Are restaurants the 'third' in your relationship?
What's with American's obsession with ice? Would you let AI chose your wine? Are displays of food 'back' as a symbol of wealth? How Sourdough captures our need for connection in conflict, and more.
Hello!
Welcome back, thanks for reading! Apologies for tardiness on this article. I’ve been a bit hunkered down with the house, work, and some travel. If some of this seems a tad bit late to post, you would be correct, but I landed on better late than never here!
Hope you all had a good Valentine’s Day (if you celebrate it at all).
I was listening to an episode of We Can Do Hard Things where they were talking about Valentine’s day (I also appreciated the queer lens) and heard some interesting statistics about America and Valentine’s Day! Apparently, up to 52% of Americans celebrate Valentine's Day in 2024. However, there are some tougher sides to the day too. Around 3 in 10 Americans will go into credit card debt from V-day spending, and a romantic Valentine's dinner out costs $121 on average. Further, 46% of consumers will receive a Valentine's gift they don't even like!
Anyways, that might seem like a real dampener on ‘the celebration of love’ but it’s certainly interesting to think about given how big it is for so many industries (especially hospitality)!
This week:
When Sourdough becomes so much more
Are restaurants the ‘third’ in your relationship?
Ice Ice Baby
Let them eat cake!
Would you like AI choose your wine?
Cosmo time
Are restaurants the ‘third’ in your relationship?
I saw this substack title in The Supersonic and immediately giggled. There are three people in every marriage. Restaurants can be your Camilla Parker Bowes or your fun third.
In the article, Darin Bresnitz provides a guide to some of his favorite restaurants and what specific stage of your relationship they’ll fit best.
Relationships are steeped in decisions revolving around food. Big and small moments are often remembered in the context of favorite restaurants, first dates, disastrous meals, new local finds, travel adventures, first food poisonings etc.
In time for Valentine’s Day, the Atlantic popped an article titled ‘The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late’ into my inbox writing “The reason my marriage fell apart seems absurd when I describe it: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink. It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations. But it wasn’t the dishes, not really—it was what they represented … It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect or appreciate her.”
What to eat is the decision you make most often as a couple. What to eat, when to eat, who should cook, where to go, how much to spend. The infinite seemingly insignificant questions and petty arguments that make up a life.
There’s another side to restaurants and their significance in relationships too. The NYT published a piece about the favorite restaurants ruined by breakups. “When a relationship ends, there are many casualties. You may lose your bar-trivia friends, your rent-stabilized lease in Fort Greene, your beloved terrier. But one crushing loss is often overlooked: your favorite restaurant.”
Or take this Modern Love column about A Man (and Meals) Worth Losing Sleep Over “The cook would arrive after midnight and whip up a Michelin-worthy spread. Which was great, until I could no longer keep my eyes open at work.” A story about the fine balance of life schedules, relationships, and good food. Things you can only compromise on for so long.
On the happier side, here’s a Modern Love column about how one couple went from the Dining Dead to falling in love again. “One night we went to dinner, just the two of us. And as we sat there quietly eating, a horrible memory came to mind. It wasn’t a memory of my own experience. It was a memory of my watching a scene in a movie. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Kate Winslet, who plays Clementine, and Jim Carrey, who plays her boyfriend, Joel, are eating silently in a restaurant when Joel notices that all of the couples around them aren’t talking. “Are we like those bored couples you feel sorry for in restaurants?” Joel muses to himself. “Are we the dining dead?” My husband and I sat there stone-faced, like two more of the dining dead.” (I promise it’s a nice ending)
Restaurants and food are such a huge part of our lives it’s only natural they’re deeply intertwined in our relationships. What you make of this ‘third’ is up to you.
Picture this: Your phone lights up with two back-to-back news alerts. The first is about glaciers in Greenland melting 20 percent faster than scientists previously estimated; the second is about a new startup shipping ice from Greenland’s 100,000-year-old glaciers to luxury cocktail bars in Dubai.
