arguably worse than Wendy’s or even McD’s on a good day. But they give you more (albeit cheap filler) food and offer a full service (albeit unpolished) dining experience with a real live server and everything. Whether that aspect is a feature or a bug can be left to chance and it might depend on what kind of day you’re having. But it’s there if you want it.

Point is, the lowest-tier sit-down bar/grill chains are out-cheaping even the basic fast food places. Also, they (the nameless, faceless powers that decide important matters like this) are now fast-fooding the Hooters and TGI Friday’ses of the world as well. Both former sit-down full service concepts have developed and partially launched new, downsized, take-out-driven versions of their iconic brands.

It’s not like Friday’s on the Fly and Hoots (jeez, can you even believe that groups of dudes making 6-7 figure incomes actually greenlit those goofy names?) are taking the world by storm or anything. What I’m saying is that in the burger space, the waters are very muddy.

You can go to Chili’s and pay $12 for a “3 for me” deal that includes a burger with either soup or salad, chips and salsa, fries, and a drink. You’re not getting that much food from Wendy’s for twelve bucks. Buy an equivalent meal from a Shake Shack, it would cost you $25 and the sharp-edged furniture would hurt your butt. Your local Chili’s may be super-lame and still smell like cigarettes that were smoked in the 90’s, but at least the seats have a frickin’ cushion.

There’s so much overlapping. The Venn diagrams have become near-circles. All the tiers are trying to poach customers from the tiers above and below them. The Chili’s and Bennigan’s (does that one still even exist?) of the world are either trying to put butts in seats by offering deals cheaper than fast food or transforming their brands to actually become fast food themselves. (Even IHOP, already among the cheapest places to eat, has launched a quick-serve brand called Flip’d by IHOP. Gah! Why, world? Just toast an Eggo or nuke a Jimmy Dean biscuit if you’re already reduced (reduc’d?) to that level of not caring.

Meanwhile, the Shake Shack and Smashburger-grade players are throwing around all sorts of gourmet-sounding culinary buzzwords like Wagyu and truffle. They’re drizzling elderflower syrup into the lemonade and dirtying up the sodas. They’re salting the caramel and Dubai-ing the chocolate in the milkshakes, trying to upscale the fuck out of the whole deal to justify twenty dollar price tags for what is essentially a soulless, fairly basic fast food experience. Looking at you, Small Cheval.

I’m not sure how it’ll all shake out, but it should be interesting. Quentin Tarantino’s iconic five dollar milkshake scene from Pulp Fiction doesn’t seem like all that long ago. But I guess it was. Released in 1994, so that’s 32 years. So much has changed.

As the song goes…"C'est la vie", say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

Message the Kardashians.

Disband the Real Housewives of Wherever.

I’m calling it. The long era of peak luxe (or as I’ve snidely referred to it in past posts, The Princessification of America) is coming to an end.

It started in the 80’s. Dynasty, Dallas, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with Robin Leach. Ever since, non-wealthy Americans have been consuming lifestyle programming, buying faux-luxe designer brand-stamped goods and trying to vicariously construct for themselves these lives of ultra luxury like the pretty people they see on the teevee.

Sidebar: short primer on the origin story of the phrase (photo above), Wikipedia explains

The idiom "jumping the shark"…means that a creative work or entity has evolved and reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with or an extreme exaggeration (caricature) of its original theme or purpose. The phrase was coined in 1985 by radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom Happy Days.

It’s seeped into every crevice of our culture. Look at our post-80’s houses. McMansions boast hulking mass mimicking the large fine estates of the wealthy but jammed on top of each other onto small treeless lots with cheap, mass produced pre-fabbed materials and nonsensical disparate design style architecture where everything is fake stone castle looking turrets and curvy Tuscan wrought iron balconies regardless of time, place, or neighborhood.

Some flaunting of wealth is super blatant. In your face. As in, it has been literally installed into the person’s face. Gold and jewel encrusted front teeth “grills”, giant balloon puffy porn lips, snare-drum tight botox cheeks.

