#i think i have the yuzu install somewhere

[lvcae]

someone uploaded tengoku struggle onto nyaa............... ritty's first torrent..........

[hashtagartistlife]

IR hunger games AU

pt 4/???

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4

bonus comics under the cut + some more exposition 

bonus cut 1: 

bonus cut 2: 

Recap of the story so far: yuzu gets picked as tribute for the hunger games. Ichigo manages to volunteer in her place. Rukia gets drawn to replace yuzu, and ichiruki end up being the tributes for district 12. 

Ichiruki then meet urahara, their mentor, on the train to the capitol. On this train they may or may not have a conversation regarding the fact that Rukia saved Ichigo’s life as kids, and that they have consequently been dancing around each other for years now. I reserve the right to add more to this section later. Either way, they are awkward at best and frosty at worst as they enter the capitol. 

At the capitol, they meet their stylists, uryuu and orihime. They are new stylists, who only graduated last year. This is their first official stylist job. This in itself is not that surprising, as district 12 was unpopular and often stuck with the inexperienced or not-quite-so-talented stylists. However, though uryuu and orihime are inexperienced, they are the furthest thing from untalented or unpopular - since they had been students, they have been somewhat of a rising star in the styling community. So, everyone is surprised when they both (separately) apply for the district 12 styling job, because they really could have had their pick. 

Ishihime were both born and raised in the capitol, but their childhoods were far from the lavish, glamorous lifestyle commonly associated with capitol citizens. If the capitol had a caste system (which they do — it’s just unspoken, is all), they would be on the bottom rung — orihime grew up under her brother in as close to poverty as what you can get in the capitol, dreaming of the glitz and glamour of the upper crust life. Ryuuken, meanwhile, is very rich, but for whatever reasons uryuu ran away from home young and has been surviving on his own since. The fact that they both clawed their way up the ranks to become hunger game stylists out of pure talent and tenacity was a novelty for everyone, and contributed to their rising stardom. 

Ishihime hadn’t met prior to their appointment as district 12 stylists, but they HAD heard of the other— it was a pleasant surprise to both of them that the other had also applied for the job. Though they only meet on the job, they click instantly and develop an easy working partnership to create a sensation with ichigo and rukia’s opening ceremony outfits. The outfits had a fire + ice theme, based on the fact that district 12 was a mining district (coal > fire, diamonds > ice). 

Orihime applied to the district 12 job because of Ichigo— she saw him volunteering for his sister on TV and maybe fell a little bit in love with him, with the idea of him— how romantic, how heroic of him, how noble to be able to volunteer for his sister like that— the same age as her, and so handsome, too, she wants to be by his side, she wants to help him, she wants to make sure he looks his best at the games so that he can maximise his chances of returning to his sister… as stated previously Orihime grew up entrenched in the capitol mindset so she is not yet aware of how fucked up the whole system is. Uryuu, meanwhile, nobody is particularly sure why he applied for the job… he said something trite about wanting to use his skills where it’s most needed, how he likes a challenge, but orihime wonders if that’s really all there is to it— outwardly, he’s the picture perfect new graduate, enthusiastic, happy, proud of his job— but there are moments when they are being applauded for their latest creations when she thinks his expression goes a little sour… it’s always fleeting and gone so fast that she can never be sure however 

Ichiruki, meanwhile, are the talk of the town. What with their stunning entrance at the opening ceremony and rukia’s public confession, all they have to do now is ride this wave of popularity all the way through the games for an easy win— unfortunately, they are both terribly bad at knowing how to manipulate this situation to their advantage. They both understand the gist of urahara’s plan — act like they’re falling in love— but neither of them understand WHY or HOW this will work. Why would the audience be invested in their falling in love? What exactly do they want to see? HOW do they act like they’re falling in love? (and, in Rukia’s case— how much of it should be pretend, how much of it is real?) 

Enter Rangiku, the previous district 12 stylist. She and gin grew up in one of the districts, both hating the games and the capitol, until one day at 14 yrs old, gin said to her ‘i’m gonna make it so that you don’t have to be afraid of your name being called at the reapings no more’, volunteered as tribute, won the games, and promptly disappeared from her life. 

Years later, rangiku sees gin on tv as the new host of the hunger games. She’s stunned and infuriated— she thought they both hates the capitol for what they did to the districts and now he’s WORKING for them? What the hell is he thinking? So rangiku packs up and moves to the capitol— her plan is to try to see him, to talk things out, surely there must be some kind of misunderstanding— but gin is all rich and famous now, and very heavily guarded, and she’s a nobody. There’s no way anyone will let her within ten feet of gin at all— so, rangiku decides she’s going to have to join the circus to talk to its head clown, and becomes a stylist. 

Unfortunately, even as a stylist, she can’t get a word to him edgewise— and she’s starting to suspect that maybe it’s not that she can’t get to him, but that gin is actively avoiding her. She COULD climb the ranks until he can no longer avoid her— she is very good at this stylist gig, much to her surprise— but she doesn’t have the heart to do the backstabbing and bribing necessary for that. She is constantly warring between ‘I cannot pour my talent into something this morally bankrupt’ and ‘but maybe if I do my best, I’ll give my district’s kids a fighting chance’. 

Eventually, by the time ichiruki step up, rangiku is so sick of having to dress kids up nicely for slaughter that she hands in her resignation, gives up on gin, and is getting ready to move back home to her district. That is, until she sees what an absolute record-breaker ichiruki are becoming, and start to hope again— that maybe, this year things will be different. That maybe, they will be different. That maybe, at least one of ‘her kids’ won’t go home in a coffin this year, will instead require outfits for a victory tour instead— a victory tour that is accompanied by their stylists… and the host. 

So, rangiku comes back in an unofficial capacity to help ichiruki refine their act a bit more. But with less than one month left till the games commence, will what they come up with be enough to carry them through the entire games? And, even if it does— what will happen if at the end of it all, the two people who remain are ichigo and rukia— when only one person gets to return home alive? 

Very unrelated point, but: ichigo apologised to rukia for grabbing her wrist post-tribute interview. Just wanted to clarify it is NOT alright to grab at people under any circumstances— ichigo did it in the heat of the moment, but when everything was cleared up he apologised for it. Had to mention this somewhere because it bothered me so much while drawing this installment— Ichigo you have NO room to be scolding the reporter for grabbing rukia, you did it not too long ago yourself! Having said that, that’s probably why he’s being very touchy about this— it was something that had been a sore point for him too very recently. 

To be continued! 

[easyfoodnetwork]

What If Nothing But Chain Restaurants Survive? 

Ruth just wanted to eat somewhere — anywhere — that wasn’t a chain

Their vibe had been great on the app, but for their first date, the girl suggested the Garden, and Ruth almost ghosted. It was the newest location, the one on York Boulevard that got spray-painted with anti-gentrification graffiti saying things like, “GO BACK 2 UR SUBURB” a couple weeks back; after cleaning it off, the Garden had made a big show of installing a community fridge. Honestly, Ruth wouldn’t have agreed to go if she couldn’t have walked there from her house. On a Saturday night, York was busy, the outdoor parklet tables overflowing at Torchy’s Tacos and Shake Shack and True Food Kitchen; people with laptops were still hunched in the Go Get ’Em Tiger, and tired-looking parents hauled growlers of beer from the Golden Road pub, maybe with a six-pack of Bud under their arm.

