Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, this is After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mihir.
And I'm YoungMih. And we are celebrating Thanksgiving!
And we're thankful to have you back, YoungMih.
Oh well, I'm so happy to be here.
Yes, we thought a little Thanksgiving gift to everyone would be nice.
And we're just going to talk about food, I love it.
Yeah, food, food, food.
It's all about food.
I imagine you're both cooking?
Yes. Maybe, a little bit.
Mihir, you're baking at least, right?
I'm mainly eating, I think, is the best plan.
But you usually bake.
Aren't you the baker?
I do bake, but sometimes we go to my sister's and so my sister may be in charge, which is just perfectly fine with me.
That sounds great. I have vegans in the family now too, so I have two types of turkey.
I have a conventional turkey and I am doing a vegan turkey also.
I will let you know how it goes.
Oh you're bringing it.
But I have the whole family here, so I have to bring it.
I appreciate that. And speaking of trends, we each just brought observations about the food industry.
Yeah, food on the brain.
Food, food, food. Sounds good.
Felix, food. Glorious food.
Tell us more. This is probably one that the two of you also bring everything Korean.
It is just astounding how the food industry has turned to Korea.
And what I find so interesting is it's at all levels of cuisine.
So it's, of course, the fried chicken that is everywhere.
But it's also three of the new entrants among the restaurants in New York City that have earned Michelin stars are now Korean restaurants.
Amazing. And you see this explosion in Korean food.
We've seen it, of course, in music and film.
And what is it about this moment maybe also that lends itself to this Korean trend?
Well, only if there was someone of Korean extraction who could help us understand that.
Well, tell me you ask.
I don't know how many people are aware of this.
But Korea is one of those countries, it's not the only country, but it's one of those countries that has made a concerted effort to export its culture.
This has come into the form of K -pop, K -drama, K -beauty, and Korean food as well.
And so, for example, if you are a chef training in the U .S.
and you want to go and learn about Korean food, you can apply.
And the Korean government will put you up for a year of Korean food exploration.
They just do a bunch of stuff and all of it was designed to get the cuisine out into the world.
And I do think there's a confluence of people watching K -dramas in which they're eating Korean food and listening to Korean music and then you want to go sample the cuisine.
It all sort of comes together.
The one final thing I'll say is that these are bold flavors.
Yes, exactly. And I do think that is also convergent with the times.
Yeah, I think it's the flavor profile.
And even like a texture profile, like that crispy rice, there are these things that are really distinctive and they're different.
And I really have come to love them.
And so bold flavors, interesting textures, it feels like it's a fundamentally different and very rich cuisine.
So there's variation.
It's not just like one note.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
And I think it matches the general craving for comfort food also.
Many of the dishes have a little bit this quality where even if you didn't grow up, you can just imagine what it's like to have some of these dishes as comfort food.
And maybe this is one of the things that Korea is very good at sort of recognizing and tapping into a conversation that is a larger conversation than we just have in this one small country.
I think it was true for Parasite when this sort of joined the conversation around global inequality and how we feel about inequality.
It's even true for Squid Game.
There's something in the culture that makes the country and makes entrepreneurs very attuned to what the moment is.
And I think now they're tapping into it in a really wonderful way.
Good for us. I love that you started us out that way.
You're totally unbiased, of course.
So, Mihir, did you bring in something else, Korea related?
Well, so Kay, yes. I think one of the most interesting business stories today involves Kellogg's.
Oh. And what they're doing.
Kellogg's is just this storied American company.
But what has been going on in the last eight or nine months I think is really fascinating.
Kellogg's, of course, is the cereal company, but they also have a big snacks business.
First part of the story is, guess what?
The topic du jour, they're splitting up.
So he's spinning off the companies.
He's taking the global snacks business and international cereals and putting in one division.
He's putting North American cereals in another division.
And then he's got a dinky little plant food company that he's putting into his third division.
And he's going to spin them all off.
So it really pushes the logic of spinoffs in a whole new way.
Because normally we would think, wait, distribution is good.
We can have power relative to the grocers.
