Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The need for diversity in restaurant reviewing
Eater
A beloved-by-critics Manhattan restaurant seeks to evoke the opulence and luxury of 1960s New York. But, Korsha Wilson writes, the Grill’s nostalgia erases the fact that 1960s New York wasn’t opulent for everyone. “I wondered why, in New York City, one of the most diverse places in the country, I was one of two black patrons in a dining room at one of the best-reviewed restaurants of the past year on a Friday night; I imagined how those reviews might have been different if any of them had been written by a person of color,” she writes. “While for some, Kennedy-era Manhattan is an inspirational time, calling to mind gleaming buildings and uncut optimism, for others, it represents a bleak period of misery and oppression.”
Nigella reflects on the 20th anniversary of her breakout cookbook
The New York Times
Nigella Lawson has sat at the pinnacle of cooking celebrity for 20 years and 12 cookbooks. “Ms. Lawson’s celebrity in Britain and Australia is approximately royal in its breadth and intensity,” writes Besha Rodell. “As a result, she serves as a canvas on which people project their ideas of femininity, celebrity and the British upper class.” But as a result, she has lived her life under scrutiny. Today, her reputation as a “domestic goddess” makes her “cringe a bit.”
Falling in love with soondubu jjigae
The New Yorker
Bryan Washington reflects on his deep love of the Korean dish soondubu jjigae, “a stew of soft tofu, served in a spicy anchovy broth and sometimes embellished with meat or seafood. The gochujang is the thing: a bright-red fermented chile paste, tangy and scalding and sweet all at once,” he writes. “Maybe meeting a new flavor is alchemy. Today, you can’t stand it. Tomorrow, it’s all you can stand.”
Top-secret soup
Pacific Standard
After a years-long legal fight, the CIA was eventually forced to declassify its archive. Buried among the stuff pertaining to coups and other skulduggery was the Soviet Army Cookbook, writes David M. Perry, with recipes for borscht, schnitzel and more. Also, this indispensable bit of advice: “It is a poor cook-instructor who does not go out into the mess hall where the soldiers are at breakfast, dinner, or supper and talk with them concerning the quality of the food …. The good opinion of the soldiers and the sergeants concerning the quality of the food is the most important appraisal of the work of the cook instructor.”
Actual chefs diss ‘The Chef’
Bloomberg
Author James Patterson’s latest thriller, about a disgraced New Orleans cop who launches a crazy-popular food truck and still manages to break up a terrorist plot, is picked apart by a couple of Big Easy food experts: Emery Whalen, head of QED Hospitality, and chef Brian Landry. “Anyone in the food industry will be offended by how little work this guy does to be a famous food truck chef,” says Landry. “He comes and goes from the truck in the middle of service. His partner [ex-wife Marlene], who doesn’t seem to be able to cook, runs the truck just fine without him. There are hundreds of thousands of people in line for food. But if he wants to be a detective that day, he leaves and she runs the place, no problem.”