I need the reservation app to embrace the exclamation point!
Resy is a fact of my life at this point. Most restaurants I go to use the service, even those at which you don’t typically need a reservation. But in a post-lockdown dining world I’ve found myself more reliant on reservations than ever, whether that’s because restaurants are keeping shorter hours or just because I like the security of knowing I won’t have to wait.
But something has bothered me about Resy’s interface since I started texting with it in early 2020. The day before a reservation, I inevitably get a text asking me to “reply ‘1’ to confirm your booking or ‘9’ to cancel.” And once I confirm, I, along with all Resy users, receive this cryptic response.
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“Great, done. Thanks.”
Dread flits through me. Have I done something wrong? Have I somehow disappointed Resy by following their instructions? The curtness of the periods always catches me by surprise. I do not believe you, Resy, that it is “great” that I have confirmed my reservation. For the love of god, get an exclamation point, so I can stop worrying that you’re mad at me.
I know exclamation points in professional correspondence are contentious. Women have often been told to stop using them in work emails, lest they come off as over-emotional or “juvenile,” even though most of the time women are just trying to be friendly (or conversely, to avoid coming off as a bitch). The period, instead, is authoritative. It does not suggest enthusiasm in the hopes that you’ll play along. It just is.
However, these punctual associations have been changing as our communication methods evolve. In text messages, a period has come to imply not just the end of a sentence, but an abrupt, rude end of a conversation. In one study from 2016, participants were asked how they perceived various one sentence messages with periods at the end. According to QZ, “participants thought these text messages were more insincere than those that didn’t have a period. But when the researchers then tested the same messages in handwritten notes, they found that the use of a period didn’t influence how the messages were perceived.” A “Thanks.” is the kind of email you get when you’ve screwed up and made someone else’s life harder but they don’t want to outright criticize you. It’s not an actual note of thanks. At least, I don’t think it is.
Maybe a man just wrote the copy, and did not worry about coming off as rude. Or maybe a woman wrote it and was trying to avoid sounding unserious. And while Resy is not my friend, texting is a more casual form of communication than email. So yes, when I get a text that says “Great, done. Thanks.” I feel somehow scolded. I didn’t do anything to deserve a period.
That’s what always gets me about the exclamation point drama. It often still operates from the assumption that to be friendly is to be feminine, and to be feminine is to be somehow lesser. What a boring way to view the world. How hollow to think enthusiasm and reliability cannot exist together. I want to live in a world in which the default is friendliness. I do not think that makes me weak. And is there anything so wrong about wanting to be perceived as friendly, especially when you are a company that specializes in arranging hospitality?
So Resy, consider this a suggestion to add an exclamation point. And if the bot could also tell me I’m a good person and am making excellent life choices, that would be nice, too. Thanks!
French fries and stews, pies, puddings, and cakes: Is there anything this fruit can’t do?
If you have ever found yourself wishing that baguettes grew on trees — and who among us hasn’t? — we offer up a consolation prize: Should you spot what looks like a bumpy, melon-sized dinosaur egg on the shelf of your local market, consider taking it home with you. This Jurassic treasure is actually a breadfruit, a starchy ball that smells like warm bread when baked and has such versatility you could theoretically enjoy it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert.
Breadfruit grows primarily in tropical parts of the world, but, if you live outside of these regions, it can sometimes be found fresh in Caribbean or Indian grocery stores. Some grocery stores also carry bagged frozen breadfruit; freeze-dried breadfruit, which springs back when rehydrated, can be purchased online. Eater became better acquainted with this fruit thanks to our friends at Gastropod, who recently spent time in Hawai‘i talking with the growers, botanists, and scientists in the breadfruit’s ever-expanding fan club — a group that thinks it might just be the fruit that could save the world. You’ll need to listen to the episode to find out why (hint: It has to do with the tree’s resilience in the face of both droughts and tropical storms, increasingly important in the time of climate change, as well as its incredible productivity) — but in the meantime, put on this breadfruit-themed bop from Jamaica, pick out a breadfruit recipe, and follow our guide to making the best of this extraordinarily versatile ingredient.
It’s not bread that grows on trees, though it comes pretty close. Breadfruit is a fruit that grows to be around the size of a cantaloupe or even larger, like a volleyball, with nubbly or spiky green skin that turns more yellowish in tone as it ripens. The fruit’s cream-colored flesh is soft and starchy — in fact, it’s the only staple starch that literally grows on trees — and it’s often substituted for rice or potatoes. Like rice or potatoes, breadfruit is gluten-free, while also being full of fiber, high in antioxidants, and rich with potassium and calcium.