There's all kinds of reasons maybe to keep these together.
But he tells a story of managerial attention, capital allocation, fueling growth.
Because the snacks business is booming.
The North American cereal is struggling.
And this little plant company, it's like a classic finance thing.
It's not getting valued because it's not a pure play on the plant business.
But then the story gets even more interesting, which is the whole snacks business, to me, is completely fascinating in this kind of high inflation time.
So here's what's going on.
They are pushing prices really hard.
And they're accepting volume declines, like big volume declines.
So recently, they are raising prices by 15%.
And volume declines are like 3 to 5%.
And it's not just them.
That's, by the way, Pringles.
So if you've bought a can of Pringles, you know.
Like, it's a 20%, 25 % price increase on Pringles.
But the fascinating thing to me is they're totally fine with these volume declines.
3 to 5 % volume declines.
And it's not just them.
So Frito -Lay is pretty aggressive price increases, growth and revenues, but they're like pretty substantial volume declines.
General Mills, same thing.
So there's like this finance question of like, what the heck are they doing spinning off these companies?
And then there's this classic marketing question of like, what are they doing to these brands?
Are they totally brilliant because they're pushing pricing and they're getting a lot of value out of it?
Or are they destroying them and just accepting these really significant volume declines?
And by the way, Mondales and Hershey, they're doing pricing too.
Everybody's doing pricing, but they're not suffering these volume declines.
And so there's a piece of it that makes me wonder if we're going to look back at this in 5 or 10 years.
And it's either going to be this brilliant moment where they really got the full value of their brands out there.
Or it's destroying a brand by pushing price increases so hard.
So in me, what's particularly interesting to me about your story is, I've actually seen this across many different companies in the food sector, but also elsewhere.
And I think it speaks to a really interesting issue.
For some reason, I think many executives are way too careful with price increases.
We fear these small reductions in volume.
And in fact, sometimes in my classes, I do an exercise where I give people a price increase and I give them a volume increase and I ask them which of these two things would you rather have.
And the exercise is completely trivial because if you have a volume increase, you also incur variable costs.
If you have just a price increase, it falls to the bottom line right there and then.
So your bias should always be towards price increases.
I'm telling you two -thirds of the people get this little example wrong.
Because somehow we're taught or our intuition is that we have to defend volume.
There's something almost sacred about market share and volume that we don't want to let go.
Which if you're just thinking about the mechanics of finance, makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah, Yang Mi, what do you make of this?
First of all, I agree with Felix 100 % about this natural conservatism toward raising prices in normal times.
I think companies for the most part, they want to believe they have a really strong sense of what the elasticity is for their entire portfolio.
But the truth is they sort of do and they sort of don't.
And I think we are in a period where companies are feeling pressure to raise prices because of the cost pressures they're experiencing.
So they were kind of put in this corner and they discovered, oh my goodness, we can raise prices and people are willing to pay those prices.
And particularly brands that have brand power to begin to realize, oh, the trade -off with volume isn't quite what we thought it was.
And so this is a moment of a little bit of discovery.
I think it's a precarious moment too, though, because to your point exactly you want to be careful about how you push it and you can never neglect volume growth either.
So these things should coexist in a healthy equilibrium.
And right now there's a lot, a lot of focus on raising prices.
I did want to say something about the spin -off though.
First of all, again, a reminder that we are in a period of retrenchment.
Like whenever there's some kind of macro dislocation, all of these big companies, they look around and they say, wait, are we doing everything we can to maximize the value we're creating and capturing?
So then why would you ever begin to spin off?
I think one is the reason you describe sometimes different parts of the business require different kinds of innovation and different kinds of management attention.
Sometimes quite frankly, you discover that the financial profile of the businesses are just very, very different.
And so sometimes once you spin this stuff off, you can extract a lot more value for the different pieces.
And I think you're seeing that as well.
Yeah. I think the tricky part for me on that latter point is if it's like pharma versus consumer products like J &J, or if it's like GE, where it's healthcare and aerospace or whatever, there's a whole bunch of different things going on.
There's customers and distribution and supply and everything here.
