Commentary
Opinion: Just don’t call it a bagel. It’s fluffy, domed and dimpled
APRIL 8, 2024, Los Angeles Times
Bagels are under siege, and if you need proof, I offer a single word: Airy.
Bagels, which have always been synonymous with chewy, have recently been described
— approvingly — as airy on both coasts and in Canada.
Also, fluffy.
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Spotify gave me back my father
MARCH 15, 2024, Boston Globe
My father stopped by my house recently, even though he died in 1987, and I have Spotify to thank for the reunion.
I’d just subscribed to the music streaming service, and at my daughter’s suggestion I allowed Spotify to suggest songs it thinks I might like. That’s a problematic sentence for me — I don’t like technology telling me what to do, and I don’t think it can think — but I don’t want to congeal as I age, so I decided to give it a try. I could always opt out.
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Should We Say This Term Of Endearment To Friends?
MARCH 15, 2024, The Girlfriend from AARP
It happened without warning.
A friend and I were nearing the one-hour mark on a meandering phone call, the kind of catch-up we depend on now that we don’t live in the same city, but I had to get back to work.
“Listen, sweetheart,” I said, “I have to go.”
“Okay,” she replied. “Love you.”
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Claire Folger
‘American Fiction’, Alzheimer’s, and mid-century moms
FEBRUARY 26, 2024, Boston Globe
We bemoan the onset of Alzheimer’s, yet having seen ‘American Fiction’ twice, I can finally consider the possibility that my mom had some kind of disconnected peace, absolved at last of her parental responsibilities.
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Lara Cornell, Warner Bros. Pictures.
Is 'Barbie's' message of empowerment all it's cracked up to be?
JANUARY 6, 2024, Los Angeles Times
I’m not a Barbie fan. She made me and my friends feel bad about ourselves for being built like real girls, back in the day. I only reluctantly watched the movie, once it was free on a streaming service, so I could participate in the national debate.
And then I got seduced, a little bit, by the movie’s sly, subversive charm. Recently, younger women have explained to me that feminism is irrelevant to their lives, so I am grateful when a $145-million movie makes its case. That’s some megaphone.
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Commentary: The 21st-Century Shakedown of Restaurants
July 24, 2023, The New York Times
Tell me if you’ve heard this one: A social media influencer walks into a bar ….
No, wait. This isn’t a joke. This is a 21st-century shakedown.
Here is how it works: An influencer walks into a restaurant to collect an evening’s worth of free food and drink, having promised to create social media content extolling the restaurant’s virtues. The influencer then orders far more than the agreed amount and walks away from the check for the balance or fails to tip or fails to post or all of the above. And the owners are left feeling conned.
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Op-Ed: What’s the worth of a Michelin star?
JANUARY 14, 2023, Los Angeles Times
Fine dining needs a therapist. Restaurants at the high end of the spectrum — ambitious chefs, multiple courses, impeccable service and prices that reflect all the effort — are having an understandable identity crisis. Getting to the top of the mountain takes a toll. Staying there can mean a world of pain.
Chef David Kinch closed his lauded Los Gatos, Calif., restaurant, Manresa, on Dec. 31, after 20 years and three Michelin stars. The work, he said, had been “backbreaking.” He’s ready to shift his attention to his bread bakery and two casual places.
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Op-Ed: My lonely boycott hasn’t hurt In-N-Out Burger, but our small decisions do add up
DECEMBER 11, 2022, Los Angeles Times
In-N-Out Burger is the most popular fast-food restaurant in California, according to a data-tracking site.
Maybe it’s a great burger, and maybe that’s why it’s so popular. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never had one. For that matter, neither had my grown daughter, for the first 12 years of her life, because I refused to sign her up for the In-N-Out Burger truck that showed up at her elementary school on Fridays to give parents a break from packing lunch.
Not me. The other kids got burgers and fries, but my daughter got pasta and an apple. It made her feel left out, which made me feel bad, and yet I did not fold.
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Bottom-line considerations alone won’t save restaurants from the hardships of the last two-plus years. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Hospitality is a two-way street
SEPTEMBER 12, 2022, Los Angeles Times
COVID and inflation have knocked restaurants to their knees, and everyone with a vested interest, from owner to chef to server to customer, seems to have an opinion on how to get them up and running again.
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Op-Ed: What can save restaurants? Try hospitality
SEPTEMBER 12, 2022, Los Angeles Times
COVID and inflation have knocked restaurants to their knees, and everyone with a vested interest, from owner to chef to server to customer, seems to have an opinion on how to get them up and running again.
Permanent “parklet” dining will save the day. Meal kits will, or better wages, more compassionate work schedules, menu price hikes, smaller menus, the addition of a wine shop or a curated market, a reasonable landlord — or some combination of the above.
That’s all dollars and cents, though; somebody forgot to mention hospitality, the unquantifiable element that attracts us to one food palace or neighborhood joint or food truck over another. Hospitality’s the unsung hero of the dining experience, as essential as any spreadsheet item.
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Lucy Jones
Going on Bake-ation
APRIL 12, 2019, The New York Times
I’m going to California to see my daughter, son-in-law and cousins, my preferred ocean, and friends who have known me since I was younger than my daughter is now. I pack for happy: four pounds of apples, a vacuum-packed trio of vanilla beans, 10 favorite recipes tucked into a plastic folder. The right size tart pan.