The Garden was the street’s newest addition, its glass exterior covered in long green vines, looking disconcertingly hip and inviting next to the local chain Thai Town, huddled in a former barbershop. The girl, Sierra, was waiting inside, perusing the menu projected on the wall in old-school Italian-joint cursive. She was shorter than Ruth had expected, and the ponytail peeking out from her trucker hat was bright pink. She greeted Ruth with a huge smile, and Ruth tried to act normal; meeting someone after messaging back and forth always felt so unbearable, even worse if they were actually cute. Sierra was cute. They bantered back and forth about whether the cauliflower parm would be good or a disaster, and agreed they could not not get mozzarella sticks. After ordering at the counter, they sat down and a runner immediately brought out a basket of warm breadsticks, the only reminder of the chain that had spawned the Garden.

The breadsticks were the best thing, soft and salty and comforting. Ruth’s cauliflower parm was soggy on the bottom, and Sierra’s vegan alfredo was like slurping nutritional yeast. Their messaging over the app had been playful and cheekily uninformative; now Sierra explained she was a storyboard artist on a kids cartoon about girl superheroes, airing on Prime. Ruth used to lead with her now-defunct Instagram ice cream business, or even her old restaurant in New York, the one that closed. But the endless grind of first dates had sanded down her pride, so she stuck to honesty: She was a corporate chef at Alexa’s.

“So we both work for Amazon,” Ruth said. “What are the odds?”

“Honestly, this isn’t the first time this happened on a date,” Sierra said. “Though you’re the first chef I’ve gone out with. And I brought you to a competitor!”

The Garden was not a competitor; Alexa’s did full table service, with good wines and produce pulled from the Whole Foods pipeline. Every dish was made by a person, at some point, from scratch. Ruth didn’t like how tightly she clung to this. “I appreciate Olive Garden’s way with breadsticks.”

“I was so pumped when this place opened in the neighborhood.”

“It’s not really my style?”

“Then on the next date, take me somewhere with better breadsticks.” She laughed, and Ruth decided she liked her.

Sierra came back to Ruth’s fixer-upper bungalow she’d run out of money to fixer-up, and they made out for a while. It was pleasantly awkward; neither quite knew why they liked the other yet, but what they stumbled onto was promising. Sierra said she’d be back for breakfast the next morning, a move Ruth honestly kind of appreciated because she’d worked a surprise double shift Friday and needed sleep. The next morning, Sierra let herself in with a bag of glossy chocolate Dunkin Donuts and sweet, milky coffee. Ruth asked if this was technically a second date, and Sierra slid her hands up Ruth’s loose T-shirt. The ice melted in the coffee by the time they got to it, but Ruth was glad for the doughnuts, even if they were a little stale.

Both she and Sierra worked 70-hour weeks — animating an empowering kids show was a real nightmare, it turned out — so they stole time together when they could. Mostly, they spent Sundays together, since Ruth was working Saturday nights again, the exact thing selling out was supposed to fix, but Alexa’s kept expanding and taking her chefs to open in Venice and Inglewood and Glassell Park and then she was stuck expediting again. Alexa’s was technically a New American restaurant, built around exclusive deals with farmers and Whole Foods’ zero-waste pledge (if a bunch of bruised peaches went from Whole Foods to Alexa’s house jam, everybody except the cooks who had to scramble to make jam was happy). The menu was shaped by algorithms that analyzed purchases and searches, or that’s what corporate claimed; Ruth would never have put Huli Huli chicken and a brown butter pasta on the same menu, but she had dutifully developed the recipes and watched them sell out night after night.

They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering.

Ruth kept putting off taking Sierra out for old-school Italian all the way across town. Instead, on Sundays they’d spend most of the day in bed, ordering in Sweetgreen if they couldn’t remember the last time they had vegetables, or Domino’s if they didn’t need to feel virtuous (mostly, they didn’t). Occasionally, they’d walk down to York or head to Figueroa for brunch. At the Houston’s in a historic former hotel, they always split the spinach artichoke dip, and at the Taco Bell Cantina that opened in one of the many former Mexican restaurants that used to line the neighborhood, they drank shitty bright blue frozen cocktails under a local graffiti artist’s mural that was preserved alongside the Taco Bell logo. Ruth hadn’t gone out this much since moving to Los Angeles, and it felt gross, sometimes, eating nothing but chain food. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. But it’s not like there was very much else, not anymore.

Late one Sunday morning while Sierra was listing off the usual brunch and delivery options, Ruth tried to express this to her, but all that came out was, “The thing is all these places kind of suck?”

Sierra stared at her phone. “I will not let you slander Domino’s in bed.” One of the characters on her show was obsessed with greasy pizza, and she had personally designed the cheese pull.

“Don’t you miss eating at mom and pops?”

“Taco Bell and the Garden are mom and pops. They’re all franchises.”

“We should make actual memories together.”

“Sharing breadsticks at the Garden is a real memory!”

Ruth took out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. She found the image of pork belly drenched in a glossy red sauce she’d been thinking of and showed it to Sierra, saying they should try something authentic. So they put on pants and drove to Alhambra and went to this new Hunan restaurant every food person Ruth followed on Instagram was hyping up. When they opened their menus, Sierra let out a snort and pointed to the cute illustrated map of the restaurant’s 50 locations across China.

After that, Ruth’s thrashing about chain restaurants became a thing, mostly a cute joke. Sierra regaled her friends about her obsessive chef girlfriend dragging her to an old-school burger stand literally surrounded by a luxury apartment building (Shake Shack was taking over the lease) and a 7/11 secretly serving Sri Lankan food and a backyard barbacoa set-up, all of them requiring at least an hour in traffic, maybe more. Ironically, this kind of restaurant tourism wasn’t a thing Ruth had had time for when she had her own restaurant, but now that she had gone corporate, sometimes there was such a thing as a slow week, so she could check out other people’s restaurants. Actually, Sierra would continue, the barbacoa stand they’d spent all Sunday seeking out had been glorious, but it was also so sad — the city had raided it the next week. The cooks at Alexa’s told Ruth the city was raiding street vendors all over the city, not just on commercial strips, now that the big chains were lobbying the city to clean up “unsafe” competition.

For Sierra’s birthday, Ruth surprised her with tickets to a secret pop-up supper club high up in Montecito Heights, hosted on a terraced patio overlooking the hazy towers of downtown. It was run by two white, queer chefs, an impossibly attractive tattooed couple, who were maybe 10 or 15 years younger than Ruth; in New York she would have known them, but out here she was so disconnected. There was a land acknowledgment and prompt to send money to a local mutual aid fund, and then 15 small courses of pepino melons over glass noodles, blistered purple okra with popped buckwheat, and hot-smoked salmon collars with a yuzu-miso glaze, broken up by two “palate cleanser” courses: a Spam sando and tiny Magnum ice cream bars. The food wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was seasonal and playful, and Ruth had only a few quibbles over technique: The house sourdough was overproofed, and the popped buckwheat did nothing for the okra.

“So what’d you think?” Ruth said on the ride home.

“Great view,” Sierra said. “That whole house was insane.”

“I really loved the corn pudding, but I’m not so sure about that buckwheat on okra.”

“There were a lot of really pretentious courses, and then, like, tiny ice cream? I wish there’d been more stuff like the bread and butter.”

“Oh, I thought it was overproofed,” Ruth said, but Sierra wasn’t even listening.

“Maybe you’d hate your job less if you did pop-ups like this, too,” Sierra said.

“Who says I hate my job?”

“Ruth, you work for the biggest corporation in the world and you hate chain food.”

“I hate chains because they swept in and took up everyone’s leases after COVID and now no one can open a restaurant.”

“I guess this means you don’t want to go to McDonald’s right now.”