First off, there are diseconomies to the spin offs in the sense that they have to set up companies.
Oh, yeah. That's right.
Yeah, there are tax consequences.
You've got to like set up whole new companies and the food business is like a $300 million revenue business.
And like you're going to set up a new public company for that thing.
And all the distribution power you might have collectively, you won't get exercise anymore.
So it's really leaning heavily, young me, on your finance intuitions.
It's about valuation and unlock.
I'm intrigued that you both think the volume declines are okay.
There's a piece of me that worries that what happens in 12 months, where's the growth going to come from?
Yeah. You can't sustain these price increases.
Pringles is like a 20%, 25 % price increase.
It's really big. But it's two things you have to be careful of.
One is you can't sustain price increases.
But number two, you can't underinvest in your brands for too long because restarting that engine is very, very difficult.
And I could tell you many stories of brands that underinvested for too long and then it took years and years to dig themselves out of it.
But I do think it's a bit of the sign of the times, yeah.
It's a sign of the times and I think it's just in part because it's such an iconic American company.
It's going to be really interesting to see what happens.
So Youngmee, this means you have to have brought something that starts with the letter K.
So it's Korea, Kellogg's.
Wait, yours? Oh, K.
No. No? No, I did not.
Okay. However, I am going to take a hard left because the topic is food.
And so I have something I want to talk to you about that is not food per se, but related to food because it's related to restaurants.
As you know, we have been living for a couple of decades under the regime of when it comes to fine dining, huge plates with a tiny bit of very artistically rendered food in the middle of a huge plate.
So this has been the era of the huge plate.
I don't even go so far as to say it's the hegemony of the large plate because it started in the 90s.
Now it's 2022. Basically, a good expensive restaurant you are paying for plate.
But there are three plating trends that I have noticed that I wanted to get your reactions to.
So these are breaking away from the hegemony of the large plate.
The first is the use of natural organic materials for plates.
So like a cross section of a tree stump instead of a plate or a piece of flat stone.
I see this everywhere now.
So that's the first trend I see.
The second is unconventional receptacles for the food.
So I had a salad recently served to me in a mason jar.
I've had an after dinner drink in a test tube.
So these are like unconventional receptacles for food.
And the third, which I think is the unmatched or mix and match grandma plates, if you know what I mean?
These are the vintage plates in the bowls with the old fashioned floral patterns and everything is mismatched on the table.
So these are three plating trends.
First of all, have you noticed them and what is your reaction to them?
The thing that strikes me about this young me, which I think is so true about these big plates and especially, I don't know if you know these plates where they're like really wide brims and in a small bowl in the middle.
But the thing that strikes me about it that I also find annoying is it becomes an artistic endeavor where there's a smear.
Like, you know, the smear, right?
I'm so tired of the smear.
I'm so tired of the smear, right?
Of your three, I really like the last one, which is the vintage plates.
The mix and match vintage plates.
The mix and match vintage because in general, I don't know if you feel like this sometimes, but there's like this inverse relationship between the quality of the food and the degree to which people are caring about some of these superficial things.
So like if it's coming in a test tube, I'm like already deeply skeptical.
If you spend that much time thinking about it, it's like going to restaurants with great views.
I'm always thinking like the food's not going to be that great.
Really? So I like the vintage plates because it's homey and it feels more casual.
And that's kind of what I think the moment is about today more than it is about the hyper precious smear streaked big plate.
Yeah. And there's many of these trends that coexist at the same time.
So you're exactly right.
There's sort of this trend towards informality and serving food that can be eaten in large groups.
But then also I see many, many restaurants that are really, really trying hard to become more formal.
So I cannot remember in a long time the number of restaurants that insisted on men wearing a jacket.
I was recently in a place that sent away young people because they were in tennis shoes.
And these tennis shoes, they looked like designer or something.
And one intuition is like, oh, this is like completely ridiculous.
Why would you send anyone away?
But then you are in a space where everyone is dressed up at night and it does feel special.
Maybe it's a multitude of experiences really that animates the restaurant scene at this moment in time.