I am going on a bake-ation — my word for any trip that involves good weather and the opportunity to make dessert for friends and family.
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Los Angeles Times
Trust us, you don’t want a reservation at L.A’s hottest new restaurant
NOVEMBER 6, 2016, Los Angeles Times
I am as guilty of culinary speed-dating as anyone: When I come to L.A. these days, a friend scours the food sites, curates a shortlist of the best new restaurants, and off we go. Forget the antiquated notion of being a regular. Even a single return visit seems as passé as an iPhone with an earbud jack.
We’ve yet to venture farther east than the landward side of Lincoln Boulevard — which is to say, we’ve barely made a dent in the available inventory of L.A. hot spots. There’s a bustling food scene downtown, after years of rolling up the sidewalks before dusk. And you have to eat in Highland Park — have to — now that Eater has dubbed a stretch of Figueroa Boulevard there “L.A.’s hippest block.” We no longer crave a specific cuisine; what we want is the place that just opened.
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Adam Amengual
The Evolution of a Restaurant Dish, From Vision to Revision
OCTOBER 30, 2018, The New York Times
Standing beside a table of four at Rustic Canyon, a casual but ambitious restaurant here, a server described an elaborate new special for two or more to share: an entire spatchcocked chicken, cut into parts, with blueberries and chicken jus, and grilled chicken hearts on rosemary skewers. He detailed the three sides: housemade toast with chicken-liver mousse and poached gizzards; polenta that used corn six ways; and an okra confit with gribenes, crispy bits of chicken skin.
Jeremy Fox, the executive chef and an owner, expected that most diners would pass judgment on the dish, which was being introduced that night in July, well before the server’s spiel was done. “If it’s something really good and appealing,” he said, “you’re like, ‘I’m getting that. You can stop talking.’”
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Family Dishes
MAY 4, 2018, The New York Times
My father was truly a fool for love. I was born with 10 fingers and 10 toes, a big thing to a man who had 10 fingers but only nine toes, the second and third on his right foot fused together . The doctor thought that the standard “You have a healthy baby girl” would suffice, but no: My father insisted that he run back to the delivery room — run! — to inventory my hands and feet.
I could breathe on my own, a common enough feat among newborns, except that my parents’ first child, a boy who arrived too early and spent a single day on earth, could not.
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Damien Lafargue for The New York Times.
The icing on the cake
OCTOBER 2, 2013, The New York Times
My mother lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., so packing for a summer 90th birthday visit was easy: Loose linen clothes, a sheet of baking parchment, and a three-ounce bar of Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate because my sister wasn’t sure she’d bought enough.
I was going to bake my mom a birthday cake — the chocolate cake her mother-in-law was known for, called “bachelor bait cake” on the little index card I inherited in a box of family memorabilia. I tormented myself, a little bit, over which cake in my repertoire was the right one; I liked this one because it had history.
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Tony Cenicola for The New York Times.
My mother’s mink
MARCH 11, 2013, The New York Times
One day my mom simply put the mink coat in a plastic bag, stuffed the bag into a box and shipped it to me. She lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., where she has no needof a calf-length fur in the eight weeks that pretend to be winter, and the mink had become something of a reprimand: Why did she no longer live the kind of life that required a fur coat?
Not an easy question to answer, so she sent it to me, to do with as I wished. Selling it was the obvious choice, but not the easy one. Mom’s coat is one of those things that mattered to my parents enough for them to assume it would matter to their kids; it seemed callous to dump the mink the moment it arrived.
I hung it away until a friend warned me that mink sheds in the summer heat. A day later it took up residence in Macy’s fur storage vault until the following winter, when I found a furrier who trafficked in used fur coats.
It was only four blocks from Macy’s to the furrier, but by the time I arrived I had relived most of the happy mink moments of my youth, snuggling against my mom in the midst of a Chicago winter, inhaling the crisp, cold, dry smell of a sea of minks on an outing to the symphony. How proud my dad was to go into debt to buy my mother that coat; how proud she was to wear it.
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Restaurant Baby
It is 11 a.m. The empty bar at this hour seems about 40 feet long, curved mahogany polished to a high sheen, like the shinbone of some extinct woodland giant. The mirror behind it reflects row upon row of bottles, the popularity of their contents revealed by the level of liquid in each one. The room smells of leather, cigarettes, and last night’s perfume. My drink sits on a napkin in front of me. Down at the far end of the bar, the owner huddles with a friend over bottomless cups of coffee. On his way to refill their cups, he smiles and wordlessly plunks another maraschino cherry in my glass.
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Brisket brought us together
I grew up after the crinoline and before the slip dress, on propriety's waning edge. When I was little, I wore a dotted-swiss and organdy party dress to Passover Seder at my aunt's house, and I dutifully scanned my patent-leather shoes for nicks while I waited for the service to end. But by the time I graduated to a kilt with matching sweater and knee socks, questioning the status quo had become the politically correct attitude, and so my sister and my cousins and I perfected an array of disaffected expressions to let everyone at the table know that we had far more important things to do.