Possibly the peak of late-capitalism dystopia.
“Glacier ice aside, the cocktail revolution has ushered in a new ice age, with high-end bars willing to pay premiums for high-quality “clear” ice that looks cleaner and tastes purer than the cheap, mass-produced stuff. But as with any form of consumption, our lust for luxury can get out of hand. Cue the cargo ships packed with Greenlandic icebergs bound for the Arabian Desert 5,000 miles away.”
The luxury ice market (yet, it’s a thing) has slowly been growing over the past two decades. In the U.S. demand for premium ice started with Gläce Luxury Ice in 2007.
“Relative to our other nasty habits, though, multiple experts agree that shipping a small amount of ice from Greenland isn’t likely to have much of an impact on the climate crisis. Climate scientist and sea ice expert Dr. Dirk Notz has speculated that Arctic Ice’s environmental impact is negligible. “The rapidly rising sea level is much more concerning than these people taking a bit of ice,” the professor told VICE.”
The company also claims that the climate impact is extremely minimal, and they’re harvesting “free-floating icebergs”. Further, that they have a rare permit from the government to take 14,000 tons of ice per year, roughly “0.00000005 percent” of the more than 250 gigatons of Greenlandic ice that fall into the ocean annually.”
"But some in the industry, including Ivy Mix, co-owner of Leyenda, feel passionately that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Her Brooklyn bar uses ice from a manufacturer in nearby Queens. Whether it’s ice or Perrier water, the luxury shipping market is “insane,” she says.”
It’s not an isolated business or industry, our arguably other “insane” international transportation has been cumulative in creating the climate crisis.
In the NYT Becky Hughes wrote “Nobody loves ice more than Americans. It’s a running joke, a quirk of the national personality: Iced drinks are as American as rock ‘n’ roll, pickup trucks and to-go cups.
Way back in 1895, Mark Twain wrote that ice had become so inextricably linked with the United States that “there is but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name ‘American.’ That is the national devotion to ice-water.””
In the past year, #icetok, a hashtag with nearly 950 million views on Tiktok. In 2020, 51 percent of the 2,000 Americans polled by the appliance company Bosch self-identified as “ice obsessed.” Even more said that they wouldn’t drink water unless it was cold, and that if no ice was available they would simply drink less water.
Luxury ice isn’t just about provenance, it’s also about how they can be customized. People are willing to pay $14 for a block of customized and ‘luxury’ ice.
Dr. Rees, a historian, thinks there’s something distinctly American about splurging on ice. “We’re willing to spend on something that’s essentially free — that’s a sign that we value it.”
Let them eat cake!
If we’re talking about luxury and wealth status symbols I’ve been noticing an interesting trend with the uber-rich.
While the rest of us (for the most part) are struggling under the cost of living crisis and rising grocery prices, celebrities like the Kardashians keep posting photos of excessive tables of fruit and food. As many joke online, having a full fridge or bowl of fresh fruit is a new symbol of wealth.
I’ve also written about how all the trends forecasting for 2024 points towards an aesthetic of indulgence, decadence, and maximalism. However, it’s hard to have this conversation without pointing out the obvious wealth divides and the luxury of extravagance.
The Kardashians are, arguably, losing their status and importance in pop culture. Likewise, our expectations, and what we want from celebrities have changed. Given the cocktail of these factors, it’ll be interesting to see how much tolerance we have for an out-of-touch Marie Antoinette dining decadence. Or perhaps more broadly, our tolerance for excessive displays of any type of wealth (luxury ice included) as the cost-of-living, and climate crisis deepend.
When Sourdough becomes so much more:
I read Lexie Smith’s beautiful piece in the NYT about what bread can teach us in times of conflict.
“It’s easy to understand how before the 1850s, when scientific discoveries shed light on fermentation’s inner workings, bread was considered both wicked and holy. Sourdough can lie dormant for many years before being revived. (Seamus Blackley, the designer of the original Xbox and an amateur Egyptologist, went viral when he and some collaborators raised loaves with 4,500-year-old sourdough spores extracted from an ancient Egyptian vessel.)”