Yeah, I think that's right.
More variety is better.
I had the pleasure recently, I was in Copenhagen and I ate at Geranium, the new restaurant that kind of replaced Nomma as being the place everybody wants to go.
And Meher, to your point about not trusting the food, if there's too much thought that went into the plating, it was like they took that to heart.
The plating was so simple.
Everything was understated.
It was almost anti -plating.
The silverware, everything.
It was always to just keep the emphasis on the food itself.
And it completely worked.
The food was divine.
And it was a very, very simple atmosphere.
And there was nothing fussy about it.
That's great. I was actually going to pick a trend that kind of intersects across your two topics, which is you've made fun of me previously, young me, for my pronunciation of Korean food.
What are you going to say?
Gochi. K -O -C -H -I. So, it's a restaurant in New York and they serve everything on skewers.
Oh, I have not been there.
And I got to tell you, anything served on skewers, I love.
You're there? I'm there.
Any kebab thing, any food that's like served to me in a skewer, I'm like almost bound.
And Gochi is like just a spectacular Korean restaurant which just does skewers.
And it's like really, really good.
So that's anti -plating in some sense.
Next time I'm in New York, we'll do Korean food.
How does that sound?
That sounds great. So Felix, do you have another one?
I have one that is more about the food industry in general than about food specifically.
And that has to do with, I think we're at a really pivotal moment in our conversation about recycling.
So I think the data are now pretty clear that recycling plastics is just a hoax.
It's never going to happen.
And instead of making us feel good about the fact that we throw it in special bins and we see the special cars that pick it up, we just have to come to grips with the fact that for many types of plastics, you feel good about recycling it and it's going to end up in a landfill.
So basically overall, we're roughly at 5 % of all plastics are recycled.
And then it depends on the type.
You don't have these little numbers in the recycling logo.
So number one, which is the water and soft drinks, so the pet bottles essentially, there we recycle about 20%.
So there's some chance that it might get recycled.
For number two, milk jugs, it's about 10 % or so.
And then there's some recycling for number five also.
But for everything else that you pick up in the supermarket when you order out food, I think we have to come to a realization that actually what we have to do is go away from recycling.
In particular, if you order takeout and you're at home, why is it a tradition that you get delivered forks and knives?
Don't people have forks and knives at home?
Instead of holding out hope that somehow magically with better sorting or new chemical processes that we will ever get to a point where we will do recycling, let's just make the big ambition.
No, we're going to move away from plastics.
We're going to replace plastics with glass, with cardboard, with all of these other materials where we know we can recycle them.
Right. And in a way, Felix, it's this kind of illusion which is stopping us from those more important steps, like reduce and reuse.
That hierarchy is actually really important.
And that's where we should be going.
I completely agree.
What I like about what you said is plastic actually is, there are certain circumstances where it is really almost irreplaceable.
But there are so many cases where it's actually quite easily replaceable with something else or is not even necessary.
And so what that means is going through every usage scenario and thinking about what is the right material we should be using in this context, and then thinking about what it means to replace.
The cost of replacement, it's tricky.
That's what gets in the way.
That's exactly right.
It's just incredibly inexpensive to produce new plastic.
That is the economics of recycling, or terrible.
And then just little things, like if you have your food delivered to you in a cardboard container, then is it as pristine in the bag as when it comes in plastic?
That's where I think, as consumers, we have to just say, no, it's not going to be as pristine, but it's better if it doesn't come in plastic.
So young me, what else did you bring?
So it is amazing how much pleasure I get from food scenes on television shows and film and social media, but really, I want to talk about TV shows and film.
And I kind of feel like TV producers know this because the food scenes on TV shows have become so specific in all the best shows.
Like when I was growing up and a family sat down for dinner on a TV show, you couldn't even see the food.
It was some generic food.
And now whenever there's food involved in the best shows, I think it's very, very specific.
Of course, the show that did this really well was The Bear.
The food in that show was a character in the show.
But even when it's not about food, an example of a show that I think does this splendidly well is Succession.
Early on in one of the seasons, there was this unforgettable scene where they're eating an ortolan with a napkin over their heads.
