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That Feels Very Jackfruit-ish to Me: An Interview with Jacqueline Alnes, Author of “The Fruit Cure”

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15-16)

Thus begins Jacqueline Alnes’s memoir The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour. Through research and her own story of falling for an all-fruit diet as a college athlete with a neurological illness, Alnes tackles the pitfalls of the healthcare system, challenges the language of wellness culture, and addresses the dangers of being chronically online as an impressionable youth. The Inquisitive Eater was fortunate enough to speak with Alnes over Zoom about her book, diets, and everything in between.

When people think about diets, they usually think about food and physical health, but I wanted to start off by asking if you have a diet for mental health, as in, what do you consume for self-care?

That’s a great question. I think food is so emotional, which I think is partially what comes up in the book—you can start to assign value to food. And I think, obviously, as I wrote about, that can become dangerous. But I think the question you’re asking is much more fun, which is food can also be this source of joy or comfort. For me, there’s so many; I love food.

I am obsessed with matcha latte every Tuesday and Thursday because I teach for eight hours straight. I don’t think it’s so much physical as it is, “I get a treat at a certain midpoint,” and then that carries me through the rest of the day. Keeps me cheerful.

My grandma used to make chicken soup, and sometimes they make that, and that feels like a way of remembering someone, even if it’s not about the food itself.

I make cookies a lot, so I have a lot of memories of friends eating my cookies, or myself eating my cookies.

Aww, that’s really sweet!

When I was looking at your website, I noticed that each page has a different fruit in the background. “Writing” has dragon fruit and lychee. Was that a symbolic choice, as in, do you think that your writing is about unveiling your inner self, or if you could pick a fruit to symbolize your writing, what fruit would you pick?

Oh my gosh, that’s a good question. I’ll say the website is mostly just for aesthetics.

I don’t know if I’m drawn to this because it’s my favorite fruit when it’s good, but jackfruit. I love it. On the outside, it’s sort of unassuming, gigantic, a little bit spiky. But then you open it up, and there’s all those pods—endless rows of pods. I feel like that’s how writing is for me where you have this idea on the outside, but then as soon as you open it up—oops, I have different things in here! And I could eat them all if I wanted to! I’m really into rabbit holes and get really enthusiastic about things, and that feels very jackfruit-ish to me.

You surprise yourself, too.

Yeah, for sure. That’s one of the most fun things about writing, not knowing where it’s gonna go.

In your alumni interview with Elon University, you said that you were working on two books: “One is a memoir about a neurological illness that began at Elon, and another is a narrative nonfiction book about the rise and fall of a fruitarian YouTube community.” When did you realize that those two books could be combined? When did they click?

Well, the not-cute answer is the first one didn’t sell, so it was a product of the publishing industry giving me a sign.

I wrote the memoir about the neurological stuff during my MFA and my PhD. For six years, most of my energy was toward that project, and it was very, very, very tethered to me. It did not at all really go outside of me, myself and I, and so I think I had to write that version just to get it out of my system or process it.

Now that I look back on it as a book, it does feel super insular and not as interesting to me in a bigger way in terms of thinking about getting rid of that loneliness that I felt. I just kind of let myself stay in that loneliness and feel like this is my story. And so after that one didn’t sell, I remember that I was just gonna, for fun, try writing something about the fruit people and see what happened.

I couldn’t stop coming back to myself, so eventually, I started realizing that they weren’t separate at all. I had thought of them as if I was going to write from the outside looking in, but then I realized, wait a second, the reason I was obsessed with them for so long was because there’s so many ways that they reflected my story back to me, and I, them. So it sort of became an invitation then to rewrite and rethink my own story, but in light of that one, and so I’m really glad that it happened the way it did.

All part of finding the jackfruit.

Exactly. I think it’s important for people to know that this book wasn’t born out of my first idea, or even my first draft or my first attempt. I’m always comforted by other people admitting, “I failed. I totally struck out, and now, I didn’t, and I’m okay.”

When I was looking up fruitarianism, I found something called the “alkaline diet.” According to healthline.com, it’s “based on the idea that replacing acid-forming foods with alkaline foods … can alter the pH of your body.” Such alkaline foods include fruits, nuts, legumes, vegetables. It explains that, “Proponents of this diet even claim that it can help fight serious diseases like cancer,” but goes on to say, “However, claims that it boosts health are not supported by reliable studies.” Why do you think language and fact checking are so important when it comes to talking about diet and health?

What you bring up is really important, which is, when I was looking at the fruit diet, I was twenty years old. Twenty! Looking at the website as a twenty-year-old, I would see stuff like “adrenal fatigue,” and it sounded so fancy, so legitimate. I didn’t even know what it was, but I heard that, and language like “toxins,” “arteries,” “clogging your arteries.” I started to believe it.

I think part of fact checking is just looking at the language that’s being employed and asking, “Do they have the credentials to support this language they’re using? And is it even a legitimate thing? Or is it more based in emotion and coming from a place of fear?” Like when I hear healthline.com mentioning cancer, I think a lot of times these diets warn us of what we all are most afraid of, which is dying, aging, getting really terrible diseases that have taken loved ones from all of us. Anytime that’s used as a reason for you to do something, look into the connection of, “Is that legitimate? Is it a peer reviewed study with a wide body of people? Or is it two people who ate blueberries, who were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t have cancer, we’re good’?”