Photojournalist Lauren Greenfield in her article “More is more: Making sense of America’s Wealth Obsession” calls this “partying on the deck of the Titanic” and that seems about right to me.

Except it’s only like 10% who are doing their partying in actual luxury sipping Champagne and nibbling Ahi tuna tartare. The rest are drinking Busch light and eating Great Value tuna out of a can on a raggedy pontoon boat in the Ozarks, convinced they’re living those caviar dreams.

As the saying goes, though, if it doesn’t come from the Champagne region of France, it’s just sparkling bullshit.

And it’s time that someone’s says it. ENOUGH.

It’s BORING, guys. It’s lame. It makes you seem kind of desperate. To be liked, admired, noticed. Attention-seeking. Social climbing. Wanting to be something you’re not. Like you don’t feel special. You’re in need of validation.

Greenfield describes it in the article referenced above as a:

“fundamental shift in American society. In the past, Americans used to compare themselves to their neighbors and aspired to the neighbor who had a little bit more. But reality TV has changed all that.

We now know the characters on TV better than (our) neighbors and aspire to what THEY have.”

And it’s become almost an entire genre on its own in the food and dining industry.

This article went viral a few months ago for having some good fun taking pokes at Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce’s 1857 Prime Steakhouse in Kansas City and I think that’s because the message resonated with so many readers.

This shit has become so over the top that it’s comical at times. Uber-luxe restaurants have become a sub-genre all of their own, characterized by opulence. They’re all about the opportunity to gild the lily, featuring gold-leaf garnishes, caviar, truffles, kobe/wagyu, served in artisan crockery in gorgeous Shonda Rimes series set design-worthy scenes.

If you have a strong desire to pose with your tongue out holding up a caviar-quenelle-topped lobster roll in a fern-draped, crystal chandeliered, sun-dappled rooftop atrium, these places have you covered.

But then you go there and you realize it’s all just a bunch of prom kids and Naperville soccer moms playing queen for a day with their sweatpants-wearing boyfriends and husbands in tow who can’t believe they’re paying this much for a burger, but it’s prom/her birthday/our anniversary so they try hard not to roll their eyes too much cause at least she didn’t make them put on real shoes.

Sorry to break it to you, American trend-makers, but mainstream regular folks in this country are POOR. Most folks work way too hard to make barely enough to scrape by. What the mainstream wants, now, in 2026 USA America, is straightforward earnest quality for a good value.

Too boring? Maybe. But aren’t we tired of the flashy splashy used-car salesman huckster bit yet? Sick of always being “marketed” to? Aren’t we ready for a little boring, quiet consistent competence? (looking at you, American politics)

So I’m declaring it over. Spare us your BS brioche bunned truffle-oiled fake Wagyu sliders, the frozen “lobster” ravioli, the paddlefish roe “caviar”, all of it. We’ve seen all the tricks you use to be able to name drop the fancy ingredients while using cheap imitations. When Taco Bell offers a “luxe menu”, it’s time to turn on the lights, cut off the music and send’em home with their favor bags. Party over, kids.

Remember when restaurants would get lots of publicity by charging $1000 for a piece of chocolate cake, and then it came served with a fancy bottle of champagne or a diamond ring or whatever? Yeah, that was fun.

Don’t do that anymore.

That time is over. It’s not cute, original, or interesting anymore, it’s square dancing on the deck of the Titanic and it comes across as crass and tone-deaf.

Because a lot of us are literally going down with the ship and not only do you not care, you’re posting photos of yourself mugging to the camera while you’re doing it, as if to rub it in everyone’s faces like it’s some sort of global game of whoever dies with the most clout wins.

For those of you reading who might be thinking, “jeez….bitter, party of one? Your table is ready,” that’s probably valid. I’ll acknowledge that.

My perspective on this has shifted some in recent years. But in fairness, I was always disdainful of these kind of overt displays of conspicuous consumption and wealth-signalling even when I was more financially comfortable. Even when I was binge-watching that one season of Real Housewives of Orange County I somehow got sucked into.

But I don’t think it’s just me, I think it’s that most people are sick of it now.