“Why don’t we try to find a taco truck?” But even along Figueroa, which used to be lined with trucks, their bright signs scrolling BIRRIA MULITAS ASADA in the night, no one was out. The Garden was still open, though; Ruth sat in the car as Sierra ran in to get breadsticks.

That week at work, Ruth’s job was to find a use for this new buttermilk the company had sourced. It was genuinely fermented buttermilk, and good quality; it was perfect for biscuits, and if she could find a recipe that worked at scale, Alexa’s could change this dairy farmer’s life. By the end of the week, she had a biscuit she thought worked, and she gave it to the pastry cooks to test for the next night’s service. She even texted Sierra to tell her to swing by early for dinner, the first time she’d invited her to work. Ruth grifted some company time making a fresh batch of the biscuits herself to bring down for Sierra; when she got to the kitchen, she saw the cooks unwrapping a huge frozen pallet of premade biscuits to lob in the oven, next to the batch the pastry cooks had left to rise.

“What the hell is this?”

“We’re A/B testing, apparently,” Alonzo, the new chef, said with a roll of his eyes. “Kyle said these really taste homemade.”

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself.

Kyle was the efficiency officer sent down from Seattle to oversee what he called Alexa’s “workflow.” He’d already been asking a lot of questions about why there were pastry chefs working here when most desserts could be bought frozen, as if the whole point of Alexa’s hadn’t been to offer a premium restaurant experience.

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Sierra was sitting at the wine bar drinking ginger ale; Ruth tried not to watch her too intently as she munched on first the packaged biscuit, and then Ruth’s.

“Which do you like better?” Ruth said.

“Is this a test?”

“Either you can tell me or let the cameras assessing your expressions take a guess.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“The cameras are a staff rumor.” But they all wore fitness trackers that monitored the tone of their voices as they spoke to each other and to guests, and produced a rating on “harmony” and “service” at the end of shift. No one shouted in the kitchen. But the servers had learned that only the most obsequious tone of voice got them good customer interaction ratings.

Sierra broke off a piece of both biscuits and chewed thoughtfully. “To be honest, I wish you guys had breadsticks.” She said it with a little flirty smile, trying to deploy it as an inside joke.

“Clearly biscuits aren’t worth the trouble,” Ruth said, and took the basket back.

“So this was a test.”

“One of these is a recipe I’ve spent all week on, from a batch I made myself, for you. The other came frozen out of a box. If my own girlfriend can’t tell that my version is better, then there’s probably not much hope for me here.”

“Babe, I don’t even like biscuits that much —”

“When you get your check, be sure to leave your feedback about breadsticks.”

Sierra asked her to sit down; Ruth made excuses about having to work back in the kitchen, and then hid, taking up space and messing up people’s flow. Kyle would not have approved; the step tracker was probably wondering who was standing stock still during a busy service. At one point, she tried scrolling Instagram to distract herself, and there was a message from one of the pop-up chefs, asking if Ruth could get them a job at Alexa’s until they finished rounding up all their investors, you know? They were sure they’d find a space soon.

“You’ve never cooked for me before,” Sierra said on the car ride home. “Maybe if I’d had your cooking, I would have recognized it.”

“You don’t seem to care much about food, so I don’t see the point.”

“What the fuck, Ruth. I care about you.”

“I mean, the cooking doesn’t make me who I am, right? We used to have to remind each other of that all the time. That we’re more than a job.”

“I work for this huge company and make something I care about. Why can’t you try to too?”

They had the conversation they always had, about how Ruth should start a secret pop-up, and Sierra would do all the branding and promotion, and then she’d get rich investors and live her dream again. The next week, Ruth got her pay docked for rudeness, probably from when she’d snapped at Sierra about the biscuits. On Sunday, they went out to the Garden, and Ruth ate breadsticks until her mouth tasted of nothing but salt.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34UCH3U https://ift.tt/3bkKdpY

Ruth just wanted to eat somewhere — anywhere — that wasn’t a chain

Their vibe had been great on the app, but for their first date, the girl suggested the Garden, and Ruth almost ghosted. It was the newest location, the one on York Boulevard that got spray-painted with anti-gentrification graffiti saying things like, “GO BACK 2 UR SUBURB” a couple weeks back; after cleaning it off, the Garden had made a big show of installing a community fridge. Honestly, Ruth wouldn’t have agreed to go if she couldn’t have walked there from her house. On a Saturday night, York was busy, the outdoor parklet tables overflowing at Torchy’s Tacos and Shake Shack and True Food Kitchen; people with laptops were still hunched in the Go Get ’Em Tiger, and tired-looking parents hauled growlers of beer from the Golden Road pub, maybe with a six-pack of Bud under their arm.

The Garden was the street’s newest addition, its glass exterior covered in long green vines, looking disconcertingly hip and inviting next to the local chain Thai Town, huddled in a former barbershop. The girl, Sierra, was waiting inside, perusing the menu projected on the wall in old-school Italian-joint cursive. She was shorter than Ruth had expected, and the ponytail peeking out from her trucker hat was bright pink. She greeted Ruth with a huge smile, and Ruth tried to act normal; meeting someone after messaging back and forth always felt so unbearable, even worse if they were actually cute. Sierra was cute. They bantered back and forth about whether the cauliflower parm would be good or a disaster, and agreed they could not not get mozzarella sticks. After ordering at the counter, they sat down and a runner immediately brought out a basket of warm breadsticks, the only reminder of the chain that had spawned the Garden.

The breadsticks were the best thing, soft and salty and comforting. Ruth’s cauliflower parm was soggy on the bottom, and Sierra’s vegan alfredo was like slurping nutritional yeast. Their messaging over the app had been playful and cheekily uninformative; now Sierra explained she was a storyboard artist on a kids cartoon about girl superheroes, airing on Prime. Ruth used to lead with her now-defunct Instagram ice cream business, or even her old restaurant in New York, the one that closed. But the endless grind of first dates had sanded down her pride, so she stuck to honesty: She was a corporate chef at Alexa’s.

“So we both work for Amazon,” Ruth said. “What are the odds?”

“Honestly, this isn’t the first time this happened on a date,” Sierra said. “Though you’re the first chef I’ve gone out with. And I brought you to a competitor!”

The Garden was not a competitor; Alexa’s did full table service, with good wines and produce pulled from the Whole Foods pipeline. Every dish was made by a person, at some point, from scratch. Ruth didn’t like how tightly she clung to this. “I appreciate Olive Garden’s way with breadsticks.”

“I was so pumped when this place opened in the neighborhood.”

“It’s not really my style?”

“Then on the next date, take me somewhere with better breadsticks.” She laughed, and Ruth decided she liked her.

Sierra came back to Ruth’s fixer-upper bungalow she’d run out of money to fixer-up, and they made out for a while. It was pleasantly awkward; neither quite knew why they liked the other yet, but what they stumbled onto was promising. Sierra said she’d be back for breakfast the next morning, a move Ruth honestly kind of appreciated because she’d worked a surprise double shift Friday and needed sleep. The next morning, Sierra let herself in with a bag of glossy chocolate Dunkin Donuts and sweet, milky coffee. Ruth asked if this was technically a second date, and Sierra slid her hands up Ruth’s loose T-shirt. The ice melted in the coffee by the time they got to it, but Ruth was glad for the doughnuts, even if they were a little stale.