When I was talking to these dieticians for the book, they were talking about how sometimes health practitioners will use their degrees, but not in helpful ways. For example, when I was on the banana website, there was this cardiologist who would say, “Don’t eat olive oil. Olive oil is a complete toxin. It clogs your arteries.” I started believing it. Then the dieticians I talked to years later were like, “That is not advice he should be giving to a twenty-year-old who has no heart problems. If you’re in your seventies and you’re having heart problems, then maybe that’s advice you can take.” Using medical credentials but manipulating it in a way where it’s to everyone, when no advice should be for every person, it should be more specific. Those are things I took away as being, if I were to ever get in a situation again, questions I would ask.

You mentioned getting rid of toxins and clogging right now, and in Chapter Two, you show how fruitarianism began as a religious movement in the late 1800s as people believed that restraint was pure, excess was sinful. Today, a lot of registered dieticians have gone viral on TikTok for suggesting an “add, don’t subtract” approach, where instead of trying to eat less unhealthy foods, you try to eat more healthy foods, as in, you add fruit to your oatmeal, instead of just eating fruit. What do you think this kind of approach says about today’s generation or today’s societal beliefs?

I don’t want to generalize, but I feel, potentially—and I say potentially because these resources are not always true—we do live in an era where we have more access to resources that contradict each other. For example, I can go on Instagram, and I’ll see something that’s like, “January 1st—do a detox for your body!” But then a licensed [registered dietitian] is next on my feed saying, “Look, if someone tells you to detox your body, that’s what you have kidneys for.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I don’t need to fall for that scam.”

Abundance is something I thought a lot about in the book, and this idea of more versus less. At least for the fruitarians I followed, abundance was part of their appeal because it’s the Holy Grail of eating where you can eat more and still be thin or “healthy.”

I think there are more proponents of health, at every size, of not having to look a certain way, but instead feel a certain way or paying attention to actually just the eating itself and not worrying about what that means in terms of aesthetics or looks. It’s definitely something that I’ve seen more of lately that I really do appreciate.

You have a line in Chapter Fifteen that really stood out to me as a main takeaway from the book: “When choosing to follow someone online, [registered dietitian nutritionist] Dahlia [Marin] encourages people to ask, ‘Does this person have high emotional intelligence? And does this person live a life that I would want to live myself?’ If the answers to these questions are no, it might not be the best fit.” Could you give an example of what you think emotional intelligence might look like within diet culture?

Emotional intelligence in that context, at least for me, might be a willingness to be wrong, and a willingness to be flexible. When I see creators who are sticking to an idea of what is right or wrong, good or bad, it’s so easy to get pigeonholed into a certain belief system.

The anonymous person I talked to, they were talking about feeling like they were in an echo chamber, because at a certain point, all of the voices around them start to say the same thing. And I think that can happen on social media if you refuse to admit that maybe you were wrong. Maybe you could make a small change, and it might suit you better. Or if you start feeling unwell, trying a certain diet, having the courage to be like, “Actually, it’s not working for me anymore” without feeling shame about that. So I feel for me, that’s what I look for. Is this person painting broad strokes for a huge population of what they think is right? Or are they kind of sitting with you and being like, “Well, it’s complicated. Let’s try stuff.” And that seems to be more authentic and more of what life is, which is pretty messy all the time, in my opinion.

Is there anything that you would like to say about your book? One last message?

To my followers? No, I’m kidding.

Reaching for nuance whenever you can is richer than living in extremes one way or another. It’s sometimes less comfortable to live in the gray area where there aren’t rules and there aren’t definitive answers that tell you you’re doing the right thing, but I think it’s more real that way, and I think your life can be richer for it.

Christine Ro is a first-year Nonfiction student in the Creative Writing MFA program at The New School and one of the nonfiction editors of The Inquisitive Eater. She loves to write humor essays and screenplays. Some of her work can be found at The New School Free Press and The Inquisitive Eater.

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Get these tomatoes out of my poem!: An Interview with Evan Hanczor, Founder of Tables of Contents

Evan Hanczor is the founder of Tables of Contents, a reading/tasting series that pairs short selections of prose with small plates inspired by the writing. In 2021, the TOC team put out Tables of Contents Community Cookbook, a cookbook that compiles recipes by former readers and was named one of the best cookbooks of the year by the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Hanczor is also the owner and chef of Little Egg, the new reincarnation of Williamsburg’s beloved Egg restaurant, which closed in 2020. 

The Inquisitive Eater paid a visit to the most recent TOC reading, which featured Megan Fernandes, Tess Gunty, and Gina Chung (a New School MFA grad!). Hanczor prepared “rabbit food,” aka a carrot puree uni dish and a grazing salad; Tanya Bush of Cake Zine fame made a chocolate layer cake with thick, creamy peanut butter mocha frosting. After the readings and the food, Hanczor led the authors in a panel discussion, talking about their allergies — both culinary and literary. 

We got to sit down with Hanczor to discuss the inspiration for TOC, sustainability in food writing, and the most important thing in the world (tomatoes). Here’s a transcript of our conversation. 

I read in your fantastic piece for Lit Hub that the first inklings of what eventually became Table of Contents came to you while reading The Sun Also Rises. Can you talk to me a little bit about how that reading influenced you?

I was at Tulane, and I was taking this class called Last Call, which was taught by a professor named Dale Edmonds and was the last class he was going to teach at Tulane after 30 years of teaching. I snuck into the class — I had heard about this professor, and I wanted to catch him before he left the school. It was just him teaching his favorite books. Someone teaching a book with that certain kind of passion, particularly their last hurrah — he did it well. And I was also in college, and had this romantic literary tendency. So I was reading The Sun Also Rises in my friend’s backyard, drinking a bottle of red wine, and just thinking, “Man, I wanna live in this book.” I wanted to eat the meals and experience the senses of the book. But I wasn’t a cook. I cooked for my friends, but I wasn’t a cook.