Sick of having other people’s wealth constantly shoved in their faces and having to be confronted with the reality that their lives don’t measure up.

When this all started, being a millionaire meant someone was wealthy and that connoted a certain lifestyle. Now, being a millionaire on paper doesn’t necessarily preclude even living paycheck-to-paycheck for many with kids in college, soaring housing and healthcare expenses, parents needing care, etc.

The new standard is being a billionaire.

What ever happened to the concept of humility? Keeping it real and staying down to earth? Nah, not so much anymore? Doesn’t get the clicks.

It used to be that “elitism” was a term that carried a negative connotation but now the term is borderline positive. People want to be elite, be seen as being elite or at least see themselves as being able have an elite dining experience.

But if everyone is elite, the word no longer carries any real meaning or social capital. Elite becomes average, then mediocre.

That’s where we’re at. Mark it down. Sell your Birkin bags. Tear out your wine rooms, break the exorbitant lease on your Range Rover. It’s over.

Peak Luxe is dead. 1980’s-Today. RIP.

It’s fuckin’ scary, guys.

Let me just say that even as I thank goodness for the ability to make ends meet by skimming a small middleman fee from the laziest impulses of random strangers, I am concerned about just how lazy and hooked on convenience we are, my fellow Americans.

I had one batch — the individual orders you shop on the app are called “batches” — that consisted of just two items; one of those little clear plastic bowls from the produce section at Jewel filled with red and green grapes and another with peeled clementines.

The total cost this person paid for these two items was $31. For maybe six clementines and a half a bunch total of two types of grapes. I personally made more than $12 for shopping and delivering this order to a house a few miles away. (Contactless porch dropoff, naturally - human contact is scary). Someone else made probably $25/hour (minus union dues) to pluck the grapes and peel the oranges.

The total COGS (cost of good sold) for this order was probably eighty cents, including the plastic bowls, lids, and price stickers.

Nearly everyone breathing is capable of plucking a grape off the stem or peeling a clementine. Why are we paying a 3000%+ markup to have someone pluck our grapes, package them, buy them, and deliver them? Doing the math on outsourcing your convenience/time saved on that one feels like it’s a bad choice.

Peeling a fruit that was purposely bred to be super easy to peel and then using a container made of petrochemicals to put it in so it doesn’t go bad is sheer lunacy! It already comes in it’s own package invented by nature! It’s called a peel!

I get worked up. We’ve gotten so far away from the point. We’ve lost the thread.

But also, this is what a large portion of our economy is built on right now. Outsourcing stuff we don’t feel like doing ourselves. Or feel like we don’t have time to do ourselves. Or maybe a lot of folks feel like they don’t know HOW to do these things?

As a person who’s partially paying my bills by filling this need, I know I shouldn’t be complaining, but I can’t help noting that it feels like a very poor allocation of resources, unless the person is super wealthy or severely debilitated in some way. No judgement. (but, kind of.)

Is this what we’ve been reduced to as a culture? Do we suck so bad at taking care of our own daily needs that we have to pay someone to pluck a grape or peel a practically self-peeling orange for us because we can’t deign to get our hands dirty or expend the muscle power?

What are you saving your energy for, guys?

I’ve always been the kind of person who would rather just grab the first parking spot I see rather than circle the lot twice looking for a close spot. I figure I could’ve been in the store and halfway shopped before some have even parked.

And I’m able-bodied, thankfully. What’s another 20 feet for me to walk into the store? Heck, I probably need the exercise anyway. It’ll count for my steps.

But more and more when I go to stores, I see people —young, able-bodied people— who studiously work to get as near to the store as possible. There’s this new phenomenon where the guy (nearly always in a huge SUV) drops off the woman to do the shopping and just SITS in the fire lane in front of the store entrance the whole time. What the fuck is this?

I see it every day. It’s like a late 20’s, 30-something guy nearly every time, sitting there blocking the little ramp in the sidewalk that folks driving carts need use to go into the lot. So now we all have to go around and thunk the cart down off the sidewalk because young master Corey is taking up all the space playing Royal Crush. GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY!