Breadfruit grows on magnificent, 80-foot-tall trees and is thought to originate somewhere in the South Pacific. By the time Western explorers first recorded this fruit, it had spread across most of Oceania in the Pacific, which includes islands and island groups such as the Philippines, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawai‘i. Since most of the popular varieties of breadfruit are seedless and primarily reproduce through root shoots or cuttings, it couldn’t have spread across all of those millions of miles of ocean on its own — Polynesian travelers brought baby trees with them in their massive canoes as they explored and settled new lands, a testament to just how useful this plant was to those intrepid explorers.
As handy as it is for hungry humans to have a seedless clone, it does pose a challenge to scientists looking to figure out where and when the progression from seeded wild breadfruit to the modern, seedless version took place. Researchers have figured out that breadfruit’s two closest wild relatives are the Marianas breadfruit, a seeded breadfruit found in the Mariana Islands and Guam, and the breadnut, another spiky tropical fruit with edible seeds found in New Guinea, the Maluku Islands, and the Philippines. DNA testing has provided some more clues: It suggests that people in Melanesia and Polynesia started by propagating shoots from the breadnut tree, selecting for smaller seeds, and then when they migrated to Micronesia, they hybridized these trees with the Marianas breadfruit. Outside of their interest for botanical history, these studies also shed light on another mystery: Because seedless breadfruit can only be spread by humans, tracking the genetics of this tree across space and time can also help historians figure out the pattern of early migration across the Pacific.
Most varieties of breadfruit don’t have seeds and need to be grown through root shoots or cuttings. Root shoots are new, baby trees that pop up from the roots of a mother tree, and they’re often generated when the elder tree has been damaged. These shoots can be removed when they’re around a foot tall and planted in soil. Similarly, when a breadfruit tree is not actively fruiting, it’s safe to cut pieces of the tree’s roots and replant those in soil, where they will grow into new baby trees.
Young breadfruit trees need fertilizing and mulching, and, while still saplings, protection from high winds and the hungry nibbling of herbivores like deer. When mature, however, breadfruit trees are a pretty low-maintenance crop. They grow strong and resilient, and they’re often among the only trees left standing after powerful hurricanes or cyclones. These trees start producing fruit at around three years old, and one tree can produce up to 450 pounds of fruit every year for the rest of its lifespan, which can be 50 years or more.
These trees are so self-sufficient that they don’t even need pollination. While breadfruit trees do flower, and while bees are said to be big fans of their pollen, they don’t need the help of those bees in order to produce fruit. (Fun fact: This evolutionary quirk is called parthenocarpy, and it’s a natural consequence of human selection for seedless fruits.)
In Hawaiian mythology, when famine and drought struck the islands, the god Kū buried himself in the dirt, and the first breadfruit — ‘ulu in Hawaiian — rose from where he lay. Indeed, Hawaiian breadfruit grower Scott Fisher told Gastropod that breadfruit’s hardiness and productivity has made it known as a plant that historically stood as a safety net for Hawaiian families.
“One common practice was, when your child was born, you would plant an ‘ulu. So it’s meant to be identified with an individual as a protector,” Fisher says. “‘Ulu is something that has guided our people and protected our people during times of hardship and famine, as well as being just a wonderful crop even in the best of times.”
While that might make it sound like eating breadfruit is a bit of a chore — something you’re forced to swallow when nothing else is available — Gastropod can attest that it is absolutely delicious. In Hawai‘i, the hosts were fortunate enough to enjoy a meal prepared by James Beard finalist and Top Chef contender Sheldon Simeon, author of Cook Real Hawai‘i, and he prepared both traditional and modern versions of the fruit, the former steamed and served with heated coconut oil and the latter diced into a herby German potato salad. Both were incredible — potentially (whisper it) better than potato?! For dessert, they tried the Maui Breadfruit Company’s Pono Pies: delicious mini-cheesecake-style treats made from breadfruit, macadamia nuts, honey, and almond milk.
If you’re lucky enough to have access to fresh, whole breadfruit, you can select the right fruit for your cooking project based on different stages of ripeness. Bright green, underripe fruits are said to have a similar flavor to artichoke hearts, and are popular as pickles, though they can be eaten raw or boiled and added to any normal recipe. When breadfruit is fully ripe, it’s a little softer and at its most starchy, with a mild flavor similar to a nutty potato. In fact, it rivals the potato in its versatility: At the mature stage, breadfruit can be cooked in practically any way you can imagine — steamed, fried, grilled, baked, boiled, pressure-cooked, you name it — and transformed into everything from breads and crackers to chips or fries. When overripe, breadfruit becomes sweeter and soft like a pudding, with a flavor commonly compared to sour banana. These breadfruits are often eaten raw or used to make desserts such as cakes or pies.