That initial feeling or desire came back when we had some friends who were holding this book festival called Food Book Fair around the corner from Egg in Williamsburg, and they asked us to do the closing dinner for it. George Weld, who was my partner at Egg, is also a writer — a poet-turned-cook. So we had a very similar trajectory, and similar interests. I was like, why don’t we try to do a literary meal? It’s a food/book thing, that would make sense.

So we did this dinner inspired by The Sun Also Rises, which was five courses, each course inspired by a specific scene, just like the reading series is now. There’s a scene where some of the characters eat at this restaurant, Madame Lecomte’s, in Paris. And they eat this roast chicken with green beans and potatoes, so we turned that into a salad. There’s obviously iconic bullfighting happening in the book. So we did kind of a bullfight dish, with mushroom powder all over the plate and beet juice splattered like blood and a roast steak.

I think the scene that kind of hit me the most when I was reading the book, which still is one of my favorite dishes, is when two characters, Jake and Bill, are on the Spain-France border, fishing. And they’re chilling their bottles of white wine in the stream where they’re fishing, and they catch a fish, and they wrap the fish in ferns and put it under a tree to stay cool, and that just felt like a dish sort of writing itself. So we did trout wrapped in dandelion greens, with a wine sauce. As we were putting that meal together, it made me feel like there was some real creatively-satisfying spark there, and unlimited potential for that to repeat itself over and over again — with any other number of books.

You’ve also written that “nearly every great book has moments of food in it.” Why would you say that is, in your opinion?

We’ve gotten a lot of answers about that from authors at the reading series. Sometimes, when we reach out to authors to take part in the series, they’ll say, “This sounds great, but there’s no food in my book, so I might not be a great fit.” And I always ask ’em to send a copy, because there just is always food. I don’t think we’ve ever encountered a book with zero food. Some, you know, have been a little bit sparse, but actually, when that’s the case, usually the moments where food shows up are particularly powerful.

The question we ask is, why do you deploy food in your work? What does food do for you as a tool that some other subject or focal point couldn’t quite get across? For me, food reveals so much about a person, about a place. It’s one of the most intimate things that we have and hold onto in our lives. If you move somewhere, one of the things you might bring with you is your food memories. You carry that as a deep part of your identity. And then, of course, there’s what food says about class and status. It just touches on everything.

Actually, one of the things that brought me to cooking is that I realized ultimately that through food, I could engage with or touch on in the real world a lot of the topics I was hoping to write about. So I think that’s why it then finds its way back into fiction, into stories; because it is this powerful subject that people have reference points for and have an emotional connection to, and therefore can allow for something to happen in the story in a particular way.

You went to school for English. Do you still identify as a writer? What kind of writing do you do?

Only in my most generous and aspirational moments! I still write. I mostly wrote poetry when I was in college, and so foolishly thought that would be my career. I continue to aspire to be more of a writer than I am, and I feel so lucky that I’m able to engage with writers that I admire. I have half-joked that food has been the back door into the literary community that my writing might not have gotten me into. And also, sometimes I’m a little suspicious of it — I’m like, “Is all this sort of time spent with other people’s work scratching some literary itch that I should be scratching myself?”

So I always hope to set aside more time for some of my own work. And I think there’s room in my mind in the future development of Tables of Contents for that to happen. You know, we did the cookbook during COVID as a fundraiser, and that was more of an editorial project — I was editing and curating those selections. It definitely lit me up in a way that made me feel like doing some other publishing work, including something where I’m writing more, is on the horizon.

When you do write, do you write about food?

Sometimes, yes. It’s funny, when I started cooking, I was noticing food making its way into my writing in a way that really upset me. I was so frustrated by it. I was like, “Get these tomatoes out of my poem! I want to write about big things, like life and death and sex and love.” And then, you know, eventually, I realized tomatoes are one of the most important things in the world to me now.

The tomatoes are the sex and the love.

Yeah. Especially a good one. Nothing sexier than a dripping tomato on a thickly mayoed piece of bread, you know?

Amen to that.

I think what I probably end up doing in relation to writing and food is I’ll start writing about food in some way — food is the map that I’m writing on — but I’m using it to get to something else, whether that’s some interpersonal dynamic that I’ve observed, or something simply personal. I like writing about food, but I think my internal sensor sits up a little bit. It’s like, don’t just write about food, ’cause you already do all these other things with food. Write about other things! So I guess: yes, I write about food, reluctantly and hopefully more than that.

Since you’re coming in contact with all these varied types of food writing, do you have a definition of what good food writing looks like to you?

No, I don’t think so. My preference is writing that feels confident — actually, I think, similar to my cooking preferences. I’m attracted to a sort of writing that you can tell that under the surface, there’s a lot of practice, there’s a lot of mastery, there’s been a lot of thought, and that it’s chosen intentionally. There’s a big difference between that and writing that tries to appear confident, which often, to me, comes off like bravado. You see the cracks in it, and there’s a shell of perhaps also skillfulness there, but it’s doesn’t go as deep. I like to feel like there’s writing with roots, even if that’s not shown on the page — something that you can feel below it.

You’ve touched on this a little bit already, but when you find an author and you want them to read at Tables of Contents, how do you decide which dish they describe is worth trying to cook?

With authors for the reading series, we ask them to send us a couple options that come to mind, and that can be a really helpful starting point. And sometimes, especially if it’s an author that maybe tends to think and write more about food, they’ve already put some thought into that. But just as often, we’ll pick something that they didn’t recommend, that you might not even think of as a food moment. 

