Appetizers

A Nooch for All Seasons

Nutritional yeast as a popcorn topping thrives at the center of a very particular Venn diagram, uniting the lactose intolerant, vegans, and crunchy folks who just like a bit of nutty funk in their snacks.

The problem is that unless you really douse your popcorn in olive oil, butter, or whatever non-dairy fat you prefer to make it stick, those big flakes of nutritional yeast are liable to fall off the popcorn entirely and land at the bottom of the bowl.

I learned a trick from an old coworker: if you give your standard bag of nutritional yeast a buzz in a blender—a regular one will do, this isn’t a Vitamix thing—you’ll get a fine powder that effortlessly sticks to every last nub of every last kernel of popcorn when showered over a freshly popped bowl. I now keep both blitzed nutritional yeast and the flaky kind in my pantry. One last tip for the real freaks: try it on heavily buttered toast. —N.S.

Bitter, Purple, and Read All Over

The wonderful weirdos at the food zine Radicchio Salad have written a wide-ranging prose poem that is the last take any of us needs on the adverb-y recipes coming out of the New York Times. I didn’t expect them to bring The Matrix into it, but it does kind of make sense. Weeknight chicken? No surprises there! —N.S.

Estraño Things

Kim Gordon idled by (is anyone listening to that bizarre trap album??) while comedian Tim Robinson sat at the back with a table of friends. The High Maintenance Guy huddled with a group of us around the outdoor kitchen. A line hundreds of diners deep stretched out of the restaurant, around the corner, and into an alley like a cartoon dynamite fuse—by the time eaters reached the makeshift counter to order, more than an hour in, they were stumbling into the explosive energy of a moshpit. The Circle Jerks blared from a P.A. while orders stacked up by the dozens, partially unfulfilled in the chaos of the collaboration. The kitchen screamed to each other and to patrons (“RACHELL!!!!” then “JERRY!!!!!!”). 

A fellowship of ten-odd tatted-up cooks were sweating behind woks and grills in the backyard of Salazar, and the typically soignée Sonoran-style restaurant at the top of L.A.’s Frogtown neighborhood had gone feral for this pop-up event. It was a joint effort, combining cooks from Diego Argoti’s mobile freak unit Estrano Things with Brooks Headley and his crew from NYC’s Superiority Burger.

This was a gastronomical L.A. house show, and were it not held in the shelter of Salazar’s lovely gravelled backyard, I’d have expected the cops at any moment. Superiority’s legendary TFT (tofu-fried tofu) sandwich, a straight-edge take on a fried chicken sandwich, paired radically with Argoti’s dan dan verde, a bowl of sickly green lime leaf strozzapreti (“priest-choker” noodles) in tahini curry with strawberry adjika (a sweet and spicy riff on a Georgian salsa) and pistachio dukkah—a dish reminiscent but distinct from his show-stopper pasta at his last restaurant, the spooky diner-within-a-barcade Poltergeist, where he served one giant bucatino, a quarter-inch wide and more than a foot long, in a yellow curry sauce. I, alongside fellow diner-journalists Gabe Schneider and Tasbeeh Herwees, cheered the return of his famous extraterrestrial Caesar (this time with pig’s ears) and gorged on a host of superseasonal spring sides (ramps, peas, etc.) and desserts from the Superiority crew. 

How does a hypertensive collaboration of this magnitude even happen? A friend of a friend tells Gourmet she heard Argoti and Headley shared burritos about a year ago, when Headley began to choke. Argoti performed the Heimlich maneuver, and upon spitting out a chunk of burrito, Headley blurted out that they should co-host a pop-up. The truth is unimportant once you eat the food. When a server attempted to bus my dessert bowl, still cradling a single bite of buttermilk cake and labne gelato, I resisted. She looked down at the morsel, nodded, and put the plate down. “That’s some serious shit,” she said, and hurried away. —A.T.