There's another scene where the entire family is at the Hamptons and the servants are preparing the most decadent meal of lobster and steaks.
And then Logan decides he wants pizza.
And so the next scene you see is just them throwing away all that food.
There's this other scene where Shiv and Roman, they go to London to visit their despicable mother.
She serves pigeon and potatoes and wine.
And the food is so specific, there's so much thought put into exactly what kind of food.
And it becomes a form of character exposition or cultural depiction.
So I'm wondering, first of all, have you guys noticed this?
And what in your mind is a depiction of food in a TV show or a movie that has really just stood out for you this year?
You know, for sure The Bear.
Yeah, amazing, right?
Yeah, too much yelling, but the food is amazing.
But I think the other one that I'm reminded of as more historic is both the Sopranos and the Godfather use food so, so well.
And they're usually scenes of cooking, but they're often the scenes of eating and just sharing food.
It really captures, and I can't remember which one, you know, there's like the razor on the garlic.
There's these very specific actions.
There's Michael Corleone in the Kitchen and Godfather 3, when he gets pulled back into the mafia, like I'm trying to get out and they keep pulling me back in.
Because they're so family -centric movies, I think the role of food is just spectacular.
And I think that's one of the things that Godfather did that was really original was put the food kind of front and center as a character.
And I think it does it really, really well.
And then Sopranos. Yeah, and for Sopranos.
Yeah, amazing. Yeah, totally, totally.
When you talked about how the people and tensions between people can be reflected in food, it reminded me of Big Night, of course, the movie about the Italian immigrants who tried to run an Italian -style restaurant somewhere in New Jersey.
And you have all the tensions around the food, the artistic brother in the kitchen who wants to cook as if he was in Sicily, and then the clash with the local taste.
I don't quite understand.
Remember, he serves this past edition.
People are confused because there's no meatballs.
So I confess, Felix, that was going to be my recommendation this week, which is Big Night is like my favorite.
Oh, I haven't seen it.
Oh, my God. You've got to see it because it's amazing.
Just as you described, Felix, like these two brothers, and they make this thing called the Timpano.
The music is amazing, Felix.
Stanley Tucci, and that other guy, whose name I can't remember, who played Monk.
Anyway, it's just the best movie.
Yeah. And the sense of family, the immigrant experience, and then there's a party, the whole thing called Monetana Party.
And Felix, I still remember seeing that movie in the theater.
Oh, my God. This is so many years ago, right?
Wow. Yeah. It was like New Year's Day.
Mid -1990s. Yeah. Something like that.
And I just remember it was such a great movie, such a good experience.
But to bring this full circle, Kdramas do this really well.
They always show you what they're eating.
And then it makes you want to go out and get Korean food.
Yeah. There you go.
It's all coming back.
Very nicely done. The other thing that came to mind is, do you know Binging with Babish?
What? It's a YouTube channel.
The guy recreates dishes for movies.
Oh, no, really? It's hilarious.
So, the visual style is a little bit like tasty and bus feed.
Yeah. Because you don't actually see his face.
You just see the torso.
You see the hands. But he's cooking like blue noodles from Star Trek, pigeon pie from Game of Thrones.
And then, of course, ratatouille from ratatouille.
And sometimes it works as food and sometimes it doesn't work as food.
It's really to the point and fast, which I now appreciate so much about YouTube because all these clips are way too long.
But he's really to the point and quite quick.
That's great. I mean, the selection of dishes is great.
It's really funny. Oh, although I don't know if I want to cook the Game of Thrones food.
We got through so much of this episode without talking about Game of Thrones.
Oh, no. So, here, what did you bring?
The wonderful thing about food is you see the whole world in food.
After a few drinks, huh?
Yeah, exactly. I have kind of come to get obsessed and think about the world via a grain of rice.
So, rice is so fascinating to me.
I don't think we've come to appreciate how critical rice is to our future.
So, I'll give you a couple of facts.
So, the first fact is rice is just responsible for like an enormous amount of caloric intake around the world, depending on the population.