Sometimes I’ll pretend I’m looking at my phone while I’m driving the cart out of the store and crash it right into the side of their black SUV. “Whoops,” I say, “didn’t expect you to be right in front of the store exit. My bad.” They love that. Sometimes they’ll even roll down their tinted window, glance up from their phone and yell insults my way.

“Oh, I’m fat? Thanks for letting me know. Have a great day, Kyler!”

We’ve become a “me first”, “me only”, “don’t care who I have to step on to get my way” kind of a society. And I hate it. It’s shitty, guys. We need to not.

I have trouble turning off my impulse to be considerate of others. But I’ve found that if I don’t turn it off, I feel like I’m the only one acting in a way that’s considerate of others and then I get resentful. Don’t shop angry!

When shopping at Costco, for decades I would studiously drive my cart to the right hand side of aisles, park off to the side out of the main pathways, etc. I can’t turn it off, it’s just how my mind works. When I’m in someone’s way and I’m conscious of it, I feel bad, apologize, and move. I always put the divider bar on the conveyor at the end of my order. I feel that being aware of these little things will help make everyone’s shopping experience less of a hassle and more pleasant.

But after a while, Costco changed me. People are so cutthroat there. They will just look right at you and drive their cart right into you. A whole family, six abreast, strolls down the aisle leaving you nowhere to go. Acting as if they’re completely oblivious to my existence.

“Do you not see me?” I sometimes yell that right in their faces.

It’s like a constant game of shopping cart chicken. I got sick of losing and feeling like I was the only one who shopped there who has basic manners, so at one point I said “fuck it”. I’ll be a cutthroat shopper too. I weigh over 300 pounds, bitches. You want to walk into my path while I’m driving a loaded Costco cart? Bring it. Trust me, you don’t.

But then after a while of employing that approach to shopping at Costco (a store that I absolutely love by the way, none of this is their fault), I felt myself dreading going shopping there. After a couple Saturday afternoon trips where I came home literally feeling shell-shocked like I had just gone through trauma, I started making rules for myself. I would only go for certain items and only on weekdays before 4pm. I had to gird myself for battle to get a freakin’ roast chicken and my favorite cranberry-walnut crusty loaf.

Crazy. What kind of post-modern warehouse membership retail nightmare is this? Bringing this post back full circle to the beginning, I guess this is why people are willing to pay so much for the convenience of not having to go fight this battle themselves every time they need toilet paper, but sheesh! Is this really our society now? Paying double to have someone else go fetch groceries because doing it ourselves just seems too daunting?

Less than a century ago, the idea of getting fresh strawberries in winter was a dream. I’ve touched on these themes before in other posts.

Now there are 20+ places to get fresh berries every single day of the year within a couple miles of where most of us live. Between organic options and all the various berries, there are probably 8-10 kinds available at all times from 7am-10pm every day.

And yet…. even starting our luxury SUV’s and setting our car’s auto-navigation system to cruise control and getting it to auto-steer itself to the store to buy a clamshell of strawberries seems too overwhelming to many. Can I pay someone to pluck the green tops off those, put them in a plastic container, bring them to my home and hand feed them to me?

That’ll be next. Or maybe you can have your robot butler feed them to you.

As I detailed in this post about a year ago, I tend to do my writing in spurts and then take good chunks of time where I don’t produce a lot of content. I’m not sure why that is, although now that I realize I did almost the exact same thing a year ago, I wonder if its seasonal.

After I got back from my still-to-be-blogged-about-in-detail road trip last November, I was really feeling the money crunch. I’ve been working a freelance writing job I landed while on that trip as well as doubling down on my side-hustle gigs to try and get back to close to above water, so I guess I just haven’t had the headspace for recreational writing.

For those wanting an update about a new Edzo’s…the possibility appears to be off the table.

I was working with a group of investors led by a longtime regular customer but after honing in on multiple potential locations, we couldn’t seem to get past the conceptualization stage and make it happen. At this point, I don’t think a new Edzo’s is likely to happen. I feel pretty good about the fifteen year run I had starting in 2009 and while I feel bad disappointing those who continue to encourage me to re-open elsewhere, I’ve accepted that it’s over.

