Meet you at the pickleball courts
How to feed the Olympic Village, Could you meet 'the one' at the pickleball courts? Pickle martinis, The era of the line cook, How to survive Hot Grill Summer, and more!
Hello!
Thanks for tuning in for another Drink Seco newsletter. Like everyone else, we’ve been tuned into the Paris Olympics so I figured this newsletter could have a little more of a sports focus.
This week:
How to feed the Olympics
Have we all got the pickleball bug?
This might pickle your fancy
The culinary cocktail is drunk on nostalgia
The era of the line cook
Hot Grill Summer- and how to survive it
How to feed the Olympics:
Everything comes down to the numbers in the Olympics. This includes the numbers behind the scenes. Specifically, how do you feed over 15,000 people? And not just regular people, but athletes with extremely specific nutritional needs and different cultures.
“Events management and catering group Sodexo Live takes that responsibility seriously. What results is an incredible feat of logistics, combining sustainable sourcing, diversity of options, and ensuring all athlete’s nutritional needs are met by some combination of the 500 dishes that will be served.”
The International Committee took surveyed 200 athletes on their culinary needs and preferences to help design the menu and meal options. The culinary team also receives menu plans from the athletes to map out everything they’ll need.
The Olympic Village culinary team estimated they’d need 3 million bananas over the course of the 2 weeks for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Sodexo’s director of the Olympic Village Estelle Lamotte says “Americans have been extremely vocal about what they want. They were more picky and sensitive about having a lot of gluten-free items, and a more vegetable-based diet. Also each delegation has rooms in the village to create their own things. The Australian delegation, they literally turned a space into a coffee shop and brought a barista.”
This article in Eater Mag is an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes of the culinary team and how they prepared for the Olympics.
Also spotted at the Paris Olympics were mice. Or as they’re known in the Pixar film Ratatouille, the catering staff. We’re all about line cooks until they actually look like the ones in movies!
I won’t get too off-topic with the Olympics and food, but the South Korean new world record holder for 25m shooting Yeji Kim wins my medal for her unmatched level of coolness. Total badass.
Finally, whoever the Snoop Dogg fan is behind the scenes, we love you. Snoop Dogg has had more ‘side quests’ in his career than anyone I know. There is nothing this man hasn’t done. And what a joy he is.
Have we all got the pickleball bug?
According to the New York Post and my sources (my fyp page) pickleball courts are the hot new scene, especially if you’re single.
In pickleball it’s common to play with strangers, rotating players on the courts. It’s less physically exertive than tennis and the smaller courts make it ideal for chit-chatting.
As we all know, random chit-chatting has been on a severe decline in this country (phones, changing social norms, disappearance of third places, busier lives, etc.) and chit-chatting is the start of all wonderful friendships and relationships.
Pickleball is a return of the chit-chat, a return of the third place (hanging out at the club, the courts, the parking lot even), and a return of the activity date (increasingly popular with the cost of living crisis and decline in drinking)!
Last year a lot of running clubs started up and became popular as a dating scene, but that sounds much less appealing to me, so hot, red, sweaty, and out of breath. No, I think I’ll take pickleball.
For lesbians, we of course have the added bonus dating scene of just showing up to literally any WNBA game or soccer match. But everyone can go to the pickleball courts.
This might pickle your fancy:
In the spirit of all things pickle, Evie Negri-Albert has created a pickle margherita recipe for the daring and the pickle lovers.
It seems I’m on a non-traditional martini kick, the other week I brought you the capertini and this week the pickletini.
Ingredients
• ½-1 oz pickle juice (or more! Depends how dirty you want it!)
• ½ oz dry vermouth
• 2½ oz gin or vodka
• garnish: pickle
Directions:
Add all ingredients into a mixing glass with a good amount of ice and stir until chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with a pickle.
The culinary cocktail is drunk on nostalgia:
Speaking of food in cocktails, a quick scroll through sites like Punch Drink, or the NYT Cooking section will reveal a trend of cocktails that sound more like main dishes.
Culinary cocktails came about when bartenders in and around Sonoma County decided to take experimental cocktails to the next level, bringing ingredients and techniques from the kitchen into the bar, “integrating everything from kumquats to bell peppers directly into the glass”.
To give you an example of some culinary cocktails here are some you can find on cocktail lists around the country. “A tom kha gai–inspired A Gai Khalled Tom recently served at Pagan Idol in San Francisco; two drinkable caprese salad variations previously offered at Via Vecchia in Portland, Maine, and Blue Owl in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Pico de Gallo, named after the namesake Mexican salsa, at Viajante 87 in London; and the Burro e Salvia, a nod to the classic butter-and-sage pasta preparation, at Quattro Teste in Lisbon.”
Over the past several decades, the “culinary cocktail” has evolved from a farm-to-glass ethos to a high-tech mission to translate food into liquid form, with memory at its core.