Breadfruit skin contains a sticky latex sap that can gum up a knife and cutting board, so once you’ve gotten your hands on one, the Breadfruit Institute first recommends snapping off the stem and turning the fruit upside down to drain the sap, ideally the day before you intend to cook with it. Once you’re ready to start cooking, cut the top off the breadfruit so it can stand on its end, making it easier to halve or quarter. Keep washing your knife as you cut, as any leftover sap will form a sticky residue.
From here on out, the rest of the process is the chef’s choice. You can remove the fruit’s core (which is tough like a pineapple’s) now or after you’ve cooked it; the same goes with the skin, though it will be easier to peel after cooking. Similarly, you can cut and cook the breadfruit depending on how you want to use it. Roast the fruit whole on an open flame or a grill to eat it like a baked potato, or halve it and bake it flesh side-down in an inch of water until it’s perfectly tender and ready to accompany fish or toss in a stew. Slice breadfruit into matchsticks to fry in oil or butter, like excellent french fries. Boil or steam quartered fruit to retain moisture in the flesh, or parcook it through either of these methods to be frozen and used later.
When Europeans arrived in Polynesia and encountered breadfruit for the first time, they were astounded by the breadfruit’s prolific production and saw immediate value in its nutritious, filling fruit. By that time, the breadfruit had already spread across Oceania and into Southeast Asia, but with European help, it spread even further. The British brought it to the Caribbean in order to feed slaves; this was actually the mission of the infamous HMS Bounty, whose mutineers ensured the trees never arrived at their destination. And while breadfruit still has an understandably negative reputation in some parts of the Caribbean thanks to that connection, it has been incorporated into many dishes across the region, as well as into cuisine throughout Central America and in some African countries.
In Jamaica (the home of the world’s best breadfruit tune!), breadfruit is often roasted and served as a side to jerk meats and fish. In India, where some regions know breadfruit as “jegujje,” you’ll find it stewed into curries and deep-fried. In Nigeria, a variety of seeded breadfruit called “ukwa” is used to make a traditional savory porridge. Malaysian chefs batter and fry breadfruit to serve with African tea, while in Guam, cooked and mashed breadfruit is spread into a thin layer and dried to make fruit leather.
Sweet, overripe breadfruit is popularly blended into a smoothie in Jamaica, where it’s often mixed with a dark beer to make “breadfruit punch.” Here in the States, beer makers took that idea even further. In 2012, Delaware-based Dogfish Head Brewery and Hawaii’s Maui Brewing Company collaborated on a beer called Liquid Breadfruit, an imperial golden ale brewed with Maui breadfruit and toasted papaya seeds. As far as we know, it was only a limited release, but it shows just how far this Polynesian staple can go.
Take a crack at cooking breadfruit for yourself with one of these breadfruit recipes, most of which will be just as tasty with frozen or freeze-dried fruit as with fresh:
Shashi Charles’s Spicy Breadfruit Fries
Rawlston Williams’s Stewed Chicken and Breadfruit
Island Smile’s Sri Lankan Breadfruit Curry
Arriel Bullock’s Jamaican Breadfruit Punch
Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative’s Soft Baked ‘Ulu Mochi
Anissa Lucero’s ‘Ulu Cheesecake
…and many, many more from the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Breadfruit Institute
At Jônt, Ratino aims to make Japanese-style seafood using ingredients from outside the U.S.
Running one Michelin-starred restaurant would be enough for most people, but in D.C., chef Ryan Ratino runs two such restaurants in the same building. “Jônt is a 16-seat tasting menu-only counter focusing on all the luxury ingredients of Japan cooked over a wood fire,” says Ratino. “Bresca is a French bistro, it’s like our take on bistronomy.”
Since the two restaurants serve such different styles of cuisine, Ratino has the opportunity to bring a wide variety of the best ingredients in the world to the United States. “Regardless of everything else, accolades-wise, the idea originated with, We want to cook the best seafood in the world,” says Ratino of Jônt specifically.
That goal is exemplified in dishes like the shima aji, which gets imported from the city of Oita in Japan. It’s broken down and lightly cured before getting seared with binchōtan charcoal. This allows the fish to be served raw while also warm.
“We get it hot as we can and then we sear that straight on the fat of the shima aji,” says Ratino. “It softens the texture of the fish.”