One example is we had Carmen Maria Machado come for her second book, and there’s some food in it, but there’s also this particular description about the softness of a baby’s fontanelle, on their skull. And I don’t know if she mentions gnocchi later in the passage or not, but we made these gnocchi that suggested that softness. That’s definitely not a food scene, but it was the thing that felt most interesting, or exciting to translate into food. You would not expect to engage with this descriptive moment in an edible way, right? That’s one of the cool things about the series, is that the food itself has all this emotional gravity to it. And then sometimes you can really go off the rails of what you would expect to see in terms of food translated from the page to the plate, which for me has always been one of the most exciting parts about it. 

Running a restaurant is amazing in lots of ways, but your main goal in a restaurant is to basically provide a sense of comfort and deliciousness so that people want to come back — purely tap into the pleasure centers of the brain. But one of the things I love about fiction is you can do other things. You can tap into lots of other emotions — darker, more complicated. I don’t always have that opportunity with food.

So cool. I love the idea of this baby’s head.

It’s so dark.

So dark. And I will say that one of my favorite things about the experience of being at Tables of Contents and listening to the passage being read was that the strangers at the table with me turned to each other at the end of each reading, and we were like, “What do you think the dish will be? I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be cake for this one…”

Yeah, I like that too — the surprise and the unknown. Particularly when there are maybe a couple of candidates mentioned in the passage, and you don’t really know how it’s gonna come out, or it’s really unclear where anything edible might come from.

I really want to talk about sustainability at the intersection of food and writing, because I know that that’s something you care about, and it seems like it’s a huge part of your focus at Little Egg. Does sustainability factor at all into how you’ve designed Tables of Contents?

We try to apply the same sort of sourcing practices that apply to the restaurant to Tables of Contents, but sometimes those things do come up against a specific departure from the book. I think it was for a Catherine Lacey or Kathleen Alcott reading a long time ago, there was some bologna sandwich we were doing. But I didn’t want to buy factory-farmed pork, Oscar Mayer bologna. So I got Vermont mortadella, and I was really conflicted about it, because there’s something very distinctive about the flavor and the experience and the reference point of bologna that is not at all the same as mortadella. 

It was interesting to explore that — how with storytelling, you can choose subject matters without a real-world impact. You could mention bologna, and you’re not necessarily putting money into the systems that raise animals in horrific conditions. (Although you could argue about what you promote in fiction and the positions you take, and that’s a much bigger conversation.) But with food, it’s not theoretical. It has an impact on the ground somewhere. So that’s one area where sometimes there’s an interesting friction for me, thinking about how to honor the text in a way that I really feel committed to doing in this series, and also honor the values of food that I’m working with.

In every case where we can make a choice that feels aligned with the values that we’d normally work with for sourcing, we’ll do that. But there are still some times where if it says Wonder Bread, it’s gotta be Wonder Bread, you know? You’re just not gonna get the texture and flavor of that experience without it, and it’s not gonna hit or resonate in the same way. It’s an interesting sort of push-pull.

I also read about the regenerative residency that you guys are starting up, which seems tied to all three of these tenets — sustainability, food, and writing. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to carve out that space and why?

There’s this farm called Glynwood in Cold Spring, New York. It’s an incredibly magical place, and I first stumbled upon it eight or more years ago. I was taking part in this policy and advocacy training course that was being started by the James Beard Foundation, for chefs to develop more skills around really direct policy and advocacy action, around issues that are important to us. Over the years I have become very close with Sarah and Kathleen, the folks who ran it at the time. They do really amazing industry-focused work on regenerative agriculture, on promoting and sustaining local agriculture in the Hudson Valley — and beyond, but with a focus on the valley. It’s this beautiful property and they have several buildings on the property that I thought would be an incredible place for an artist’s residency.

So two years ago, I spoke with Glynwood and asked if they’d be willing to let us produce an artist’s residency on their property — just give us access to one of the cottages for a few weeks, and we try to take care of all the logistics. And they said yes. Giada Scodellaro was our first resident, and she was the perfect person for it.

The idea was exactly as you said, to tie together more directly the sustainability, food, and agriculture work that I do with Tables of Contents, and see what interesting work or space could be created by bringing them together.

We hosted Giada last year, and this year we’re going to have two residents in the spring, and hopefully, this will be the last of our trial years. We’re lucky to have access to the space from late fall to early spring, so there’s potential for quite a number of residencies if we could figure out logistics and funding. And we want to create an application process that’s more open, to bring a wider range of folks into the potential resident realm. It’s one of those ridiculous ideas where we don’t have any money, we don’t have a plan for this, but we’ve been offered this space to use, and we’re just gonna try it and figure it out and go from there. So hopefully we can keep it going, but it was an amazing first run, at the very least. 

Hannah Berman is the Fiction Editor for The Inquisitive Eater, and a Brooklyn-based journalist covering food and culture news. Her fiction has been featured in anthologies published by Allegory Ridge, Thirty West, and Wanderlust Journal; you can also read her writing in the Sad Girl Diaries, Talk Vomit, and On the Run Fiction, among other places. Read more at hannah-berman.com.

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From the Anthology: Food & Writing with Min Jin Lee

This piece was originally published in The Inquisitive Eater Anthology, which you can now purchase online.

What’s your go-to snack when you’re reading or writing? Dry roasted almonds.

What’s your favorite piece of writing/art that has to do with food? M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating.

What do you think is the most writerly food/drink? Coffee.

What’s a food you’ve read about that you wish you could actually experience? Mangosteens; I tried mangotsteens in Thailand only because of R.W. Apple’s essay, and he was absolutely right. I wish I could have some more. Like now.

If you had to live off one food for the rest of your life what would it be? Seolleongtang.