But especially amongst the poorest people and especially in Asia, rice is just an incredible source of calories.
The second piece of it is on the climate side, which is first off, it turns out rice is grown in areas, and you can imagine in your mind's eye, perhaps a delta area or a floodplain area where there's flooding.
Well, it turns out those areas are A, getting a lot hotter, and B, more and more prone to flooding.
And so, we have had in the last several years, booms and busts in rice production that have been really problematic.
So, climate change is hitting rice in a way that it's not hitting a lot of other things.
And then the final piece of it is that rice is associated with like 12 to 15 percent of methane emissions.
Oh, wow. And all together, about one and a half percent of greenhouse gases.
And of course, it's also responsible for a lot of calories, but it is a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.
And it turns out that these very simple alternative irrigation mechanisms where instead of flooding these patties, you alternate wet and dry, actually can reduce methane gas emissions by like 60 percent.
Oh, wow, interesting.
So, I guess I have just become obsessed with rice, and if you're looking for a way to play this, I will say, and I came across this organization like 20, 30 years ago when I spent some time at a Institute of Tropical Agriculture for unknown reasons, there is the International Rice Research Institute.
Huh. It just is this amazing entity which basically averted two large scale famines in Asia over the last 50, 60 years, has these amazing new varieties which basically allow farmers to deal with floods and droughts and extreme heat, and now is producing this golden rice, which is amazing and has beta carotene
in it. And then you have all these technological innovations on irrigation which can reduce emissions massively.
So, I guess I've just gotten obsessed with rice.
I find this fascinating.
I do feel like there's a little bit of a theme here, but as a Korean -American, one of the things you grow up with a sensitivity to is the different varietals of rice.
I've never thought about it the way that you just described me here.
So, for example, in Korea, there are more than a thousand different varietals of rice, and at the finest restaurants, there's always some artisanal varietal that is the rage.
So, for example, all of those Michelin star Korean restaurants in New York City that you mentioned, Felix, they all want golden queen rice right now is the varietal.
And you would see it on the menu, right?
Which is interesting.
The provenance of the rice is really important.
What hadn't occurred to me until you mentioned this, Mihir, was how you can think about different varietals as being better or worse on all the dimensions that we need to be caring about more.
That's fascinating.
And it's also kind of low -tech, but the impact of these interventions is just amazing.
Interesting. And do we know if, say, we have to be even more drastic about climate change consequences?
Is there some sort of a substitute?
Are there other grains that are better, say, from a methane point of view?
Are there other grains that are more drought -resistant maybe?
That's interesting.
Is rice really the category we should bet on?
That's an interesting question.
I don't know the answer to that, Felix, but I think what we know is that it's just a remarkably pervasive crop that satisfies caloric intake.
So you're right. We could think about switching to different grains that might be better.
And I think one of the big issues is the flooding.
It is the way it's grown.
And rice is unique in that way.
There are these plains and they get flooded.
And that actually means that a lot of stuff starts to grow in there that releases methane.
And then the farmers themselves, when there's all this refuse, they burn it.
And that also turns out to create a lot of methane.
And I think rice is, in some ways, unique about that.
But it's an interesting question, which is I hadn't thought about whether we should switch as much as I was just trying to think about, I guess, in a way, you know, like how are these books like cod or sold?
Like, I kind of want somebody to write the rice book.
Or you could write one.
Now you're talking.
Aren't you on sabbatical?
I could write the rice book.
All the world in a grain of rice.
Do we have time for more, at least quick ones?
Yeah, let's do some quick ones.
Okay. So trends you're into or trends you're not into?
On the topic of menus, I have something I love and I have something I hate.
Oh my God. I think I have the same one that I hate.
Okay. I'll tell you about the one I love.
I love short menus.
Supply chain problems and labor crises are causing shorter menus.
And I think it's great.
And the thing I hate, I'm an old man.
I don't want QR codes.
QR code menus. It's not that I'm anti -technology.
I hate the way they do it.
If we are going to actually move as a society to QR code menus, they need to be so much better.
Yeah. They need to be easier to use, easier to navigate.