So? I’m applying for jobs, trying to make a little money on the side with my writing and side hustles, and focusing on moving forward in a way that allows me to feel like I’m staying true to myself and my values.

As always, thanks for reading and for giving a crap about what I have to say. More and cooler stuff to come!

In almost every restaurant I’ve worked, many of my Latino co-workers would participate in something called a tanda, which is kind of an informal way for folks living paycheck to paycheck to either get a loan or save money.

At first, I thought it was gambling (which, sometimes, apparently, it can morph into, to one extent or another). But it’s usually more of an ad-hoc savings and loan program that folks who can’t or don’t want to use regular banks started doing on their own.

The practice goes back to cultures in which the monetary system, currency and/or banks weren’t stable and trustworthy or for whatever reason (racism, poverty, geographic isolation) most folks simply couldn’t gain access to loans.

What happens is that however many people want to participate all agree to contribute a chunk of their paycheck every week/month for a set amount of time, and then the group draws numbers to determine the distribution order.

Or sometimes they’ll only draw the number of the person who gets today’s payout and then each payout day takes on kind of a lottery with a jackpot sort of feel. Could today be your big day where you get all the money?

So say there’s a group of 10 employees who want to participate. Each agrees to put in $300 from every paycheck and they all agree that one of the members of the group will receive the full pooled amount per month.

Ten employees pooling $300 per check = $3000 per biweekly check = $6,000/month.

In other words, every other payday, ONE of the participants gets $6k. This goes on for ten months.

Everyone else will have to keep waiting until the next month or for their predetermined payoff month. Everyone in the tanda eventually gets paid the same $6000 they slowly kicked in over the life of the arrangement, it’s just that some get fully paid out right away and others can end up waiting nearly a year to recoup what they pooled in.

Wild, right?

It’s partly a loan program, because if you draw first and get $6k right away, you still have to keep paying in $300/check for the full length of the deal. Which in this case would be 18 more $300 payments. So, in essence, it’s a loan that gets paid back in full.

But it’s really more of a savings program, because for most of the folks involved, they’re just getting back money they squirreled away and kept from themselves for however long it takes to eventually get their payout.

In many cases, it starts when a co-worker is hit with an unexpected large expenditure they can’t avoid. Often car repairs or medical expenses.

In these instances, the group will set up the tanda in such a way so as to ensure the person with the immediate money emergency gets paid out right away to solve that problem. It ends up being a way for everyone to kind of pool their money to help a friend in need without having to be out of pocket for the expense. Paying it forward, but also striking a social group deal to get paid back later.

This group mentality ensures a higher rate of payback than would probably happen in one-on-one situations. There’s strength in numbers. Having nine people mad at you for owing them money is way worse than if it’s just one person.

Of course, this involves a high degree of trust. Co-workers who quit or get fired must still finish the payment program even after they don’t work there anymore. You can’t just not kick in your $300 one payday if you were out sick for a while one month and your check is lighter than usual.

For me, that’s the interesting part of it, the amount of non-formalized social trust that needs to be extended for this arrangement to work. I love the DIY vibe of it, compared to using banks, credit cards, or now apps to borrow, save, or deal with emergency expenses that may pop up. In today’s world, many of us are likely have more trust in co-workers and the other regular people around us than we do in these kind of major financial institutions.

At least we can look our fellow co-workers in the eye. I wonder if something like this could become part of a new path forward. People funding people collaboratively rather than all of us depending on global financial institutions whose only goal is to skim as much as possible in the process and turn their billions into trillions.

Uber started as peer-to-peer “ride sharing”, but it’s really not. It’s a business and the people doing it are working to try to make money.

But maybe there’s a way to engage in “funds sharing”? A global tanda? Motivated not by profit motive but by the same sort of likemindedness and social connection from which the original tanda arose? As a way around monetary systems, financial institutions and banks that are increasingly becoming more untrustworthy. Think of how much more powerful our money would be, all us non-billionaires, if we pooled it together in such a way.