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award. A New York Times bestseller, Pachinko was a Top 10 Book of the Year for The New York Times, USA Today, BBC, and the New York Public Library. Pachinko was on over 75 best-of-the-year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN. Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times, NPR’s Fresh Air and USA Today. Her fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and has appeared most recently in One Story. Her writings about books, travel, global affairs, and food have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Conde Nast Traveler, The Times of London, Vogue (US), Travel + Leisure (SEA), Wall Street Journal, and Food & Wine. She has served as a columnist for The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s leading newspaper, for three seasons. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writers. A 2018 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, Lee has been named a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University for 2018-2019, where she will be researching and writing her third novel, American Hagwon.

Featured image via Pxhere.

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From the Anthology: Food & Writing with Stephanie Danler

This was originally published in The Inquisitive Eater Anthology, which you can now purchase online.

What’s your go-to snack when you’re reading or writing? I make picnics on my desk – slices of apple, chunks of cheese, cornichons, crackers. Anything salty. 

What’s your favorite piece of writing that has to do with food? The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher. And Seamus Heaney’s poem “Oysters.”

What do you think is the most writerly food/drink? Unfortunately, alcohol. I like mine in a Campari soda.

What’s a food you’ve read about that you wish you could actually experience? Freshly harvested white truffles in Alba, Italy. I’ve had them in the states but I can’t imagine the scent fresh out of the ground.

If you had to live off one food for the rest of your life what would it be? Toast.

Stephanie Danler is the author of the internationally best-selling novel Sweetbitter, and the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter television series on STARZ. She is currently based in Los Angeles, California, and at work on a book of non-fiction.

Featured image via Pxhere.

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From the Anthology: Food & Writing with Sarah Gerard

This was originally published in The Inquisitive Eater Anthology, which you can now purchase online.

What’s your go-to snack when you’re reading or writing? Raw arugula.

What’s your favorite piece of writing that has to do with food? The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams.

What do you think is the most writerly food/drink? Scotch.

What’s a food you’ve read about that you wish you could actually experience? I have never had a Christmas goose. I’d like to try that.

If you had to live off one food for the rest of your life what would it be? Raw clams.

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times critics’ choice, and the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Baffler, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She lives in Florida.

Featured image via Flickr

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Food & Writing: Glynn Pogue

Photo by Mia Penaloza.

 

Glynn Pogue is a powerhouse. A fellow New School MFA alum (2017), with several pieces published in reputable magazines, and named Brooklyn Magazine’s 2018 “30 Under 30,” Glynn is ambitious, eloquent, and a total bad-ass. I was lucky not only to sit down and talk over a meal with her, but in her home where she made me a delicious vegetarian dinner of tacos, beans and rice. We got to talking about her childhood in Bed-Stuy and discovered that both of us grew up with ambitious mothers who traveled a lot for work. Sated with homemade cocktails in hand, we got started with the interview.

Felicity: What’s your writing routine if you have one?

Glynn: I think I write in bursts. This is kind of a whack analogy, but it’s like a faucet. So if I start to think about something, it just continues. The faucet opens, and it continues to run and run and run all day. I might wake up in the morning with an idea, and I’ll start to jot something down as I’m walking to the train station. Then, while I’m on the train, or at work, the story is writing itself in my head, and I’m constantly taking notes. So then, by the time I sit at my desk, it’s already there.

Felicity: I’ve recently started writing in my Notes app and it’s really helpful.

Glynn: I write in my Notes. I send myself emails constantly of exact lines that I want to use, or stories I want to write so that I don’t forget, and then it’s about finding the time. But I sort of see it before it happens.

Felicity: Do you snack on anything when you’re reading or writing?

Glynn: I love gummy bears so much. Little snacks like that, that you can just constantly grab. If I get into a full meal, then there’s no writing happening probably. Maybe some takeout sushi, which is like my favorite thing to order. But usually, whiskey or red wine, if I’m honest about things.

Felicity: I haven’t heard sushi for writing before. That sounds good because it’s something you can kind of pick on.

Glynn: It can’t be something that I’m really digging into and enjoying, it has to be something kind of like mindless, where you’re biting and continuing to move. I also don’t even know how often I actually eat while I’m writing. It depends. If I’m writing a piece that’s kind of kicking my ass, and that’s usually something that I’m writing for an assignment or something, it’s just coffee and wine. If it’s a piece I’m really digging into for passion, then maybe I’m writing and then maybe I’m taking a break to go cook, which is a thing that really fills me. I love cooking. It’s a whole creative process in itself.

Felicity: What’s your favorite broke artist meal?

Glynn: Oh my god, I love this question. Literally, what we just had. I can buy five cans of beans from the grocery store for $5. So I get a black beans, a red beans, a chickpeas, a black-eyed peas, and pink beans. And I plan my whole meal around that bean, that protein, and some kale, and a boiled egg, and some tomato. I just cut up some tomatoes and put them on top. That’s my favorite.

Felicity: That’s so healthy!

Glynn: But it’s like the cheapest thing too, because it’s just all vegetables and canned goods and shit. And my favorite broke meal eating out: I love a good dollar slice, the dollar slice spot even right by The New School, right by the A train.

Felicity: What food do you think is the most fun to write about?