Totally. They need to be more beautiful.
They need to take you to an app that's functional.
Right now, you just get some sad PDF.
Some PDF. So poorly done.
Terrible. Oh, I totally agree with you.
It reminds me so much of what first happened when newspapers went online.
Yes. The online version of the newspaper was just the PDF of the print of paper.
So bad. Really terrible.
Felix, a trend you love or hate?
Yeah. So another pandemic -related trend that I'm actually not so fond of is really shameless limitations of how quickly you have to be out of the restaurant.
I understood under the very special circumstances of the pandemic that you needed to worry about the economics of the restaurant.
But it's one of these things that it's like not having your mini -fridge filled in hotels.
Once that becomes an option, mini -fridges will never ever go away.
Which I'm sort of okay with, but then at least can we unplug them?
That annoying combination is now they're empty and they're plugged in.
Which is really the odd.
But on the timing of the reservations, it just somehow it made something acceptable that does not go very well.
What's the shortest amount of time you've sat there before they ask you to leave?
Oh, I had one where you knew when you made the reservation that you were going to be out of there in 30 minutes.
What? 30 minutes? Yeah.
Lunchtime, a sushi Japanese kind of place.
Okay, wow. And you booked 30 minutes.
But still, that's really strict.
Yes. By the way, Felix, I have a related thing I love, which is in general, I love counter service.
You put me at a counter, like at a bar, for a meal.
I do too. My husband, I love sitting at the bar.
Same for me. I'd rather eat at the bar than at a table, totally.
Okay. Here are a couple I love.
Number one, I love the trend of spicy baked desserts, like chocolate cake with cayenne pepper, or I had this mango habanero ice cream.
Oh my goodness. Good.
So, so good. And then the other trend I like, this one's been around for a while, but the nostalgia comfort food thing.
So, deviled eggs and baked Alaska.
Yeah. I had this hipster hamburger helper recently.
Yeah. Stuff like that, wedge salads.
Yes. Everything has like a little twist to it now.
That's true, yes. It's not exactly what you know, but it reminds you of the comfort food.
That's really fabulous.
Love it. Do you have something you don't like, young me?
Oh, the whole butter board trend.
Wait, is this where you get different kinds of butter?
So, you know how you would have, say, a prosciutto board or cheese board?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the new thing now is you take a board and you just smear a huge amount of butter on it, and then you put all different seasonings on different parts of the butter, and then you just hand out bread and people just, it's so gross.
There's this one over here.
Yes, yeah. It's so unattractive looking and people double dip and the whole thing, I'm not into it.
I'm really down on it.
Can I say something about boards in general?
Okay. It's nice if you put the prosciutto nicely on a plate or on a board, but we make such a big deal out of it.
It's sort of sad, yes.
Yeah, please help yourself and try to make it look nice, but it's not art.
Not the big thing. No one should be famous because you create a board.
A board? By the way, what do you guys think of the whole early dining trend?
People eating dinner, it's six.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with that.
You go to Manhattan now, it's six o 'clock, I mean the restaurants are packed.
I have to say I'm in favor of it, but then I'm also a little heartbroken when they close at ten.
Yeah, they close at yes.
Does that mean you're an early diner?
Yes, call me at five and I'll be there.
I might need a minute snack.
Oh, 5 .01, cocktail in hand.
I'm all over that. That's all good, I completely agree.
I consider it to be progress.
This feels like progress to me, because then you can take your time, and you can still get home, and then you can still do other stuff.
It's progress or it's getting old.
Yeah, maybe. Womp womp womp.
Okay, I guess we'll come back with recommendations on that note.
And we have recommendations, of course.
Okay, I have two, real quick.
But I'm not on the pod that often, so I get to have two, don't I?
You get to have two, that's right.
First, I want to recommend the drink of the moment, a Negroni Spagliato with Prosecco in it.
Nice. So that was all over social media a couple weeks ago, so I decided to try it.
My husband drinks Negronis quite frequently, but I don't, but I tried it, it is so sublime.
It is very good. Pure Negronis are a little more of an acquired taste I think, so this is like a lighter version.