Both she and Sierra worked 70-hour weeks — animating an empowering kids show was a real nightmare, it turned out — so they stole time together when they could. Mostly, they spent Sundays together, since Ruth was working Saturday nights again, the exact thing selling out was supposed to fix, but Alexa’s kept expanding and taking her chefs to open in Venice and Inglewood and Glassell Park and then she was stuck expediting again. Alexa’s was technically a New American restaurant, built around exclusive deals with farmers and Whole Foods’ zero-waste pledge (if a bunch of bruised peaches went from Whole Foods to Alexa’s house jam, everybody except the cooks who had to scramble to make jam was happy). The menu was shaped by algorithms that analyzed purchases and searches, or that’s what corporate claimed; Ruth would never have put Huli Huli chicken and a brown butter pasta on the same menu, but she had dutifully developed the recipes and watched them sell out night after night.

They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering.

Ruth kept putting off taking Sierra out for old-school Italian all the way across town. Instead, on Sundays they’d spend most of the day in bed, ordering in Sweetgreen if they couldn’t remember the last time they had vegetables, or Domino’s if they didn’t need to feel virtuous (mostly, they didn’t). Occasionally, they’d walk down to York or head to Figueroa for brunch. At the Houston’s in a historic former hotel, they always split the spinach artichoke dip, and at the Taco Bell Cantina that opened in one of the many former Mexican restaurants that used to line the neighborhood, they drank shitty bright blue frozen cocktails under a local graffiti artist’s mural that was preserved alongside the Taco Bell logo. Ruth hadn’t gone out this much since moving to Los Angeles, and it felt gross, sometimes, eating nothing but chain food. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. But it’s not like there was very much else, not anymore.

Late one Sunday morning while Sierra was listing off the usual brunch and delivery options, Ruth tried to express this to her, but all that came out was, “The thing is all these places kind of suck?”

Sierra stared at her phone. “I will not let you slander Domino’s in bed.” One of the characters on her show was obsessed with greasy pizza, and she had personally designed the cheese pull.

“Don’t you miss eating at mom and pops?”

“Taco Bell and the Garden are mom and pops. They’re all franchises.”

“We should make actual memories together.”

“Sharing breadsticks at the Garden is a real memory!”

Ruth took out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. She found the image of pork belly drenched in a glossy red sauce she’d been thinking of and showed it to Sierra, saying they should try something authentic. So they put on pants and drove to Alhambra and went to this new Hunan restaurant every food person Ruth followed on Instagram was hyping up. When they opened their menus, Sierra let out a snort and pointed to the cute illustrated map of the restaurant’s 50 locations across China.

After that, Ruth’s thrashing about chain restaurants became a thing, mostly a cute joke. Sierra regaled her friends about her obsessive chef girlfriend dragging her to an old-school burger stand literally surrounded by a luxury apartment building (Shake Shack was taking over the lease) and a 7/11 secretly serving Sri Lankan food and a backyard barbacoa set-up, all of them requiring at least an hour in traffic, maybe more. Ironically, this kind of restaurant tourism wasn’t a thing Ruth had had time for when she had her own restaurant, but now that she had gone corporate, sometimes there was such a thing as a slow week, so she could check out other people’s restaurants. Actually, Sierra would continue, the barbacoa stand they’d spent all Sunday seeking out had been glorious, but it was also so sad — the city had raided it the next week. The cooks at Alexa’s told Ruth the city was raiding street vendors all over the city, not just on commercial strips, now that the big chains were lobbying the city to clean up “unsafe” competition.

For Sierra’s birthday, Ruth surprised her with tickets to a secret pop-up supper club high up in Montecito Heights, hosted on a terraced patio overlooking the hazy towers of downtown. It was run by two white, queer chefs, an impossibly attractive tattooed couple, who were maybe 10 or 15 years younger than Ruth; in New York she would have known them, but out here she was so disconnected. There was a land acknowledgment and prompt to send money to a local mutual aid fund, and then 15 small courses of pepino melons over glass noodles, blistered purple okra with popped buckwheat, and hot-smoked salmon collars with a yuzu-miso glaze, broken up by two “palate cleanser” courses: a Spam sando and tiny Magnum ice cream bars. The food wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was seasonal and playful, and Ruth had only a few quibbles over technique: The house sourdough was overproofed, and the popped buckwheat did nothing for the okra.

“So what’d you think?” Ruth said on the ride home.

“Great view,” Sierra said. “That whole house was insane.”

“I really loved the corn pudding, but I’m not so sure about that buckwheat on okra.”

“There were a lot of really pretentious courses, and then, like, tiny ice cream? I wish there’d been more stuff like the bread and butter.”

“Oh, I thought it was overproofed,” Ruth said, but Sierra wasn’t even listening.

“Maybe you’d hate your job less if you did pop-ups like this, too,” Sierra said.

“Who says I hate my job?”

“Ruth, you work for the biggest corporation in the world and you hate chain food.”

“I hate chains because they swept in and took up everyone’s leases after COVID and now no one can open a restaurant.”

“I guess this means you don’t want to go to McDonald’s right now.”

“Why don’t we try to find a taco truck?” But even along Figueroa, which used to be lined with trucks, their bright signs scrolling BIRRIA MULITAS ASADA in the night, no one was out. The Garden was still open, though; Ruth sat in the car as Sierra ran in to get breadsticks.

That week at work, Ruth’s job was to find a use for this new buttermilk the company had sourced. It was genuinely fermented buttermilk, and good quality; it was perfect for biscuits, and if she could find a recipe that worked at scale, Alexa’s could change this dairy farmer’s life. By the end of the week, she had a biscuit she thought worked, and she gave it to the pastry cooks to test for the next night’s service. She even texted Sierra to tell her to swing by early for dinner, the first time she’d invited her to work. Ruth grifted some company time making a fresh batch of the biscuits herself to bring down for Sierra; when she got to the kitchen, she saw the cooks unwrapping a huge frozen pallet of premade biscuits to lob in the oven, next to the batch the pastry cooks had left to rise.

“What the hell is this?”

“We’re A/B testing, apparently,” Alonzo, the new chef, said with a roll of his eyes. “Kyle said these really taste homemade.”

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself.

Kyle was the efficiency officer sent down from Seattle to oversee what he called Alexa’s “workflow.” He’d already been asking a lot of questions about why there were pastry chefs working here when most desserts could be bought frozen, as if the whole point of Alexa’s hadn’t been to offer a premium restaurant experience.

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Sierra was sitting at the wine bar drinking ginger ale; Ruth tried not to watch her too intently as she munched on first the packaged biscuit, and then Ruth’s.

“Which do you like better?” Ruth said.

“Is this a test?”

“Either you can tell me or let the cameras assessing your expressions take a guess.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“The cameras are a staff rumor.” But they all wore fitness trackers that monitored the tone of their voices as they spoke to each other and to guests, and produced a rating on “harmony” and “service” at the end of shift. No one shouted in the kitchen. But the servers had learned that only the most obsequious tone of voice got them good customer interaction ratings.

Sierra broke off a piece of both biscuits and chewed thoughtfully. “To be honest, I wish you guys had breadsticks.” She said it with a little flirty smile, trying to deploy it as an inside joke.

“Clearly biscuits aren’t worth the trouble,” Ruth said, and took the basket back.

“So this was a test.”

“One of these is a recipe I’ve spent all week on, from a batch I made myself, for you. The other came frozen out of a box. If my own girlfriend can’t tell that my version is better, then there’s probably not much hope for me here.”

“Babe, I don’t even like biscuits that much —”

“When you get your check, be sure to leave your feedback about breadsticks.”

