Tin Fish, Goldfish Crackers
Recent Reads Ed. 10
I faced “getting old” this month. My child started Kindergarten. I had surgery for a kidney stone. My computer is dubbed by Apple as “vintage,” though I feel like I just bought it. I now go to bed at 9 p.m.
I remember when I could find a reasonably priced bottle of Sancerre at a wine shop. Yes, I will gripe about it.
To top it off, 2024 has been the year of 40th birthday parties.
The thing about 40th birthdays is that they typically involve good food and even better drink. Unlike our 20s, when we sought out the best bang for our buck (Anyone else host a party at Sunburnt Cow with free jello shots? Guilty at 24), our 40s are a thoughtful reflection of our friends and their tastes. For my social circle, that’s often single malt Scotch, French wine, custom cocktails, and catered meals from beloved restaurants. We may dance like it’s 1999, but we sure are partying like it’s 2024.
We are an epicurean bunch, like many other millennials. We were raised with “Chopped” and “Top Chef,” Eater and Lucky Peach and food blogs, amid the rise of craft beer, wine bars, and speakeasies with passwords to gain entry. We saw the emergence of farm-to-table as the ONLY way to eat, watching the Venn diagram of seasonal cuisine intersect molecular gastronomy and dishes from a variety of cultural backgrounds. We revered chefs the way that some do football stars, and we eschewed club life for in-the-know restaurants, because where you eat and drink certainly says something about you. (More below.)
We weren’t about to be drinking well vodka sodas.
As I head to a drinks date myself—at The Grill, no less—I dive further into our food culture. At least I’m not a man on a trip eating food.
To snack or not snack
Millennials want snacks and more snacks, but really only because we’ve been served them up for our entire lives, which is the topic of conversation in this piece by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic. Cushing goes through the history of snacks, and how we sub-40-somethings have a knack for a snack: 90s advertising. 2000s technology. 2010s job perks. 2020s and who has time to cook?
It makes sense. I thought about our changing food habits in the past few years as we undertook that impossible millennial task of buying a home. While touring apartments, I was surprised how many new builds and renovated flats came with great rooms that included gorgeous kitchens, luxurious stone islands, pantries, and floor-to-ceiling windows featuring amazing views…without a slot for a table. It’s like the dining table went poof(!) replaced by bar stools, or what I suspect, the coffee table.
That pantry? Most definitely to hold snacks!
“Snacks are designed by geniuses using advanced technology with the express intention of making us eat more.”
I imagine myself to have refined tastes, but I also love a snack (guilty pleasure: Annie’s Bunnies/Goldfish), which apparently proves I’m a cog in a corporate machine built to make me crave nibbles. See, snacks are made with inexpensive ingredients at industrial complexes and sold at a heavy markup (ahem: profit margin). Businesses are smart so they got super good at making them super delicious, so much so that now the term for perfectly satiating snack, palatability, has been dubbed “hyper-palatability.” Seriously, there is an application to induct the word to the food lexicon.
We have simply gotten too good at making snacks too good. And we probably won’t stop.
Out of wet coat, into a wet martini
The saying goes, “darling, get me out of this wet coat and into a dry martini,” but it’s possibly irrelevant if the commenters on this The New York Times story about wet martinis have any say in the matter. Former food critic Pete Wells writers that he is surprised to see guests at a new restaurant in NYC suddenly drinking wet martinis, and gets a dose of reality from the cocktail connoisseurs.
News flash: people have always been putting healthy pours of vermouth in their gin martinis.
(Obviously, vodka does not make a martini.)
As many readers suggest, a short conversation with a bartender at any reasonable cocktail establishment that’s not Cheesecake Factory will result in a great wet martini. Members of my own household are known to sip their martini with a little more vermouth than average.
From my observations, at cocktail-driven establishments, there is rarely a single martini listed. It’s either a martini list with several variations or none at all, because a martini guy/gal is going to just order their martini directly, to their own specifications. If you think you don’t have some, order in front of a mirror.
In the case of Eel Bar, highlighted in the story, the wet martini is actually listed in the vermouth section because the entire place is a Spanish-inspired haunt with an expansive selection of vermouth. The real trend I spot? Tin fish is everywhere.
At least everyone agrees on one thing: The worst thing a martini can be is warm.
Corner booth, front row
Speaking of martinis, the cocktails were served, among others, at a dinner-party-fashion-show-friends-hang thrown by designer Thom Browne. Instead of lining up hundreds of people to watch models prance down the runway, Thom invited his friends to dine with him at an Americana-esque restaurant in downtown New York City and dressed them all in his clothes.
It’s the ultimate flex.
If you were invited, you got to touch and feel the clothes up close and personal, deepening your connection with the brand. But you’re clearly already a fan otherwise you wouldn’t be on his inner-circle list, which included Martha, Evan Mock, Christine Baranski, Cole Escola, Jennifer Aniston’s ex, my friend’s cousin, and this GQ writer who covered it all.
The rest of us get to day-dream, making it somehow more alluring of a desire than simply seeing another outfit posed under overly glam lights on a white background like the rest of New York Fashion Week.
The idea of dining on delicious comfort food, with exceptional company in exquisite clothing? It’s my vision for my life.
“I spilled Champagne all over Martha Stewart.”
It’s the chicest type of chic to buck tradition in a very refined way, to make a statement while keeping it all class, and promote your product in a way that feels authentic rather than forced. After all, Thom Browne designs so that those that wear the clothes not only don a look, but walk into Thom Browne’s lifestyle. I think that’s the point.
A Twist of Lemon
In the film, “LA Story,” Steve Martin and friends rattle off a menagerie of coffee orders after lunch. At the time, it seemed insane. By today’s standards, entirely reasonable.
Customization of coffee drinks, even if they no longer include coffee, has yet to peak, so says The New York Times. Thanks to social media (surprise!) and the pandemic (surprise!) customers feel no shame in ordering elaborate beverages with handfuls of modifications not one, but two, even three times per day and totalling some $300 per month. After all, treats! It's climbing so rapidly that McDonald’s launched an entirely new brand focused just on wacky drink combos to join the already budding independent shops slinging all-things drinks.
At the core is the idea that what you drink says something about you.
I understand completely. That was my Master’s thesis, a long-form journalistic investigation into the sociology of wine bars in the early ‘oughts. Money quote: “I want to be with sexy people. Sexy people drink wine.” (Those were the days.)
What you drink, what you wear, what car you drive—these are the ways in which we nonverbally communicate our personalities to society. It broadcasts what we value and it most definitely says something about what we can afford.
“A drink is a status thing.”
Not that I pay much attention to what’s in the Starbucks cup that passes me on the sidewalk, but I do, admittedly, have my own snobbery around coffee. I only drink cold brew. Birch Coffee makes the best cold brew in the city. I drink it black. As a fellow coffee nerd expressed here, drinking your coffee black makes a statement too.
And I haven’t even begun to discuss wine.
Cheers 🥂