This is a lighter version.
Yeah, easier version of it.
You won't suffer the next day.
And then the second is I bought a bento box, lunch box, like a little bento box, little kit.
Oh, yeah. And I have been taking my lunch to work in my little bento box, and I can't even describe how much joy it gives me.
The box itself or the lunch?
The box, because it's got all these little compartments, which means that when I pack it, I have to have like a little bit of fruit, like two carrots, three slices of cucumber, a tiny thing of rice over here.
It's so, so perfect.
And it's unbelievably pretentious to take out your bento box at work and to eat out of it, but I love every minute of it.
It gives me so much joy.
It's a very inexpensive way to bring joy to your everyday lunch.
Fantastic. That's my recommendation.
That is great. What about you?
I'm here. Well, so I literally was going to recommend Big Night, but I have another one, which is more lowbrow.
Okay. There's this wonderful YouTube series called The Hot Ones.
Have you seen The Hot Ones?
Oh, where they have the celebrity eating the chicken wings?
Yes. That is so good.
It's crazy good. So this is like total highbrow, lowbrow, which is it's very simple format.
They get a celebrity on and they have to eat chicken wings with 10 hot sauces.
Increasingly hot. Increasingly hot.
And the wonderful part about this show is it's totally predictable what's going to happen, but yet the drama is great.
And the final one is extremely hot.
And the beauty of the show is the guy who runs it actually undertakes it like a serious interview while these celebrities are undergoing the pain of eating like something on the Scoville scale that's like 10 million.
And so the last one I think was Kate Blanchett.
Oh, that was so good.
She's like a very serious actress, a really super thoughtful person.
And she's like tearing up as she is eating and talking about her role in tar.
And it's hilarious.
But because they're in so much physical discomfort, they actually become quite vulnerable.
And so they say things they don't intend to say, they lash out at the interviewer because their head is about to explode.
And they're sweating.
They can't put together a sentence.
Their guard is down.
And then he's asking serious questions.
Yeah, it's great. And they're just spewing back.
It's really entertaining.
Yeah. Oh, my God. That sounds really funny.
It's so good. That's my pick.
And then Felix. I will, as always on Thanksgiving, watch Pieces of April, which is a food centered movie that I have recommended before.
And I watch it every Thanksgiving.
I cannot imagine Thanksgiving without Pieces of April.
Wow. It's about a dysfunctional family getting together for Thanksgiving.
So it's very predictable, cutesy, like watery eyes, that kind of a thing.
But that's not my recommendation because I think I recommend this a bunch of times.
But what I wanted to recommend is a cookbook by Grace Young.
And the cookbook is called The Wisdom of Chinese Kitchen.
And it's a really fabulous cookbook.
It has, of course, many of the recipes in Cantonese cooking that you're familiar with.
But she does an amazing job.
Both explaining how you should pick ingredients.
For instance, why is it that you don't want to buy ginger when the skin is not rough, when it's too smooth?
You should stay away.
And she explains why and why you pick it.
But also, she embeds these recipes in the Chinese philosophy of cooking.
And in particular, in the southern Chinese culture, where everything is about the balance of heat and coolness.
And so you pair particular things, the philosophy around these dishes, and how, in Chinese culture, you think about how it influences your body and how it influences your well -being.
The way she tells the stories sometimes as these conversations with her grandma.
And it makes no sense what her grandma is telling her.
And it's hard to understand why two things go together or don't go together.
There's all of that, how the recipes themselves get passed on in the family.
But also a sense of what you're thinking about when you're cooking.
That that's a big part of what gets passed on as well, which is really beautiful.
That's great. This sounds like one of those cookbooks that I can imagine reading even though I never try to cook.
You will never cook, yes, that's exactly right.
It's just interesting.
You read it. There's so many cookbooks like that that are just on the shelf.
Well, that sounds so good.
And I don't know if this was the purpose of taping this, but I am starving.
And Happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
And this was it. A special Happy Thanksgiving episode from your team at After Hours and The Ted Audio Collective.
Thank you.