Sierra asked her to sit down; Ruth made excuses about having to work back in the kitchen, and then hid, taking up space and messing up people’s flow. Kyle would not have approved; the step tracker was probably wondering who was standing stock still during a busy service. At one point, she tried scrolling Instagram to distract herself, and there was a message from one of the pop-up chefs, asking if Ruth could get them a job at Alexa’s until they finished rounding up all their investors, you know? They were sure they’d find a space soon.

“You’ve never cooked for me before,” Sierra said on the car ride home. “Maybe if I’d had your cooking, I would have recognized it.”

“You don’t seem to care much about food, so I don’t see the point.”

“What the fuck, Ruth. I care about you.”

“I mean, the cooking doesn’t make me who I am, right? We used to have to remind each other of that all the time. That we’re more than a job.”

“I work for this huge company and make something I care about. Why can’t you try to too?”

They had the conversation they always had, about how Ruth should start a secret pop-up, and Sierra would do all the branding and promotion, and then she’d get rich investors and live her dream again. The next week, Ruth got her pay docked for rudeness, probably from when she’d snapped at Sierra about the biscuits. On Sunday, they went out to the Garden, and Ruth ate breadsticks until her mouth tasted of nothing but salt.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34UCH3U via Blogger https://ift.tt/3gPS2os

[sonnetxli]

All of the Lights

May 13

Tokyo - Odaiba, Asakusa, Ueno

Unfortunately I was not feeling well overnight so I only slept for about 5 hours, but by the time morning came my stomach had settled and I was ready to tackle the day!

We got up fairly early and dropped by our neighborhood Family Mart - one of many, many convenience stores in the area - to pick up a few things, including breakfast. I picked a small baked item that looked delicious which turned out to be a cream and chocolate-filled crepe - and it WAS delicious.

Then we made our way to the neighborhood of Odaiba to locate the digital art installation called teamlab borderless. I had seen it online and had it recommended to me but read that it could get quite busy so we had pre-purchased our tickets. We arrived a little bit before opening time but they let us in early, which was lovely! Entry was smooth and quite quick.

teamlab borderless is a dynamic set of rooms and interactive areas where they use lights, music, and sound to create different visual effects. The patterns and pictures change all the time, so even if you come back to the same room twice it will not look as it did before. The whole area is quite dark, so I stuck to Gianna while she led the way through the various halls, stairs, and rooms.

By getting an early start we were able to beat a lot of the crowds and it seemed like we were perfectly on the first wave of visitors as each time we arrived at a room it wasn’t too busy, but by the time we were leaving that room it was filling up. It was fantastic!!!

There are so many amazing things to see at teamlab that it’s hard to summarize them well, but some of the experiences and highlights include: the Floating Nest, where you take off your shoes and walk across a net to then lay down and watch a light show; the Lantern Room, full of lights that resemble floating lanterns and change colors all the time; a lily-pad room that you could wade your way through; a bouldering area where you could climb through matched by color and sound; a delightfully slippery slide that made me feel like a kid again; a hilly room full of creatures like whales and frogs moving across the floor; a waterfall room with stunning water-like light effects; a wave room with thrashing, crashing waves; and a number of hallways sprouting flowers, shimmering with fireflies in bamboo forests, or with floral animals lumbering along.

We also decided to take part in the tea room experience for a small extra cost. Here you chose a tea - we both went with the iced green tea with yuzu - and sat along a long table to be served. Then they used lights to have flowers bloom in your teacup. The flowers would bloom unendingly, slowly unfurling on the foamy surface; if you picked up the cup to sip the tea and then replaced it on the table a shower of flower petals would dance away from your cup. It was a great break from the surprisingly active art displays (we were ready to sit down!) and a pretty display.

After the tea room we checked back on a couple of places to see the differences that had arrived over time, and then made our exit. We were quite surprised - and pleased - to see just how long the line had become to enter the museum (and this was the line for ticket holders, at that) and thus appreciate how we came at exactly the right time.

Right next to the entrance was a large Ferris wheel that we had chatted about going on earlier, so now that it was open we headed that way. I think we might have been the only ones on it at the time - the staff were all quite eager to usher us on. Anyways, it was a fun ride and a lovely view from the top - the bay and the futuristic neighborhood were all on display, along with a rather iconic-looking building that I recognized but could not remember the name of at the time (it’s the Fuji TV building). We took some pictures and then on the way down Gianna pointed out a park area that we could visit next. We promptly walked over and enjoyed a stroll through the gardens, complete with roses and butterflies and a beautiful ivied trellis built over a pair of vending machines - a beauty matched with function approach that is ubiquitous in Japan.

Feeling hungry, we decided to loop back to the mall nearby to visit the food court. We were both a bit tired - still adjusting to the time change - and I was feeling a little dizzy so we slowly walked along the stores to see the food options. We settled on a chicken and rice place and both ordered katsu or breaded meat cutlet, which came with salad, rice, and miso soup (oh and an unidentified item that was small, brown and thin - but it was decent so I ate it.) The taste was very good and it was nice to sit and rest for a bit, although I still felt a bit sleepy.

We decided to head to Asakusa next so we hopped back on the train. It’s quite fun to take trains out of Odaiba as much of it is surrounded by water so you get to take a train over a bridge. Ours ended up having a complete spiral in it that was rather fascinating!

We reached Asakusa and you could really feel that it is a touristy area. After taking a photo of the front gate, we plunged into the crowd along Nakamise Street, where rows of small shops selling traditional Japanese goods line the main walking path. Gianna was looking for a wallet so it was nice to pop in and out of stores with a goal in mind. We walked the full length of the street, checking products and prices along the way, briefly enjoyed the views of the actual temple at the end (which isn’t too big in terms of grounds, or at least not that I could see) and then went back along the shopping street so G could buy the wallet she had in mind. Purchase successfully made, we decided to head down a side covered street with a slightly bigger variety of shops. There was a lovely shop with cups, plates, chopsticks, and so on that I liked the style of and I ended up finding a cute tiny cup to buy.

We walked all the way down this new shopping street and then debated what to do next. I knew that Ueno Park was somewhere around the same area but wasn’t sure how far away it was. After looking it up I could see that it was the next neighborhood over - a fair walk, but more direct than going all the way back to the station to then take the train over. We decided to just go for it and walk.

This turned out to be both the best and worst decision of the day. Best, because even one or two blocks into our journey we were already away from the crowds and tourists and into what I like to think of as “real” Japan - actual normal side streets with houses and small businesses and school kids and cyclists and people going about their everyday lives. Walking along these kinds of places is my absolute favorite thing about visiting a country as you really feel what it might be like to live there. It was a delight, in that sense! And worst, because it really was a decently long walk and we had both decided to wear sandals for the day - tried and true ones, but ones we hadn’t worn since last summer - so by the time we were close to Ueno our feet were killing us.

As we reached Ueno station we had to try to figure out how to get to the other side to reach the park. G spotted a number of people going in to a certain entrance and that turned out to be a way in to the station. After another long walk inside we came out and found that we still weren’t quite where we needed to be. Gianna to the rescue again - she spotted an escalator up to a bridge that crossed over to the park. This turned out to be an entrance into Ueno Station also (called Panda Bridge) and we spent a moment resting there before continuing across to the park. There, we dragged our tired feet to a bench at the close side of the park (having been there before I can assure you that it is a MASSIVE area, but we did not have the energy to go beyond the one side). We actually sat here for quite a while just enjoying the scenery, people- and animal-watching, and alternately chatting or listening to the birds and other animals. The breeze was nice but a little too cold for my taste (G loved it), but we still sat relatively comfortably for about an hour.

