Maple-maxxing
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: A Denver food fight, a Gourmet writer’s novel, and the Taix of X.
Appetizers
Taix Audit
Cale recently wondered aloud about the Taix (RIP) of New York City, and a couple of readers wrote in with their own “weird, old, beloved spot.” Friend of Gourmet (FRoG) Erin R. remembers The Frisco of Austin, Texas, now closed but always in her heart:
It was a diner, which I realize Taix is not, but it truly attracted all sorts—old people who had been going there since the ’50s, hungover hipsters, college students, families with young kids. It was also one of the first restaurants in Austin to integrate and be an equal-opportunity employer—if you got a job there, you stayed there for decades. Just a truly beloved place with the best pancakes I've ever had.
Another FRoG who identified himself as “Frankie from Kearny” tells of a restaurant that is—gasp—still open:
The Taix of Suburban North Jersey (“The Greater Sopranos-Opening-Title-Sequence Metropolitan Area”) is Lee’s Hawaiian Islander on Stuyvesant in Lyndhurst. Come for the tiki-drunk karaoke, leave for the food.
Shall we arrange a road trip before it’s too late? —N.S.
A Book in the Family
A very happy pub day to Gourmet contributor Julia Langbein, whose new novel Dear Monica Lewinsky is now available wherever books are sold. In case you haven’t been following along, Julia wrote a delirious, hilarious travelogue through time, space, and the élite hotel cocktail bars of Paris for this magazine last month. Read both! —S.D.
Corn Maiz(e)
As the editor of a publication naturally interested in the question of brand names, I was pleased to find my inexplicable Instagram algorithm parachuting me into some Denver restaurant nomenclature drama this week.
The owner of Maiz, a Mexican food establishment that expanded from food truck to full-on café, posted about another business encroaching on its nominal turf. Maiz’s Maria Rangel, who started the business in 2021, learned late last year that Johnny Curiel, the Michelin-starred chef behind Denver’s high-end Mexican hot spot Alma Fona Fina (the city’s first restaurant to earn a Michelin star without a tasting menu), was planning to open a new spot called Maize. “Given the similarity to my business, Maiz, which I have built from the ground up, I was concerned,” Rangel wrote last Thursday. She said she reached out to Curiel to see if he would consider changing the name. Curiel allegedly said he would think about it. Rangel never heard back, per her story, and later discovered a restaurant website domain identical to hers (maizdenver.com) save the addition of the letter “e”.
Rangel’s post touched a nerve—or the perfect algorithmic balance of rage, empathy, and words overlaid on multiple static images to go viral on Instagram. It currently has over 12,000 likes and 500 comments. Voila, that same Thursday Curiel announced a name tweak: Fonda Maize. One could argue that a restaurant named after a common ingredient doesn’t have a real argument against duplication; you could also argue that the optics of a Michelin-starred chef knowingly taking the name of a one-woman business are unbecoming at best. Either way, it’s trial by algo. —C.G.W.
Maple-maxxing
By Adrienne Raphel
A Vermont sugar farm is skiing a different route
On a bright, deceptively cold December afternoon, I went for a cross-country ski at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Craftsbury, Vermont with my former high school English teacher Jenny and my now-husband David. The sun was already starting to set when we decided to go for our last run of the day, a loop around Duck Pond. It wasn’t far—I’d done this loop countless times—and I didn’t think twice as we careened along. The late-day sunset that seared across the sky when we circled to the far end of the pond quickly faded to bruised dusk as we made our way back toward the more densely wooded Center. We all hustled, jerking our arms like overenthusiastic elliptical users, but even so, by the time we returned, the temperature had plummeted.