Who’s Afraid of a Little Cooking?
IN THIS ISSUE: P.F. Chang’s adventures in P.E., fish gone fakakte, and the $1,500 movable feast.
Appetizers
Capri F. Chang's
Recently, while whittling down a Negroni slushy, a FRiend of Gourmet (FROG) struck up an across-the-bar convo with Robert Fleming, the owner of L.A.’s sceneiest aperitivo destination: Capri Club. How did Robert Fleming come to administer CPBar to a flamed-out Eagle Rock red sauce joint once called The Capri? “My dad had been in the business for a long time,” he explained. After brief stints elsewhere, Robert was “connected to” cool-guy L.A. spots such as Hermosillo and Bar Covell. His dad? Further research identified him as Paul Fleming. As in the P.F. in P.F. Chang’s, who sold the restaurant chain to private equity daddies Centerbridge Partners for $1.1 billion back in 2012. Fleming the Son rose to spritz up the OG Capri in 2019, but it didn’t reopen as an “Italian-inspired” joint that reeks of “restaurant group” until 2022, after two years of suspiciously glizzi renovazzioni. You decide: did a little nepo tofu grease the drill during Eagle Rock Boulevard’s High Gentrissance?? —A.T.
Dept. of Appetizing
A trusted, tipless tipster returned from a recent trip to the Zabar’s smoked fish counter with the following withering report: “I asked my guy to make me a sandwich while they sliced the rest of my order, and he looked me in the eye and told me that all sandwiches were now made in the cafe—‘same fish, I swear!’ The sandwich I got from the cafe was made with bullshit machine-sliced salmon. Why even go to Zabar’s anymore?” A shonda. —A.B.S.
René Sera, Sera
$1500 a table?? Next week, René Redzepi spills to Gourmet that his plans for a pop-up high-roller baccarat game at Noma Los Angeles have been gravely misunderstood. Undskyld, indeed! —A.T.
Who’s Afraid of a Little Cooking?
By Amiel Stanek and Nozlee Samadzadeh
A(nother?) manifesto. Plus, the baked rice pudding recipe you’ve all been waiting for.
Food media really seems to hate cooking these days. You see it in recipe titles and newsletter subject lines, the endless parade of 3-Ingredient This, 10-Minute That, One-Pan Weeknight the Other. The assumption is a fundamentally aversive relationship to the act of making dinner, recipe writing organized around what people do not want to do. (Apparently: Go to the store; spend time in the kitchen; wash dishes.) And the reality is, this approach seems to work. It sells! It scales! It may very well reflect how many (or maybe even most) people feel about cooking! But it is also suggestive, evoking the specter of something that maybe the reader wasn’t all that worried about in the first place, but now must fear. It establishes a prescribed set of values that feels almost inescapable. Why use six ingredients when you could use three? Why spend an hour cooking something when 20 minutes will suffice? Why wash two pans when you can kinda just huck all the ingredients into one and call it dinner?
The answer for at least some of us is: Because we want to. Because we actually like cooking. Because the kitchen is a place where we enjoy spending time, and we don’t want to be hustled, hacked, and otherwise optimized out of it. (Like, what else would we do with our free time? Join a book club?) There was a time not so long ago when you had to be a little freak to subscribe to a food magazine like Gourmet. And we are formally welcoming all you little freaks to join us in the kitchen.
To be clear, we here in the Gourmet Taste Kitchen™ are not interested in fetishizing difficulty, or chef-bro restaurant cosplay. We don’t always have the time, or the money, or the brain space to cook the way we would like to. (One of us even has children.) But when we do, we want something that feels increasingly hard to come by these days: Recipes for delicious, compelling food accompanied by writing that make us want to cook them. Recipes with integrity, that haven’t been filtered through seven layers of “data-informed” editorial oversight, or needlessly goosed with some ingredient du jour to game the algorithm. Recipes that you tend not to see published these days because they’re too weird, or too brown, or too niche, or too ambitious. We want something we can really sink our teeth into.
That’s the baseline assumption of the recipes and cooking stories you will get from Gourmet: If you’re reading this, you want to cook. Maybe that isn’t how you feel all the time, and that’s okay—we don’t either, and we can go just about anywhere else for that. But when you do, you’ll know where to find us.
So, in honor of this, our inaugural Gourmet cooking newsletter, we humbly present: Baked Rice Pudding. Boy, that sounds boring, doesn’t it? Not even “Rich and Creamy Rice Pudding” or “5-Ingredient Rice Pudding” or “Hands-Off Rice Pudding,” even when it sort of is all of those things? Really kicking things off with a bang, aren’t ya?