Finally we summoned our energy and headed back to the station via our friend Panda Bridge. We considered dinner at the station but after assessing the choices opted to return to our hotel and simply buy ramen from the convenience store to make in our room. All in all we were quite pleased with our first full day’s adventure in Tokyo!

[beertengoku]

{:en}If we were to give out awards for the nicest people in brewing in Japan, then husband and wife team Kyohei and Monami Nakajima of Songbird Brewery would be contenders for the gold prize. BeerTengoku was thirty minutes late for a three o’clock interview due to some confusion with the express bus out from Tokyo and a thirty minute walk from the bus stop. This meant an interruption of their brew day, but they were both incredibly genial, welcoming and also apologetic.

Both of them have a long experience in craft beer, in particular the Japanese craft beer scene, with both of them working at Popeye’s [add link] in Tokyo. Having seen the bar grow from around 20 taps to over 50, they took the plunge and decided to open their own craft beer brewery in Kisarazu, Chiba, in 2012. Why Chiba (not exactly a craft beer mecca), and why Kisarazu, which is mainly known for its outlet mall? Like many other brewers, they wanted somewhere close to their home, and with a newborn baby born in June 2016, the brewery is also close for the family members, one of who turned up towards the end of the interview to look after the baby.

If you’ve ever seen a large scale brewery, then stepping into the brewing area at Brewery Songbird is akin to going back a few hundred years into the early industrial age. Some brewers use high-tech homebrewing equipment that can automate the process, while larger breweries use specially designed state-of-the-art equipment worth millions of dollars. At Songbird, there is no high-tech equipment emblazoned with LEDs and computer panels, besides a couple of pumps used to make moving 100 litres of boiling wort easier. The whole brewery is simple and functional, how both Kyohei and Monami like it. The hot liquor tank, mash tun and boil kettle are 100L stainless steel drums with a simple tap installed at the bottom, and all three are perched on some bricks with a roaring gas burner underneath. Kyohei-san was also proud to show off his homemade sparge arm, a device made from a coil of copper with holes drilled in it. It’s used to trickle water from the hot liquor tank over the mash, thus maximising the amount of sugars drawn out from the crushed malts.

The fermentation room, while small, has plenty of space for different techniques, something Kyohei was effervescent about to explain. Yeast is one of the driving forces behind the flavours of beer, with the conversion of sugar to alcohol well understood by drinkers, but few understand the importance of different kinds of yeast and the impact they have on the flavours of the beers produced. You can have two beers made with exactly the same base ingredients but different yeast, and the flavours can vary greatly. For this reason, Kyohei-san is trying to use a minimum of different yeasts to ensure that the flavour profiles stay the same throughout brewing. Moreover, the water used in brewing does not contain any chemical additives such as brewing salts, and nor is it filtered through any charcoal or other kinds of filters, something Monami was very proud of saying.

Another interesting technique, and not often found in Japan, is using open “ships” to ferment the beer using “coolships”. Coolships are wide, shallow open fermentation vessels [add pic] that allow the wort to cool quicker and also be imparted with wild yeasts and bacteria in the area. You wouldn’t want to do this in a city or suburban area though. It also depends on the weather – if it’s raining or snowing, then you could get additional chemicals that have been brought over from the industrial or busy city areas.

The area around Songbird Brewery could be considered the countryside of Kisarazu. With the nearest industrial area more than a 30-minute drive away, the area is full of open spaces that have plenty fresh air and lots of wind.  After walking for 40 minutes between the bus stop and the brewery, I can easily confirm that too. On the day we visited, Kyohei was brewing a 20L starter of a weizen to take home and put into a coolship near their house; however, he was unsure of when to use his coolship. January and February tend to bring the coldest weather, with temperatures varying from 1c to about 6c during the daytime, and also the lowest amount of monthly rainfall to Chiba, but December was relatively warm for the time of year. The plan is to take the wild fermented starter and then produce a sour beer later on in the year. Kyohei also showed us some of the previous samples Songbird Brewery had made and stored in the fermentation room.

If you’ve seen the list of beers Songbird Brewery have made [add link to list] then you could argue they’re one of the more ambitious breweries in Japan. Traditional beer styles such as blondes, wheat ales, and pale ales line up alongside brett table sours, smoked milds, peated IPAs, bier de garde (beers for keeping such as strong pale ales), franconia weisse, and bruins. At last count, they had upwards of 20 different styles of beers in their lineup with more planned. Both Kyohei and Monami are interested in different beer styles and the book has been one of founding resources they’ve used, and found many of the new styles. Moreover, their ideas come from everyday situations – with food pairings being the driving force behind new styles and combinations of adjuncts.

Their beer lineup, with it being so varied, has produced some interesting and unique beers such as an orange and ginger beer, yuzu and vanilla, and perhaps the most unusual, a lavender beer. The last one has provoked perhaps the most diverse reactions to it. Monami laughed at my response on asking for my opinion of the beer (I said it reminded me of the air freshener my wife uses in the toilet). Monami said that overall, female drinkers had a positive response to the beer, while male drinkers have generally had a negative response to it.  While the beer will appear in their 2016 winter lineup, Kyohei did say that less lavender would be used in this years’ edition.

Most of their beers do not take so long to make, with most of them bottled and kegged by hand; however, 2016 saw Brewery Songbird take on their first collaborative beer with one of our favourite beer shops, Liquors Hasegawa in Tokyo. The peated black IPA was a limited edition collaboration that almost never saw the light of day. While brewing the beer, the pump broke down and started pouring out hot fresh wort across the floor. Quick thinking meant a quick break down of the piping and pouring it back into the kettle, saving what was left. Speaking of problems Songbird has had, high alcohol beers and those with large grain bills also cause difficulties due to the much longer time needed, and the lack of guarantee of quality beer coming out as well.

Though Songbird Brewery is very much a husband-and-wife environment, there’s one thing that they didn’t do- design the labels. Their friend, who specialises in fashion and designs from the 30’s, had the task of designing the logo and the labels for the regular range of beers. Each label contains some reference to the name (Songbird), the area (Kisarazu), the beer, and sometimes a small location in the local area. Monami challenged us to find the little details in the blonde label, and while we’re not going to give you the answers, it was great to finally realise the meanings of the subtle hints. (OK, we’ll tell you one – take a look at the front wall of the temple on the Songbird Blonde and you’ll see the katakana character for so ソ).

At the moment, Songbird Brewery supply 20 bars that regularly get their kegs on tap, and their bottles can be found in Tokyo and on their online store with shipping across Japan. If you do find them on tap, try some. {:}{:ja}日本版：ロブソン由加里ソングバードビールは、千葉県木更津市で中島夫妻が経営している。この夫婦は自分が今まで出会ってきた日本のブルワリー経営者の中で、一番と言えるほどとても親切な2人だった。 今回自分は交通事情により約束時間から30分も遅れて到着してしまったのだが、中島夫妻は嫌な顔一つみせず、むしろ自分の事を歓迎して出迎えてくれた。 ソングバードビールブルワリーを開く前は2人とも東京にある麦酒倶楽部ポパイで働いていた。タップの数を20から50タップ程に増やすなど、クラフトビールの人気が広まっていく様子を目の当たりにした2人はやがて、自分たちのブルワリーを開く事を決心した。場所は自宅から近い方がいいとの事から、千葉県木更津市を選んだ。