For Chan and Faye Chen, owners of the back room bar at NYC’s Double Chicken Please, “Nothing tastes better than nostalgia,” says Chan of the impetus to pull directly from the kitchen. “Texture, glassware, how the thing is served. All together they capture a specific vibe.”
“Today, that long-standing focus on the kitchen has translated into a crop of bars across the continent using both high-tech and ingredient-driven approaches, successfully blurring the lines between cuisine and cocktails.”
“Every ingredient has a different threshold,” explains award-winning bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana, “so you need to assess the right way to incorporate them to retain balance. Think about how you use an ingredient in your cooking – then you’ll better understand how to use it in a cocktail.”
The era of the line cook:
Last year I wrote about the rise of the line cook, the shift in depictions of chefs on screen. Thanks to The Bear we saw a lot of internet discourse and articles like this one in Bon Appetit “Everyone’s Horny for the ‘Sexually Competent Dirtbag Line Cook”, and meme accounts like @thesussmans making hospo jokes reign supreme on instagram. Similarly, we saw a release of memoirs detailing the less glamorous side of famous kitchens, all while we were understanding what our relationships to restaurants and dining looked like post-pandemic.
Last month, The New Yorker wrote an article ‘The Era of the Line Cook’ “If the era of the line cook had been hovering pre-pandemic, the course of 2020 certainly hastened it. That year, as restaurant workers scrambled for gigs and sweated in the trenches of “essential work.”
The article goes behind the scenes at Eli Sussman’s restaurant gertrude’s in Prospect Heights where line cooks are getting more agency and limelight. Each week a burger special is designed and created by someone back-of-house who works the less glamorous jobs (a line cook or a dishwasher for example). Similarly, at Giant in Chicago, the initials of line cooks who conceive of new dishes are printed on the restaurant’s menu.
Chefs see this as a way of developing the skills of newer cooks and retaining talent but also as a response to social media. “With Instagram and everything, everyone’s got the potential to be noticed”. Likewise, “everybody has a voice now, especially with social media… people are more cognizant of how they’re treating their staff—because there is someone watching.”
In a new dinner series called the Line Up, line cooks, sous-chefs, and chefs de cuisine from buzzy New York restaurants get to be executive chefs for a night. The series was created by Elena Besser, a private chef, caterer, and culinary contributor to the Today Show. Elena having previously worked as a line cook was frustrated by the lack of opportunities to call the shots or get credit. This series asks chefs to nominate someone in their kitchen and “choose three per “season” to each come up with a one-night restaurant concept”, which Besser and her team fully fund and help to execute.
It’s cool to see how the cultural shifts and changing perceptions of line cooks through the stories we consume can help to change the real conditions and structure of restaurants.
Hot Grill Summer: How To Eat Well When The City Warms Up:
Talking about line cooks appreciation, last year I wrote about The Slutty Cheff (her instagram handle) a young London female cook writing, and posting anonymously about food, sex, and working in a male-dominated industry.
I loved reading her posts, it seems others did too. Last month she was given a column in Vogue!
Since we’re still in summer I thought I’d share her list of “the biggest heatwave mishaps and how to dodge them” in her article ‘How To Eat Well When The City Warms Up’.
Rooftop bars.
“Rooftop bars have this insecure teenage angst about them; they try to do too much all at once, with menus listing “Mexican nachos”, “Nashville chicken bites” and “dirty burgers”. For drinks, there’s bad pale ale on tap or a £70 bottomless drinks offering, which includes one free glass of Prosecco in plastic, then as much watered down punch as you like. Some are nice, I’m sure, but in general, rooftops are for paid influencers and artificial plants.”
Picnics
“However, in recent summers, picnics have been more about pomposity than pleasure, with complicated food and overly considered aesthetics. It is the wholesome messiness of a picnic that is special: the red wine stains, the sandwich crumbs on sticky thighs and the endless supply of crisps.” Her tip? Go cheap with the bread- it won’t dry out as fast. Bring some cold meats. Drink red wine (not as sticky and sweet as white). There’s no need for truffle crips or fancy picky bits. “It is not right to indulge in such extravagant luxuries while you are ducking behind a bush every few hours to pee.” Stick with the crunchy stuff (carrots, radishes, cucumber, apple, and maybe a tzatziki dip).
Barbeques
“Finally, barbecues. There’s nothing like walking down the street and smelling other people’s barbecues to trigger FOMO, but it’s inevitably an anticlimax whenever you actually go to one, all vats of potato salad with too much mayonnaise and packets of crisps with nothing but greasy crumbs left at the bottom. Then the burgers/hot dogs/drumsticks arrive and there’s never enough. And where do you eat them? Standing up holding a fork and plate while getting sunburned. A bloody nightmare.”
Always a chuckle, I’m sure I’ll be sharing more of her fun writing in the future.
That’s all for this week!
Carlie xx
S C hasn't had MY BBQ! Lol