Glynn: Okay. I’m going to give two answers. I was actually recently working on a piece for a travel publication about the Civil Rights Trail in Alabama. It was an interesting piece to write because I was going to the south as a person with southern roots who doesn’t know a lot about her southern heritage. My grandparents were all from Virginia and South Carolina, but they lived in New Jersey and DC. The only thing I actually knew about my southern heritage was the food, that’s the only thing that had trickled its way into my history or my memories. The food was so present; the greens that have been simmering on the stove all day, and yams, and mac and cheese and, like, soul food. So I love writing about that cuisine because it’s so steeped in tradition and there’s so many memories there. And when I think about it, it reminds me of my grandparents who’ve all since passed. There’s so many stories there. As soon as I think about that food, it reminds me of being in the kitchen with my grandmother. Now I’m thinking about her and her stories and how she looked. They’re so much tied to that food. And then, in general, I like writing about food while traveling. I like the process of discovering a dish and the history of that dish. I love a food that’s steeped in tradition, that people have been making forever, that has sort of transformed as it’s been passed from hand to hand to hand to hand.

Felicity: Do have an example of a food that you discovered?

Glynn: When I was living in Cambodia, my favorite thing to eat every morning was called bor bor, which is just basically a rice porridge, like a congee. Which is crazy because I’m a vegetarian, pseudo-vegan. But they made this broth out of all sorts of bones and bits of pigs and cows and chickens—everything. And then, like, rice is in it. And they’re stewing this out all day and they’ll put some lemongrass in it and some scallions and all kinds of spices, I still haven’t determined what they were. So it’s a beautiful base of this rich, ricey broth. This is a beautiful soup basically. And then they’ll add fish to it. And then they’ll add beans sprouts. I’d always load in a ton of chili and fresh lime. And I would have it every morning. And that was really interesting to me because from my understanding it is a result of the Khmer Rouge when there was literally no food because the country was going through genocide. And it’s a country that produces a lot of rice, so rice is always the base to all meals there. I’m always interested in traditions or practices that come out of necessity that have been turned into something that people have made beautiful.

Felicity: Some of the best dishes are made that way.

Glynn: It’s interesting to think about a meal like that porridge and just talking about soul food, as well, which was also like, “We don’t have anything. These are the things that we have to make, and we’re going to pour our love into them.” Oh my god, I just connected these dots. I like food born out of “struggle” or “hardship” or something that has been repurposed and filled with love, and that has stories and tradition.

Felicity: It’s kind of like art made from hardship—that also tends to be really beautiful. What is your favorite piece of writing/art that has to do with food?

Glynn: The first thing that comes to mind is Cigarettes and Coffee. It’s this film where all these different scenes are intersecting with each other. It’s a lot of short vignettes, all these conversations that take place over cigarettes and coffee, in a diner in all these places. It’s just dope. And I think I like it partially because I create fantasies of a writer’s life, and a lot of that is always linked to black coffee and cigarettes and, like, a black turtleneck. This is my artist identity. So, I think the Cigarettes and Coffee thing kind of tells some sort of story about that lifestyle. Also, these people are in a diner and all they can get is the coffee that is, like, bottomless.

Felicity: Unlimited refills!

Glynn: I love films that are discourse-based. I think of that movie, My Dinner With Andre. It’s just a conversation. Or those films Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, they’re like movies of dialogue, which is interesting when you think about any kind of art made about a meal, because…

Felicity: It has to be around discourse.

Glynn: It has to, right? If it takes place where people are sitting down and they’re sharing a meal, then there’s conversation and that’s it. Unless something crazy inserts itself. But now that I think about it, if you choose to make a piece of art around a meal, then you want to highlight the characters that are at the table and what’s being discussed there, which makes me think about that Master of None episode, “Thanksgiving.”

Felicity: That is such a good episode.

Glynn: Really beautiful. That’s also another great one. And similar to what I was talking about earlier with the soul food. So much of the episode is all the preparations to make these dishes that they’re going to have there. And a lot of what they made is really familiar to me.

Felicity: What’s your ideal meal, finances put aside? Like, the opposite of a broke artist meal.

Glynn: I think of that guy, Jiro, the sushi guy. I’m obsessed with sushi. I really fucking love sushi so much. It’s probably one of my favorite foods. And Jiro supposedly makes the best sushi of all time. There’s a film called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Really beautiful. If you ever watch Chef’s Table, where they make food look really poetic and there are these slow shots of people cutting things and the music is really dramatic and beautiful—Jiro Dreams of Sushi is similar to that. So this guy Jiro, in Japan, it’s impossible to get a table at his restaurant. Two of my friends, when I was in Cambodia, flew to Japan just for the day to go to eat there. And it’s like the kind of thing where he’s constantly putting plates, putting plates, putting plates. He’s just there all day. You have no choice over what he’s going to give you. You just take it. I would love that. I’m bougie as fuck, even though I’m very, very poor. I’m just really trying to get to a point where money is never a problem. I want bougie-ass dinners all the time. Chef’s choice. Sitting at the chef’s table, and every dish has a wine pairing. So like Jiro, but, like, any place where I can have that kind of thing where every little bit of it is thought about.

Felicity: That sounds amazing. I want to experience that.

Glynn: In Cambodia, it’s really strange, they have a really good food scene there, and I ate at a Michelin star restaurant for, like, nothing. And it was like a six-course dinner where there was foam and random shit—you know when there’s foam, we’re doing things now.

Felicity: Yeah, things are not usually in foam form. Okay, if you had to live off of one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Glynn: I think I want to eat pasta—but then I would have problems staying snatched! I think, ultimately, pasta is my favorite thing. Damn everything’s connecting even more, talking about soul food and the congee dish. I like comfort food. I like things I can eat in a bowl, like cheese and saucy stuff and savory things. So yeah, pasta. Like a really, really good spaghetti.

Felicity: What is your favorite book and what food would you associate with that book?