ブルワリーは、他の大規模なブルワリーと比べるとだいぶ違う印象を受ける。全てが中島さんによるデザインのシンプルな構造をしており、ここにはいわゆるハイテク機器というものはない。キョウヘイさんはホームメイドの設備を誇りに思っている。 ブルワリーの中にある発酵部屋は決して大きくはないが、それでも様々な技術を行うには十分な広さである。ソングバードビールのレシピはキョウヘイさんによって慎重に調整されていて、製造工程中あまり多くの種類のイーストを使用していない。さらに水も添加物を使用していない ソングバードでは更に日本では珍しいクールシップというテクニックを施している。クールシップとは浅く平たい発酵に使う容器だ。麦汁は速く冷やされ、さらに天然酵母とバクテリアに晒される。この技術は混みいった都会には向かないが、木更津にあるソングバードでは素晴らしい製造法となった。

ブルワリー周辺は木更津市の中でも街からは離れていて、空気がきれいなところだ。自分がソングバードブルワリーを訪ねた時、キョウヘイさんはちょうど自宅近くで20ℓもの小麦のスターターでクールシップを行なっているところだった。ここで自然発酵させたあと、年内にはサワービールを完成させる予定だという。 ソングバードは多くの種類のビール揃えている。彼らの作るビールは今の所20種類強といったところだが、まだまだ増え続けている。中島さんは日々の食事の食べ合わせなどから、新しいビールのアイデアを得ているという。 彼らのビールの中には面白いコンビネーションをもつビールがある。生姜とオレンジ、ゆずとバニラ、さらにはラベンダーのビールもある。そのなかでもラベンダービールは最も多様な反応があった。自分が試���した時、思わず芳香剤が頭をよぎったが、それを話すともなみさんは笑った。ラベンダービールは、男性よりも女性に好まれているという。キョウヘイさんによると、次回は使用するラベンダーの量を減らすらしい。 2016年、ソングバードビールは東京のはせがわ酒店と初めてコラボしてビールを作った。ピートブラックIPAである。実はこのビール製造過程でポンプが壊れ、熱いビールが床に噴射されてしまうという大きなアクシデントに見舞われていた。製造を中止するところだったが、幸運にも余ったビールを残すことができた。 ソングバードブルワリーは全て中島夫妻によって作られているが、ビールのラベルデザインは1930年代のファッションやデザインを得意とする地域のバーのオーナーによって描かれている。それぞれのラベルはソングバード、木更津やビールそのものを連想させる。 現在は、20軒のバーにビールを供給していて、ソングバードのボトルビールは東京や彼らのオンラインストアで手に入れることができる。もしソングバードビールを飲める機会に出会ったら、迷わず飲んでみることだ。飲むたびにうまくなっていく。{:}