The shima aji is then served with Asian pear, salted radish, and the Japanese citrus fruit sudachi.
Watch the full video to see how Ratino and his team operate two Michelin-starred restaurants simultaneously.
Sara Gasbarra’s passion for plants turned into a garden design business that puts edible greenery front and center
In How I Got My Job, folks from across the food and restaurant industry answer Eater’s questions about, well, how they got their job. Today’s installment: Sara Gasbarra.
Gazing out the window at her academic office job, Sara Gasbarra found herself jealous of the landscapers who were planting flowers along the sidewalk, and knew she had to make a career change. Without a plan, she quit and wracked her brain for what to do next. “I made a list of all the things I felt passionate about, hoping this would steer me in the right direction,” she remembers. “Food, gardening, restaurants, and sustainability were at the very top.”
Volunteering at Chicago’s top farmers market allowed Gasbarra to touch on all these interests — and led to her launching her culinary garden design business, Verdura, in 2011. She began by partnering with Sandra Holl, a pastry chef who had been a vendor at the market. Holl was about to open Floriole Cafe & Bakery at the time, and asked to grow edible flowers and aromatics for her renowned desserts.
Though Gasbarra never studied agriculture or landscape design (she went to college for art), she grew up in a family of avid gardeners and skilled home cooks. “I spent every summer with my Italian father tending to our backyard garden and watching him transform our ruby red tomatoes into the most delicious of sauces in our kitchen,” she recalls. “Learning from him in this informal setting made me an intuitive gardener.”
This natural green thumb led Gasbarra to success in Chicago, and she was able to pick up new restaurant clients like Bastion, the Catbird Seat, and Locust when she moved to Nashville in 2019. When the hospitality industry shut down during the pandemic, she pivoted to building residential culinary gardens for chefs like Julia Sullivan of Henrietta Red. Here, Gasbarra shares the details of how she created her dream job.
What does your job involve? What’s your favorite part about it?
I spend most of my days outside, surrounded by greenery, vegetables, and flowers. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day. Even when it’s dreary and cold in the spring and I’m hauling loads of compost in the rain, it still feels pretty magical. I have 15 gardens at the moment, and I spend my weeks rotating between them. The morning garden is so different from the late afternoon garden, and I always take a moment to appreciate the time of day, the light, the sounds, and the colors during every visit.
What would surprise people about your job?
It really is hard and laborious work! And it’s not always beautiful. We live in an Instagram world where we are presented with images of perfection, beauty, and simplicity — and gardening is much more than this. Gardens are beautiful, but they can also be ugly, complex, overgrown, and chaotic. The act of gardening involves harvesting beautiful vegetables and flowers, but also hard labor that isn’t always pleasant or pretty. I try to encourage people to embrace their garden when it is thriving and beautiful, but also when it is in decline, as there is immense beauty in this stage, too.
And the educational aspect of gardening never really ends! I am constantly learning and perfecting this craft and striving to be a better gardener. Each year, my projects present me with new challenges and successes. The gardener I was back in 2011 is certainly not the same gardener I am in 2023, and I think this translates to any profession in the culinary world. You learn so much by doing and it takes years.
How did you get into the culinary garden industry?
I had shopped at Green City Market, Chicago’s premiere farmers market, for a few years and knew that they had a volunteer program, so I began volunteering there in 2009. I worked every single market shift, every market day, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. I was so drawn to the community of farmers, chefs, and shoppers at Green City Market — it was a very special place where I was surrounded by like-minded people who felt the same excitement for seasonality and sustainability that I did.
The market also runs a 5,000-square-foot educational garden and I eventually started working there, running programming, leading field trips, and planning the garden — focusing on more unusual and heirloom varieties of vegetables. Around this time, Instagram had just launched and I began posting images of everything I was growing in the garden, while also following many of the chefs I had met through the farmers market. Chefs and restaurateurs soon began to reach out to me, after seeing endless posts of strange but beautiful looking tomatoes, inquiring if I could help them set up gardens on-site at their restaurants and that is how Verdura took root.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when you were starting out in the industry?
My understanding of cooking was strong, but pretty conventional when I first started the business. For example, I used herbs in my own kitchen in the most straightforward way: I only used the leaves. I had no idea that the flowers provided such concentrated flavor and were also used as a way to add color and beauty to whatever it was I was making.