Glynn: I think I’m going to say The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Díaz is my favorite writer. He’s Dominican, so just literally Dominican food. When I was in high school, there was this Dominican restaurant that me and my friends loved to go to. We ate a lot of mofongo and tostones and all that kind of stuff. It just reminds me of Dominican food, in general. Mashed plantain and dark meat. All of the seafood and the good rice and a good ass bean and some fucking plantains. Perfect.

Felicity: That sounds really good—definitely, want to try that now. What do you think is the most writerly food/drink?

Glynn: Seriously, coffee, red wine, and whiskey.

Felicity: Ok. All liquids.

Glynn: Yeah! And cheese and, like, grapes, and crackers and figs. I could eat all those things at The New School’s readings and every other literary thing ever. For a while, I was just like, “I’m hanging out with the wine and cheese set,” which is the literary group.

Felicity: The snacks, the bougie snacks.

Glynn: Yeah, the bougie snacks. But also on a pseudo-budget because I buy Cracker Barrel and saltines from the corner store then eat it with cheap wine.

Felicity: But it’s delicious.

Glynn: And it fills you up and it looks fancy.

Felicity: That’s like a metaphor for being a writer: looks really fancy but is actually broke.

Glynn: That’s what I think that the cheese and wine thing is about.

Felicity: Bougie with no basis.

Since we were in Glynn’s apartment, I decided to do food associations using the books on her bookshelf. Glynn went through different books she had and discussed which foods she associated with them.

Negroland by Margo Jefferson – Immediate association is fucking cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Like a high tea, like you’re at cotillion and you’re trying to learn how to cross your legs.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc – Random Family is really one of my most favorite fucking books of all time. It’s written by a journalist, so it’s reported, but it’s this layered story about these people who live in the Bronx, who live uptown. It’s super New York. So let’s go with Italian ices, New York City summer stuff you’re eating when you’re out on the block, at the block party kind of thing.

Meeting Faith by Faith Adiele – This book is written by one of my mentors. She was one of the first black monks in Thailand. So let’s just say a pad thai, which is also one of my favorite things. I think Thai food is another amazing broke writers’ meal to feel bougie, too, because Thai restaurants always will have some fly-ass décor inside and it’s like super dark and moody and shit. But your meal is like $20. It’s like a good cheap date.

The Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique – I would say it makes me think of roti and escovitch fish, like Caribbean food, West Indian food. Which is another big part of my food love, being from New York and being of a diasporic black New York experience where a lot of my friends are West Indian and black American. So I was introduced to a lot of this kind of food and culture. I actually really, really, really love stories about the Caribbean. Love it.

Here Comes this Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn – That’s a beautiful book. It’s set in Jamaica and makes me think of like jerk chicken and oxtails and all that stuff.

Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch by Carolyn Keene – I read all of these as a kid. I read them every summer with my parents when we’d go to the Jersey Shore, where we have a bed and breakfast. So it makes me think of saltwater taffy, and steamed shrimp or, like, fresh seafood off the wharf.

All Tomorrow’s Parties by Robb Spillman – I actually interviewed him when I was at The New School, and it’s about his times in Berlin just being an artist and being Bohemian and all that shit. I was in Berlin a month ago, two months ago. So my food memories are still semi-fresh. The thing that was dope about Berlin was I didn’t eat anything that felt distinctly German. It actually felt fairly international. So I had amazing falafel but it was Sudanese falafel, I’m pretty sure, Sudanese or Somali. It had a spicy peanut sauce, and you could add halloumi to it and tofu along with the falafel. It was a really interesting falafel that I’ve had only in Berlin.

Glynn Pogue is a 26-year-old writer from Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. BedStuyBrat was her AOL Instant Messenger name back in the T-Mobile Sidekick days, and the moniker still applies, as much of Glynn’s works centers around her community of brown people and brownstones. Named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s 30 under 30, the do-or-die dreamer’s writing has been featured in Vogue, Guernica, Essence, and National Geographic Traveler, among others. A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing program, Glynn is currently crafting a collection of essays on race, class, identity and her beloved Bed-Stuy. Find more of her work at glynnpogue.com.

Headshot by John Midgley.

Felicity is a recent graduate of The New School Creative Writing MFA program, her work has been published in Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, and Enchantress Magazine. Her writing can also be seen with Barbershop Books and Healthy Materials Lab. Currently the Digital Publishing Assistant at The University of Chicago Press, Felicity enjoys writing in all its forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

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‘A Home for Writers & Rebels: Profile of Denis Woychuk,’ by Felicity LuHill

85 E 4th Street houses the Kraine Theater, the famous KGB Bar, and, its latest edition, the Red Room. Though there is much discussion about its individual parts, the building as a whole has a long and rich history, much of which is evident. The owner, Denis Woychuk, is one of the wittiest, warmest people I’ve ever met, and is quick to open up.

As we sit and chat in the Red Room, he’s quick to relate everything that’s happened in 85 East 4th: “In 1838 this building was built. Think about this. The Civil War is almost 30 years in the future. Lincoln’s wearing short pants and studying his grammar, he’s… I really don’t know what Lincoln was doing.”

Almost since the start, the building was used for political purposes. “In 1878, this building was the first headquarters for the Women’s Aid Society in America,” Denis says. Concerns for worker’s rights, particularly immigrant worker’s rights rose at the beginning of the 20th Century, and by 1911, the same year as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the building was occupied by the cloak maker’s union. “This was a big union part of town,” Denis notes, saying that Union Square wasn’t named after the café. The building became such a political hub that Emma Goldman, perhaps the most famous anarchist of her time, presented to the Secret Society of Anarchists in this building. “The irony, of course, is ‘as reported by The New York Times,’” Denis chuckles. “So, ‘big secret,’ you know?”