You might remember the Sourdough craze during the pandemic. As funny as it was that sourdough starters had gripped the nation and became the thing that kept us going (or just evolved Tamagotchis for adults), it also created communities, connection, and meaning during such a scary and uncertain time. During the pandemic Lexie Smith started sending over 1,707 dried starter packs across the US and the rest of the world.
Given the state of the world and the horrors we are witnessing in Gaza, it seems pertinent to share some of this piece.
In wartime, bread, requiring only water, flour and heat, has been known to keep people alive until the world order settles back into something more humane. It can be the line, sometimes literal, between life and death.
With this understanding, bakeries and the lines that queue outside of them are notoriously vulnerable in war, as has been seen in Syria, Ukraine and, most recently, Gaza, where a substantial number of bakeries have been damaged by Israeli air strikes. By early November, all bakeries in what was then the densely populated area of northern Gaza were closed because of infrastructure damage, lack of fuel and ingredients or fear of further attacks. Prior to the closure of the final bakery, people in the region were surviving on an average of two pieces of bread a day.
In November, Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations’ relief agency for Palestinian refugees, said, “Now people are beyond looking for bread. It’s looking for water.”
Today, as during those isolated months at the height of the pandemic, we’re once again bearing collective witness to incredible human loss. Gazans, lacking adequate sanitation, medicine, food and water, are facing starvation. Many of us are again simmering — boiling, even.
We want an end to the war. We want life (the Egyptian Arabic word for it, aish, also means bread) for our children and all children. Is sourdough a solution? Of course not. But if Barthelme’s spores still bubbling away in kitchens around the world can tell us anything, it’s that it’s within our nature — especially when the world around us feels like it’s dissolving — to reach out to one another and give bits of ourselves away. There is still, and there is always, something to be done with what you have right here, in and on your hands.
Would you let AI choose your wine?
“You only need to see the way a wine list gets hot-potatoed around a restaurant table to realize choosing wine still makes most people anxious. And there will never be enough good sommeliers and wine merchants in the world to make that pain go away. Pam Dillon, co-founder and CEO of wine app Preferabli, believes AI could hold the answer.”
This article in the Financial Times caught my attention this week. Every industry is reckoning with the changes, possibilities, and threats of AI to their work.
”Preferabli’s raw material is a proprietary database of more than two million (and counting) wines, spirits and beers, which have been evaluated by a team of real-life Masters of Wine and Master Sommeliers for more than 800 different characteristics… This “algorithm food”, as Dillon terms it, is then overlaid with a whole host of generative AI capabilities, which allow users to rate wines and spirits, and receive ever-more accurate recommendations based on their own personal tastes.”
It’s different from other existing wine apps in that it’s not influenced by users’ thoughts, and it doesn’t have marketing partnerships pushing brands.
For the most part, I don’t think anything can beat talking to the restaurant’s sommelier and having a conversation with a real expert on the exact wine list you’re looking at, and the idea of having more people on their phones at restaurants is depressing (you know I even hate QR menus!). But, I can also understand wine lists can be daunting. And if we’ve learned anything from the popularity of Tiktok Sommelier accounts, it’s that people (particularly women and minorities for whom the industry feels intimidating and shut out to) want approachable, non-intimidating ways to learn about wine.
Dillon claims “We didn’t build this platform to replace sommeliers, but to extend what they do and to eliminate those things they don’t want to do. We still expect you to say to the sommelier, ‘Preferabli has suggested these three wines, now tell me what you think.’”
It’ll definitely be an interesting space to watch though.
Alas, let’s get back to cocktails.
Cocktail recipe!
To keep things fun, here’s a Cosmo recipe for however you like your cocktails, perfect for a gossip sesh with the girls.
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading!
Carlie xx