I recall growing cucumbers for a chef and having moments of intense anxiety because for months the vines weren’t producing fruit. I then found out the kitchen was only harvesting the yellow blooms from the plants. These tiny, fuzzy, petite flowers had such wonderful cucumber flavor. My mind was blown. Twelve years later, I am so grateful for all of the things I’ve learned from the talented chefs I’ve had the pleasure of working with. My home garden reflects this, as does my cooking.
How did the pandemic affect your career?
I temporarily lost all of my restaurant projects during the pandemic, when everything shut down. It was a pretty terrifying moment of uncertainty for me, as it was for all of the restaurants I was working with. However, the pandemic opened up a new opportunity for me here in Nashville. People were stuck at home, desperately looking for an engaging activity they could do outside with the family, so I had people reaching out to me about designing and building residential culinary gardens.
It was a quite unexpected pivot, but one that made total sense at the time and has now led me to a successful new branch of my business, building gardens for private residences. Many of the families I work with now love the idea of creating a garden from a chef’s perspective.
What advice would you give someone who wants your job?
Prepare to spend years educating yourself on the job — there is only so much you can learn in books and traditional classrooms. The best “classroom” is the garden and this is a lifelong program. Be prepared for failure and really embrace it when it happens. Failure is such a good thing, especially in gardening. Follow chefs who have gardens on social media and watch how they utilize what they are growing. Keep a home garden, even if it’s small, and use it to experiment. Play around in your own kitchen. Understanding how to use the ingredients you are growing is just as important as the act of growing them.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Morgan Goldberg is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.
When it comes to Easter candy, eggs reign supreme, but some brands rise above the others
Easter is here on Sunday, and it’s been at least two whole months since I swore off candy after devouring multiple bags of Valentine’s Day gummies. Right now, the only thing I can think about is candy eggs.
Easter brings some truly elite candy. Giant chocolate bunnies are classic, obviously, but the best Easter candy is shaped like eggs. Perhaps I’m drawn to the egg’s adorable kitschiness or maybe it’s my nostalgia for church parking lot Easter egg hunts, but every time March comes around, I start looking for egg-shaped Reese’s candy even though I rarely find myself eating a Reese’s peanut butter cup at other times of the year.
And so, following extensive research (read: years of eating egg-shaped candies), I’ve put together a non-exhaustive ranking of the best mass-produced candy eggs. This list does not, however, include candies that are always egg-shaped but only point out that fact during Easter. (Looking at you, jelly beans.) In order from the completely inedible to absolutely legendary, these are the candies to look out for in your Easter basket this weekend.
Despite containing an unbeatable combination of white chocolate and Fruity Pebbles cereal, these candy eggs taste exactly like a spray of lemon-scented Pledge.
How a substance that is equal parts grainy and cloying can be referred to as “creme” is beyond me. Although Cadbury Creme Eggs may be the original contender in this category, they remain objectively terrible.
The whole deal with Peeps is that they are adorable little chicks that taste like sugar and nightmares. If you remove the chicks from the equation, you’re only left with sugar and nightmares.
Tootsie Rolls did not need to be molded into egg form, the regular cylinder was perfectly fine.
Good, but not as good as a classic sour gummy worm.
A decided improvement over the original, but they’re just too big! There’s too much caramel and not enough chocolate, and you’re almost assuredly going to get both all over the Easter outfit your mom made you wear to church.
Very good, but has killed some people, unlike the other candies on our list.
It’s frustrating that malted milk balls have gone the way of other vintage candies, like root beer barrels and butterscotch discs, but Robin Eggs are a solid reminder that Whoppers remain a top-tier candy.
It’s unclear how, exactly, but the Reese’s egg is somehow better than the regular Reese’s cup. The white chocolate egg is also a banger.
The crispy candy shell, the slightly malty chocolate, AND they don’t melt in your hand? There is no chocolate egg more perfect.
In her new cookbook, Pulp, Abra Berens gives grapes their due
The grape, according to Abra Berens, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. “It’s one of those things that’s so ubiquitous in the grocery store that it kind of gets glossed over,” says the chef and three-time author — most recently of Pulp, which is out today. And that’s too bad, because especially when they’re in season, Berens notes, “they’re just so, so flavorful and surprising.”
You might recognize Berens’s name from her cookbooks Ruffage and Grist, which featured vegetables and grains, respectively, and drew on the chef’s previous work as a farmer and her involvement in the agriculture community. Pulp, which rounds out the trilogy, is the one that has “always made sense” to Berens, who grew up in Western Michigan, where she still lives. “I cook with so much fruit because we have so much of it around,” she says; the state is second only to California in terms of agricultural diversity. Accordingly, fruit is not just eaten in hand, but — as Pulp’s 215 recipes make clear — also preserved, frozen, cooked, and added to all sorts of savory applications.