Interview with Brewery Songbird / ブルワリーソングバードのインタビュー #craftbeer #beer #beerinjapan #クラフトビール ビール #地ビール #ソングバードビール {:en}If we were to give out awards for the nicest people in brewing in Japan, then husband and wife team Kyohei and Monami Nakajima of Songbird Brewery would be contenders for the gold prize.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Ruth just wanted to eat somewhere — anywhere — that wasn’t a chain Their vibe had been great on the app, but for their first date, the girl suggested the Garden, and Ruth almost ghosted. It was the newest location, the one on York Boulevard that got spray-painted with anti-gentrification graffiti saying things like, “GO BACK 2 UR SUBURB” a couple weeks back; after cleaning it off, the Garden had made a big show of installing a community fridge. Honestly, Ruth wouldn’t have agreed to go if she couldn’t have walked there from her house. On a Saturday night, York was busy, the outdoor parklet tables overflowing at Torchy’s Tacos and Shake Shack and True Food Kitchen; people with laptops were still hunched in the Go Get ’Em Tiger, and tired-looking parents hauled growlers of beer from the Golden Road pub, maybe with a six-pack of Bud under their arm. The Garden was the street’s newest addition, its glass exterior covered in long green vines, looking disconcertingly hip and inviting next to the local chain Thai Town, huddled in a former barbershop. The girl, Sierra, was waiting inside, perusing the menu projected on the wall in old-school Italian-joint cursive. She was shorter than Ruth had expected, and the ponytail peeking out from her trucker hat was bright pink. She greeted Ruth with a huge smile, and Ruth tried to act normal; meeting someone after messaging back and forth always felt so unbearable, even worse if they were actually cute. Sierra was cute. They bantered back and forth about whether the cauliflower parm would be good or a disaster, and agreed they could not not get mozzarella sticks. After ordering at the counter, they sat down and a runner immediately brought out a basket of warm breadsticks, the only reminder of the chain that had spawned the Garden. The breadsticks were the best thing, soft and salty and comforting. Ruth’s cauliflower parm was soggy on the bottom, and Sierra’s vegan alfredo was like slurping nutritional yeast. Their messaging over the app had been playful and cheekily uninformative; now Sierra explained she was a storyboard artist on a kids cartoon about girl superheroes, airing on Prime. Ruth used to lead with her now-defunct Instagram ice cream business, or even her old restaurant in New York, the one that closed. But the endless grind of first dates had sanded down her pride, so she stuck to honesty: She was a corporate chef at Alexa’s. “So we both work for Amazon,” Ruth said. “What are the odds?” “Honestly, this isn’t the first time this happened on a date,” Sierra said. “Though you’re the first chef I’ve gone out with. And I brought you to a competitor!” The Garden was not a competitor; Alexa’s did full table service, with good wines and produce pulled from the Whole Foods pipeline. Every dish was made by a person, at some point, from scratch. Ruth didn’t like how tightly she clung to this. “I appreciate Olive Garden’s way with breadsticks.” “I was so pumped when this place opened in the neighborhood.” “It’s not really my style?” “Then on the next date, take me somewhere with better breadsticks.” She laughed, and Ruth decided she liked her. Sierra came back to Ruth’s fixer-upper bungalow she’d run out of money to fixer-up, and they made out for a while. It was pleasantly awkward; neither quite knew why they liked the other yet, but what they stumbled onto was promising. Sierra said she’d be back for breakfast the next morning, a move Ruth honestly kind of appreciated because she’d worked a surprise double shift Friday and needed sleep. The next morning, Sierra let herself in with a bag of glossy chocolate Dunkin Donuts and sweet, milky coffee. Ruth asked if this was technically a second date, and Sierra slid her hands up Ruth’s loose T-shirt. The ice melted in the coffee by the time they got to it, but Ruth was glad for the doughnuts, even if they were a little stale. Both she and Sierra worked 70-hour weeks — animating an empowering kids show was a real nightmare, it turned out — so they stole time together when they could. Mostly, they spent Sundays together, since Ruth was working Saturday nights again, the exact thing selling out was supposed to fix, but Alexa’s kept expanding and taking her chefs to open in Venice and Inglewood and Glassell Park and then she was stuck expediting again. Alexa’s was technically a New American restaurant, built around exclusive deals with farmers and Whole Foods’ zero-waste pledge (if a bunch of bruised peaches went from Whole Foods to Alexa’s house jam, everybody except the cooks who had to scramble to make jam was happy). The menu was shaped by algorithms that analyzed purchases and searches, or that’s what corporate claimed; Ruth would never have put Huli Huli chicken and a brown butter pasta on the same menu, but she had dutifully developed the recipes and watched them sell out night after night. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. Ruth kept putting off taking Sierra out for old-school Italian all the way across town. Instead, on Sundays they’d spend most of the day in bed, ordering in Sweetgreen if they couldn’t remember the last time they had vegetables, or Domino’s if they didn’t need to feel virtuous (mostly, they didn’t). Occasionally, they’d walk down to York or head to Figueroa for brunch. At the Houston’s in a historic former hotel, they always split the spinach artichoke dip, and at the Taco Bell Cantina that opened in one of the many former Mexican restaurants that used to line the neighborhood, they drank shitty bright blue frozen cocktails under a local graffiti artist’s mural that was preserved alongside the Taco Bell logo. Ruth hadn’t gone out this much since moving to Los Angeles, and it felt gross, sometimes, eating nothing but chain food. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. But it’s not like there was very much else, not anymore. Late one Sunday morning while Sierra was listing off the usual brunch and delivery options, Ruth tried to express this to her, but all that came out was, “The thing is all these places kind of suck?” Sierra stared at her phone. “I will not let you slander Domino’s in bed.” One of the characters on her show was obsessed with greasy pizza, and she had personally designed the cheese pull. “Don’t you miss eating at mom and pops?” “Taco Bell and the Garden are mom and pops. They’re all franchises.” “We should make actual memories together.” “Sharing breadsticks at the Garden is a real memory!” Ruth took out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. She found the image of pork belly drenched in a glossy red sauce she’d been thinking of and showed it to Sierra, saying they should try something authentic. So they put on pants and drove to Alhambra and went to this new Hunan restaurant every food person Ruth followed on Instagram was hyping up. When they opened their menus, Sierra let out a snort and pointed to the cute illustrated map of the restaurant’s 50 locations across China. After that, Ruth’s thrashing about chain restaurants became a thing, mostly a cute joke. Sierra regaled her friends about her obsessive chef girlfriend dragging her to an old-school burger stand literally surrounded by a luxury apartment building (Shake Shack was taking over the lease) and a 7/11 secretly serving Sri Lankan food and a backyard barbacoa set-up, all of them requiring at least an hour in traffic, maybe more. Ironically, this kind of restaurant tourism wasn’t a thing Ruth had had time for when she had her own restaurant, but now that she had gone corporate, sometimes there was such a thing as a slow week, so she could check out other people’s restaurants. Actually, Sierra would continue, the barbacoa stand they’d spent all Sunday seeking out had been glorious, but it was also so sad — the city had raided it the next week. The cooks at Alexa’s told Ruth the city was raiding street vendors all over the city, not just on commercial strips, now that the big chains were lobbying the city to clean up “unsafe” competition. For Sierra’s birthday, Ruth surprised her with tickets to a secret pop-up supper club high up in Montecito Heights, hosted on a terraced patio overlooking the hazy towers of downtown. It was run by two white, queer chefs, an impossibly attractive tattooed couple, who were maybe 10 or 15 years younger than Ruth; in New York she would have known them, but out here she was so disconnected. There was a land acknowledgment and prompt to send money to a local mutual aid fund, and then 15 small courses of pepino melons over glass noodles, blistered purple okra with popped buckwheat, and hot-smoked salmon collars with a yuzu-miso glaze, broken up by two “palate cleanser” courses: a Spam sando and tiny Magnum ice cream bars. The food wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was seasonal and playful, and Ruth had only a few quibbles over technique: The house sourdough was overproofed, and the popped buckwheat did nothing for the okra. “So what’d you think?” Ruth said on the ride home. “Great view,” Sierra said. “That whole house was insane.” “I really loved the corn pudding, but I’m not so sure about that buckwheat on okra.” “There were a lot of really pretentious courses, and then, like, tiny ice cream? I wish there’d been more stuff like the bread and butter.” “Oh, I thought it was overproofed,” Ruth said, but Sierra wasn’t even listening. “Maybe you’d hate your job less if you did pop-ups like this, too,” Sierra said. “Who says I hate my job?” “Ruth, you work for the biggest corporation in the world and you hate chain food.” “I hate chains because they swept in and took up everyone’s leases after COVID and now no one can open a restaurant.” “I guess this means you don’t want to go to McDonald’s right now.” “Why don’t we try to find a taco truck?” But even along Figueroa, which used to be lined with trucks, their bright signs scrolling BIRRIA MULITAS ASADA in the night, no one was out. The Garden was still open, though; Ruth sat in the car as Sierra ran in to get breadsticks. That week at work, Ruth’s job was to find a use for this new buttermilk the company had sourced. It was genuinely fermented buttermilk, and good quality; it was perfect for biscuits, and if she could find a recipe that worked at scale, Alexa’s could change this dairy farmer’s life. By the end of the week, she had a biscuit she thought worked, and she gave it to the pastry cooks to test for the next night’s service. She even texted Sierra to tell her to swing by early for dinner, the first time she’d invited her to work. Ruth grifted some company time making a fresh batch of the biscuits herself to bring down for Sierra; when she got to the kitchen, she saw the cooks unwrapping a huge frozen pallet of premade biscuits to lob in the oven, next to the batch the pastry cooks had left to rise. “What the hell is this?” “We’re A/B testing, apparently,” Alonzo, the new chef, said with a roll of his eyes. “Kyle said these really taste homemade.” Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Kyle was the efficiency officer sent down from Seattle to oversee what he called Alexa’s “workflow.” He’d already been asking a lot of questions about why there were pastry chefs working here when most desserts could be bought frozen, as if the whole point of Alexa’s hadn’t been to offer a premium restaurant experience. Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Sierra was sitting at the wine bar drinking ginger ale; Ruth tried not to watch her too intently as she munched on first the packaged biscuit, and then Ruth’s. “Which do you like better?” Ruth said. “Is this a test?” “Either you can tell me or let the cameras assessing your expressions take a guess.” “Wait, are you serious?” “The cameras are a staff rumor.” But they all wore fitness trackers that monitored the tone of their voices as they spoke to each other and to guests, and produced a rating on “harmony” and “service” at the end of shift. No one shouted in the kitchen. But the servers had learned that only the most obsequious tone of voice got them good customer interaction ratings. Sierra broke off a piece of both biscuits and chewed thoughtfully. “To be honest, I wish you guys had breadsticks.” She said it with a little flirty smile, trying to deploy it as an inside joke. “Clearly biscuits aren’t worth the trouble,” Ruth said, and took the basket back. “So this was a test.” “One of these is a recipe I’ve spent all week on, from a batch I made myself, for you. The other came frozen out of a box. If my own girlfriend can’t tell that my version is better, then there’s probably not much hope for me here.” “Babe, I don’t even like biscuits that much —” “When you get your check, be sure to leave your feedback about breadsticks.” Sierra asked her to sit down; Ruth made excuses about having to work back in the kitchen, and then hid, taking up space and messing up people’s flow. Kyle would not have approved; the step tracker was probably wondering who was standing stock still during a busy service. At one point, she tried scrolling Instagram to distract herself, and there was a message from one of the pop-up chefs, asking if Ruth could get them a job at Alexa’s until they finished rounding up all their investors, you know? They were sure they’d find a space soon. “You’ve never cooked for me before,” Sierra said on the car ride home. “Maybe if I’d had your cooking, I would have recognized it.” “You don’t seem to care much about food, so I don’t see the point.” “What the fuck, Ruth. I care about you.” “I mean, the cooking doesn’t make me who I am, right? We used to have to remind each other of that all the time. That we’re more than a job.” “I work for this huge company and make something I care about. Why can’t you try to too?” They had the conversation they always had, about how Ruth should start a secret pop-up, and Sierra would do all the branding and promotion, and then she’d get rich investors and live her dream again. The next week, Ruth got her pay docked for rudeness, probably from when she’d snapped at Sierra about the biscuits. On Sunday, they went out to the Garden, and Ruth ate breadsticks until her mouth tasted of nothing but salt. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34UCH3U

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