Jaya Saxena

“Margaritaville, as Parrotheads will tell you, is a state of mind. But it’s also—delightfully, sometimes inexplicably—a real place now open in Times Square.”

“The story of being bullied in the cafeteria for one’s lunch is so ubiquitous that it’s attained a gloss of fictionality.”

Decimated by pandemic, many businesses are offering online experiences, from cooking classes to a visit to Rome’s colosseum, but can staring at screens offer a suitable replacement for doing actual things?

“I found out the secret was really not to make eye contact, because if I saw one of us start to tear up, it opened the floodgates for me.”

If your restaurant serves a European cuisine, you can have tablecloths and silverware. Anything else, you have to be a hole in the wall with plastic stools. In the next decade, can “authenticity” be less racist?

Ethically, no, but as long as profits dictate, then yes.

The early bird is the culinary extension of Florida retirees’ early bird lives, a predictable, routine meal perfect for building a night life around before heading to bed by 7:30. Unfortunately, like Florida’s Everglades, it’s endangered.

Jaya Saxena’s personal essay on the complications of owning her three racial identities–white, Indian and multi-racial–and dealing with the many ways people see her, and feel entitled to define her.

“Once dimly foreign, pizza had succeeded in convincing people it could be white. It was aspirational that way. I wanted to do the same thing.” Jaya Saxena reconciles her New Yorker-ness and Indian-ness with a childhood love of the doughy, pizza-like food of Pizza Hut, finding a way to hold on to her many identities simultaneously.

Jaya Saxena, whose mother is white and father is Indian, writes about her experience with being biracial.