Berens hopes to expand the ways cooks use fruit, and centers each of the book’s chapters on a different one (notably, she includes only fruit grown in Michigan). “I really feel like fruit is very frustrating to people, maybe even more so than vegetables or grains or legumes,” she says. “I wanted to be sure that [Pulp] felt very solid and very approachable.”
Berens describes her butter lettuce salad with grapes, walnuts, fennel, and buttermilk as a play on a Waldorf salad. It’s exactly the type of dish she might serve in one of her meals at Granor Farm, where, since 2017, she has cooked one-of-a-kind, distinctly seasonal dinners using the farm’s fruit, vegetables, and grains. The salad is a study in balance, with richness and acidity from the buttermilk, an “easygoing” softness from the butter lettuce, crunch from the walnuts and fennel, and sweetness and texture from the grapes.
Berens likes to compose her salads in layers for a few reasons. For one, butter lettuce can be delicate; not tossing the salad ensures the greens stay fluffier longer and don’t get damaged. Second, layers allow for more even distribution when a salad has a lot of different components. Finally, there’s the aesthetic appeal. At Granor, Berens likes to serve salads family-style on big, wide platters. “When you cover everything with buttermilk and toss it, it gets a uniform, glazed-donut color,” she says. “This way you keep the different colors and textures separate.”
As the culmination of her cookbook trilogy, Pulp shows the confidence and ownership of the form that Berens has gained over the past few years. “I love dressing stuff in just buttermilk and I don’t know if I would have had the confidence in the previous books to kind of leave that to someone,” she says. Even the picture of the grape salad — taken as a bit of a joke, after her barn cat ran over during the shoot — “is an example of feeling more comfortable in my own skin, which is [being] kind of silly at times,” Berens says.
1 to 2 heads (about 1 pound [455 grams]) butter or other wide-leaf lettuce, core removed and leaves left whole
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup (160 grams) grapes, any variety, halved and seeds removed
1 cup (120 g) walnuts, toasted
1 head fennel (about 4 ounces [115 grams]), thinly shaved and stored in acidulated water
1 cup (240 ml) buttermilk
Step 1: On a large serving platter or individual plates, lay out a single layer of lettuce leaves. Season with salt and black pepper. Scatter a handful of the grapes and walnuts evenly over the lettuce leaves. Add a few pieces of shaved fennel, patted dry if stored in water.
Step 2: Drizzle a bit of the buttermilk all over. Repeat until all of the ingredients are gone and serve.
Reprinted from Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit by Abra Berens, with permission by Chronicle Books, 2023. Photographs by EE Berger, copyright © 2023.
Hollywood’s most well-known quirky homemaker on her strongest-held sandwich opinions
In addition to her work as an actress, author, and comedian, Amy Sedaris is arguably Hollywood’s most well-known homemaker. Thanks to her kooky, cult-favorite TV show At Home With Amy Sedaris, which aired for three seasons on truTV, audiences have long seen Sedaris make wacky recipes and sew goofy garments. But she’s also quite the sandwich enthusiast, as evidenced by her recent collaboration with deli meats purveyor Hillshire Farms, in which Sedaris created sandwiches inspired by herself, and some of her most famous friends.
Eater sat down with Sedaris to talk about all things sandwiches, from how to make the perfect sandwich to the strong (and wrong) opinions of mayonnaise haters, along with the hypothetical sandwich preferences of Grogu, her tiny fuzzy co-star in The Mandalorian.
What are the important things to know about a person if you’re going to make them a sandwich?
You have to know what type of bread to use; that’s a tough one because a lot of people don’t eat bread anymore. And then there’s the mayonnaise, some people like pesto mayonnaise, some people want an olive-oil-based mayo. It’s always very interesting to me when someone wants a mustard sandwich, because I gotta go buy mustard. It’s not something I usually have in my refrigerator. If I’m making a sandwich for a kid, I like to make it fun: like using a cookie cutter on the cheese. You’ve got a lot to take into consideration when you’re making somebody a sandwich — are they eating it for fuel? Are they traveling? How is it going to keep?
Are there certain personality traits that you associate with what a person likes on their sandwich? What makes someone a mustard person or a mayo person?
There’s a certain kind of person that’s a mustard person. I like mustard people. I always think they’re kind of classy. Like, when they get a hot dog and just put mustard on it, I think, Oh, that’s cool. I like mustard people, it’s just that it’s such a dominant taste to me when I’ve got other things going on in my sandwich.
