The Burger from Baghdad
Welcome to Gourmet magazine, an independently owned digital food magazine that’s not affiliated with the Gourmet magazines of yore. Our Tuesday editions are where we feature great writing about food. Thursday is for recipes.
IN THIS ISSUE: The food service industry consolidates while food media co-ops diversify.
Appetizers
Sysco Sousveillance
The giant food distribution company Sysco announced that it was buying the giant restaurant food retailer Jetro Restaurant Depot last week for $29 billion. Both companies have about 700,000 customers (and double-digit market share), but they do pretty different things: Sysco delivers food and food service supplies to customers who place orders online, while Restaurant Depot runs a network of retail warehouses where chefs can show up and buy food, typically at higher prices than the Sysco rates, and walk out the door.
Both businesses make a lot of money; they could just keep things the same and post billions in profits. But as with all mergers, Sysco is looking for synergies. That could mean something sensible, like selling tomatoes too ripe to throw in a truck on retail shelves instead of trashing them. It could also mean flexing monopoly power and jacking up prices in markets where they know customers no longer have other options.
The deal isn’t set to close for a year, but changes could happen more quickly. To all our food industry readers: hit the tip line if you see price gouging, supplier squeezes, or other suspicious Sysco behaviors, and never hesitate to tell us about any corporate shenanigans hitting your kitchen. —S.D.
Is There Balm in Gilead?
A crew of Eater alums has launched Ravenous, a new food publication. We subscribed right away and can’t wait to see what they publish. Is it possible to have too many worker-owned food media co-ops? Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.” —N.S.
Bluesky’s All Around Me
We haven’t been the most active on social media outside of our Instagram, where Alex’s handwriting dances over Amiel’s photography. That is, until this past weekend when I decided to test the waters on Bluesky. I wrote a few posts, had some fun, and think I’ll continue on this journey—join in at @gourmetlives.bsky.social! —C.G.W.
The Burger from Baghdad
By Alex Tatusian
A British social club on the Tigris was one of the first restaurants to make burgers in Baghdad. Could I recreate it?
There’s an ancient binder in my mother Diana’s pantry—a Necronomicon of heavily annotated photocopies revealing a decades-long effort to replicate Armenian, Iraqi, and pan-European flavors in the service of her reluctant-but-decadent hospitality. Diana is a militant feminist who practiced architecture and has disliked cooking for as long as I can remember, even though she’s really good at it. She’s too fabulous, too restless, too interested in the gossip wafting in from people smoking outside the dinner party to ever want to stand at the stove.
It was inside this uneasy grimoire, in between a drunken L.A. Times tiramisu that became her signature dessert and the complete bilingual inventory of perhaps the only Arab grocery store in mid-1970s Milwaukee, that I stumbled upon a curious printout of an email from my Uncle Edmond (technically, my mom's cousin), dated September 2, 2012. It reads in full: