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Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Caroline Whiting

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Living Some Kind of American Dream at Sizzler

To us, Sizzler was the epitome of the American meal. We could have big steaks, the likes of which were expensive in Korea, reserved only for special occasions. There were nice cloth napkins you put on your lap. The waitresses were friendly and would refill your drinks for you; the drink glasses were enormous. At restaurants in Korea, we had to refill our own drinks and serve our own tea from a pitcher on the counter. We had to yell to get the waitress to come to our table. The American waitresses came by on their own, and brought us complimentary slices of cheese toast — warm and crisp, salty and buttered, with just the right amount of soft white bread in the middle.

And, of course, there was the salad bar. Like the steaks, it was also the American dream epitomized, in all its shiny brass-and-glass glory. It was all-you-can-eat — you could never go hungry in America. All the vegetables, fruit, and lettuce you could ever possibly eat were here.

Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee writing in Eater about moving to America from South Korea and shaping her new life through American icons like Sizzler.

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Big Macs Are Trophies to Some People

I would scan the commercials for every tiny detail about what life was like when you lived somewhere where there was a McDonald’s: sunshine, happy music, food wrapped up like presents in special papers and boxes, cups that came with lids and straws. Straws! People in the real world ate food in brightly colored packages and lived in houses with sidewalks and lawns. Nothing bad ever happened there. No one was cold, no one got hurt, no one died. They had flush toilets and hot water, and they had McDonald’s, and they were happy all the time because of it.

We went into Fairbanks a few times each year; whenever we flew in a visit to McDonald’s was almost guaranteed. Everyone from the villages went to McDonald’s if they could: eating there meant participating in a world we, kids from “the bush” (a general way of referring to rural Alaska), didn’t feel like we had access to, but could only admire from afar. Going into Fairbanks and eating at McDonald’s conferred status.

Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes writing in Eater about the role McDonald’s played in her life growing up in the tiny “bush” town of Fort Yukon, Alaska.

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Can We Sustain Our Coffee Habit?

[Dr. Stephen] Gliessman argues that these resilient coffee forests will be able to survive climate change. “It is the low elevation robusta variety of coffee and the coffee that is grown in large monoculture, full sun plantations (the bulk of the coffee traded on the open commodity market) that will not be resilient.” Single species plantations are more susceptible to disease and pests linked to climate change from lack of genetic diversity, and rising temperatures will make it impossible to grow even low-quality robusta at lower elevations.

“Some people say coffee will have to move up in elevation to cooler areas, but those areas are where some of the only remaining forest exists. In my opinion, with climate change, there will be added incentive for farmers to diversify their coffee plantings … so that coffee once again functions as the shade loving, interior forest shrub species it originated as in the mountains of Ethiopia.”

Leif Haven writing at Eater about coffee’s environmental footprint and long-term viability on a warming planet.

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The Gaijin Who Makes Great Ramen

As a ramen maniakku or enthusiast myself, I reread Lucky Peach‘s debut Ramen Issue once a year. The issue has an essay by chef Ivan Orkin, where he tells what it was like operating a ramen restaurant in Japan, as a gaijin, or outsider. Lucky Peach is a food quarterly started by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan in 2011. The Ramen Issue is long out of print and fetches wildly high prices on eBay and Amazon, but Lucky Peach published Orkin’s essay online for the first time, just for us. Here’s an excerpt:

The first big break came at the end of August, when I was asked to make an appearance on one of the big prime-time talk shows. The episode aired on a Sunday night; on Monday, there was a line of thirty people outside a half hour before we opened. After that, the crowds kept up every day without fail. At least ten people waiting to get in every weekday, and at least thirty every weekend. Lines even in the midst of a typhoon, which happened more than once.

Following the fans came the second wave of blog entries, good and bad. My favorites were from the infamous Channel 2 websites, where anonymous writers go after everything and everyone, and where being criticized means you’ve finally arrived. Many of the threads were conspiracy theories: some people believed I was a front for a large Korean corporation, others that I was a front for a Japanese chef. The best theory was that I was actually Japanese, and only pretending to be a foreigner. It was an idea so good I wished I’d made it up myself.

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More from Lucky Peach in the Longreads Archive

State of the #Longreads, 2014

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…