What do you think is the perfect, Platonic ideal sandwich?
It’s got ham, it’s got lettuce, it’s got Swiss cheese, there’s some red pepper in there and tomato. There’s salt and pepper, and it’s on a hamburger bun, with a little pickle. I also like a sandwich with melted cheese, like when you make it on the stove with a little melted butter in the pan, like you would a grilled cheese.
Your comedy is known for being a little bit quirky — and sometimes downright weird. What do you think is the weirdest thing you could put on a sandwich that would actually be good?
Oh god, I don’t know. The first thing that popped into my head is that I wouldn’t put a grilled vegetable in a sandwich because it might make the bread soggy, but at the same time, that might actually be good? Sometimes it’s good for the bread to be soggy. Especially if it’s an Italian-style sandwich with vinegar or olive oil. That wouldn’t be my go-to, but maybe it’s a good sandwich?
You’ve mentioned mayonnaise a couple of times, which is maybe the most polarizing sandwich ingredient on the planet. What would you say to the mayo-haters of the world?
I know! How can you hate mayonnaise? “Oh, I hate mayonnaise.” Well, you know, screw you. You don’t have taste! To me, it’s what kind of mayonnaise that matters most — I like Duke’s.
Like everyone else on the planet, I’m watching The Mandalorian, in which you play spaceship mechanic Peli Motto. In that role, you’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with Grogu, a.k.a. Baby Yoda. What do you think would be on his favorite sandwich?
Worms! On a hard roll.
Skip the constant Resy monitoring this time
This post originally appeared in the April 1, 2023, edition of Eater Travel, a biweekly dispatch from Eater’s staff about navigating places where food is the main attraction. Subscribe now.
The last thing I wanted to do while prepping for my recent vacation to Los Angeles was log onto Resy at midnight a few nights in a row to try for a table at Pijja Palace, the Indian sports bar that earned a spot on Eater’s Best New Restaurants list last year. All the planning and packing and cleaning was plenty; plus, I kept getting sidetracked with TikTok scrolling. I made a resolution: I’d have my usual food-centric vacation, but this time, I wouldn’t bother with Resy or OpenTable.
Given the rise of these platforms in New York, I doubt I’m alone in feeling a bit reservationed out. I’ve had it with setting Notify alerts for hot tables, only for them to be gone before I can tap the push alert, and I’m disenchanted with the revolving door of social media darlings — happy for everyone involved, but also okay with missing out right at the start. I feel like the sense of spontaneity is missing from my dining lately.
So, I approached my trip planning as follows. I queued up Eater LA’s Essential 38 list as well its Dining on a Dime column. I also opened Google Maps and clicked around on restaurants, take-out counters, and food trucks in different neighborhoods. I then made a new private list on Google Maps and used it to save all the places that seemed interesting, skipping sit-down places that I suspected needed a reservation. This appeased my planning-oriented sensibilities, but in a way that felt chill: I was giving myself good options, assuring I wouldn’t waste a meal somewhere lackluster, but no hard commitments.
With this approach, I loved the bounty of banchan at Soowon Galbi, and the elusive red cotton flower noodle soup at Amphai Northern Thai Food Club. I got my Filipino fix at Kuya Lord’s and Lasita; gorged on tacos from Sonoratown, Tacos 1986, and La Isla Bonita; and ate my combo plate from the Armenian takeout counter Mini Kabob ferally on the sidewalk. I loved the nasi goreng at Wallflower; the jambon beurre at Maison Matho; the sourdough with honey butter at Lolo Wine Bar; and the loco moco at All Day Baby. Finding that Jon & Vinny’s could take no walk-ins, I ended up with a great fried chicken sandwich at Son of a Gun. (I’ll concede that we did, technically, have one reservation on the calendar — for the old-school Musso & Frank Grill — but my friend made that one, leaving me free from texts from Resy.)
As an anxious traveler, I appreciated the reframing that this approach gave me: My vacation didn’t have to be predetermined and jam-packed with appointments. It allowed plans to change, making meeting up with friends easier and keeping my days flexible. Most importantly, it was nice to just find myself somewhere with a good meal — instead of committing to a place for lunch, we could go for a walk or a drive, keep an eye out for what looked good, and then be pleasantly surprised.
But I still did really want to go Pijja Palace, given all the praise I’d heard. My plan, I decided, was to show up one night right before it opened, as I’d learned from TikTok. Based on the fact that Pijja Palace is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, I only had one night to try. We showed up at 4:54, finding a line of about 15 others, but a little after 5, we snagged two seats at the bar.
My partner and I opted for the malai rigatoni and a side of garlic bread, deciding to not fill up so we still could allow for some open-endedness to our night. Afterwards, we found ourselves playing pinball for hours at Button Mash, missing our opportunity to get sushi at a spot on my map but allowing us to cap the trip off with the arcade-restaurant’s surprisingly satisfying mushroom burger and a side of perfectly crispy fried cauliflower. Now that I’m home, I hope to keep the vacation vibe going: My reservations calendar is blank at the moment, and it feels great.
Florence Pugh is the latest celebrity to join the growing list of food shows that prioritize fame over cooking ability
Chefs have, of course, been celebrities for a long time. Emeril Lagasse has been on television longer than most of Gen Z has been alive, and Julia Child helped kick off the genre in the 1960s with the premiere of her series The French Chef. But now the phrase “celebrity chef” is taking on an entirely new meaning as actors, musicians, and other people in the public eye — including those, like Paris Hilton, who are famous for simply being famous — helm their own cooking shows.
The latest entrant into this increasingly crowded field is it-girl Florence Pugh. In a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Pugh announced that a TV version of her popular Instagram cooking series Cooking With Flo is “in the works,” though she didn’t say when exactly fans could expect to see it on the air. The in-development show joins recent projects from celebs like Hilton and Selena Gomez. But with Pugh’s announcement, it seems we’ve officially hit peak celebrity cooking show — and I’m exhausted.
Celebrity interest in the culinary world isn’t exactly new, but it has exploded in recent years. These days, it’s totally normal to see a famous person release a cookbook, create their own meal at McDonald’s, or launch a line of “functional beverages.” But cooking shows centered around the fame of the host and not their actual ability to cook are the final frontier of this overlap, and for good reason: Cooking shows are harder than they look.
In order to do a cooking show, the host has to have enough charisma to hold an audience’s interest as they make a dish from scratch as well as the culinary skills to make something that looks and tastes good. And while Pugh’s Instagram stories are certainly charming, I’m not sure we need a cooking show in which the host can’t teach you anything more complicated than a pretty basic tzatziki or how to throw together a “beany fart” salad.
This trend is a pretty sharp contrast to the early-2000s reign of the Food Network, a place where a caterer named Ina Garten blossomed into the Barefoot Contessa, where Rachael Ray went from being a produce buyer to the queen of 30 Minute Meals, and where Jacques Pepin’s fussy French omelet technique went mainstream. Food Network may have created the celebrity chef industrial complex, but it didn’t do it with people who were famous for doing something totally non-food related, at least not at first. It did it with pretty regular people who just happened to be excellent cooks, whether in their own home kitchens or at restaurants.
A recent New York Times Magazine essay complained about a similar phenomenon in travel television, where celebrities, including Eugene Levy and Zac Efron, take viewers around the world to experience new locales. “The things we see must serve the narratives and characters of the stars, providing opportunities to play to or against their images, drawing out their particular moods or charms,” writes Nicholas Cannariato. “A result is a suffocating and often superficial take on how fascinating or delicious everything is.”
At the end of the day, I have absolutely no idea whether or not these celebrities can cook, but it’s very clear that they think they can cook. (A key exception here is Selena Gomez’s Selena + Chef, in which Gomez brings on experts to teach her how to make dishes like chickpea fried broccoli.) I could make Florence Pugh’s fart salad to get some idea of her skills, but why would I waste my time — and beans! — to potentially learn that she actually has terrible taste, especially when there are countless other bean salad recipes out there, ones created and tested by experts. At least with travel shows, we know that rich people actually do go on fancy trips to Spain and Italy and Morocco. They’re literally the jet set.
This new world of celebrity cooking shows makes me worry that we’ll lose a lot of what we gained during the heyday of Food Network. Food Network was never perfect, but it did give many of us our first experiences with cooking better and more interesting meals at home. But now the focus has shifted away from the food and on to the people who are making it, an inevitable consequence of our cultural obsession with fame and famous people.
And while some would argue that Pugh’s little mistakes — she giggles as she haphazardly discards a bit of onion too “slippery” to cut and forgets to tell the audience she added butter beans to her fart salad — make her cooking content seem more relatable, I’d say that it does the opposite. It’s only a person of extreme privilege who gets to do something badly, or even just adequately, for an audience, especially while standing in a fancy kitchen with an expensive Viking stove, pouring olive oil from two different $40 bottles. If I want “relatable” videos of people cooking beans, I’ll go watch someone’s sweet Italian nonna make pasta e fagioli on TikTok.