But its rebellious history doesn’t stop there. During Prohibition, the bar became a speakeasy run by Lucky Luciano, the father of modern organized crime. This is where the art deco style of the bar comes in. “The stained glass behind the bar, that’s original,” Denis says. Fifteen years after the Prohibition ended, because of anti-communist attacks and McCarthyism, the building went back to its workers’ rights beginnings as the Ukrainian Labor Home bought the building and took refuge in this space which had now become so accustomed to keeping things hidden. When Denis talks about the building, he does so like it’s an old friend he’s had the pleasure of knowing. The building was still a Ukrainian Labor Home when Denis, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, started going with his father, a Ukrainian immigrant, who would come to the Ukrainian Labor Home to drink.

Felicity LuHill

After college, Denis put himself through law school by teaching. He found he enjoyed teaching his art students better than his law students. “Surprise! Shocking, right?” he says. “It was much more interesting, what [the art students] had going on in their heads.” This inspired him to open up Kraine Gallery and Kraine Theater on the first floor of 85 East 4th. ‘Kraine’ was short for ‘Ukraine.’ “That’s what a hipster I was, right? ‘Take that ‘U’ off there. Kraine club baby!’” Denis laughs at himself. While Kraine Gallery is long gone, Kraine Theater remains, and so does the Kraine Gallery’s legacy. Fun fact: though Denis wanted to call the bar KGB because of its covert history and the covert nature of the bar when it opened, KGB actually stands for Kraine Gallery Bar. It was the only way Denis was given permission to call it ‘KGB.’

Around this time, Denis became a lawyer for the criminally insane and wrote and published two children’s books. Meanwhile, the second floor of 85 East 4th was still run by the Ukrainian Labor Home. He became close friends with the little old ladies who cooked upstairs. “You could get a soup, a salad, a three-course meal with meat, potatoes and a vegetable and a shot for five dollars,” Denis says. “It was insanely cheap even then.” He held parties in the Ukrainian Labor Home once a week, letting artists eat cheap and giving the 80-year-old owners some customers. It was this friendship that got him the bar in 1993, when they couldn’t run it anymore. From the start, he knew, “I didn’t want to have a sign. I wanted it to be true to the whole speakeasy thing.” People told him again and again that this was a bad idea, “A business with no sign is a sign of no business,” they said. But he stuck to his instincts. “The thing about New York is, if nobody knows about it, everybody wants to go.” Along with not having a sign, he kept the original art deco glass and the original propaganda posters from days past.

In 1994, KGB Bar started doing literary events, thanks to a helper of his from Columbia University. When they had a reading for Frank Browning’s Culture of Desire, The New York Times sent a reporter. The article read “New Literary Series at KGB Bar.” Denis remembers his reaction: “Oh, look, we have a new literary series. The Times can’t be wrong.” He hadn’t thought of it as a series before. He started getting people to read every Sunday night. Then with the help of Star Black and The New School’s David Lehman, KGB started a poetry series. It didn’t take long for KGB to become a literary hub. They popularized readings in bars with no fee, with the hope listeners might buy a drink or two. “I was influenced by the beats,” Denis says. Going to bars in New York after coming back from college, Denis says “it was disco balls and pinky rings,” the era of John Travolta. He remembers thinking, “smart people want to have drinks, too.”

At the same time the reading series started getting popular, Denis wrote a book, about his experience representing the criminally insane, Attorney for the Damned, which was published in 1996, the same year he decided to quit his day job to manage the bar and raise his children full time. The reading series started picking up a lot of famous people, Denis recalls, “We got Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer… some more Jonathans.” Junot Diaz was discovered by an agent while reading at the KGB. Michael Cunningham and Daniel Handler enjoy reading there. Joyce Carol Oates was the first to read in the Red Room, though it wasn’t what the Red Room is today. It was formerly a black box theater painted red, and Denis was forced to book it because he had accidently double-booked Joyce Carol Oates and Victoria Looseleaf for the same night. He deprecates his management skills. Nowadays, the managerial duties are performed by Lori Schwarz. “I’m expecting her to take over the KGB any day now,” he says. And what’s Denis’s favorite reading? “After Robert Polito and David Lehman?” Denis laughs, remembering he’s talking to a New School rep. “After those two? Those are one and two in whatever order you decide.” His “third favorite” is David Foster Wallace. Denis remembers fondly his bartender, Dan, famous in his own right as the bartender of KGB since its inception, was Wallace’s opening reader.

Jennifer Boyer via Flickr

The reading series became so popular that he eventually had to refuse readings on the weekends. He remembers being recognized by George Plimpton from The Paris Review: “He awards us the best literary series in New York…. He says, ‘You know, in terms of the quality of what they offer, it’s very high level, but the 92nd Street Y charges 15 dollars to get in and KGB has a live, full bar, so I’m going to give the award to KGB.’” At this time Denis was forced to get a sign since writers were having such a hard time directing their fans on where to attend their readings, the irony being that he didn’t need to get a sign in order to gain business but because of it. This was also around the time reading series in bars were catching on. “But here’s the thing, you don’t open a reading room to make a lot of money, because it doesn’t.” Denis says. “People will not pay 5 dollars on a regular basis to see someone read.”

He decided to remodel the black box Red Room into today’s Red Room, when his youngest daughter went to college. “I need a project every year,” Denis claims. In addition to his aforementioned projects, he has also written a few musicals, including one by the same name as his book Attorney for the Damned. On New Year’s Eve of 2013, his project for the year was complete and the Red Room opened, a true revival of the speakeasy 85 East 4th once was, complete with a bath tub made for bath tub gin. Once a month, the Red Room hosts a 20s-themed Absinthe party, called the Green Fairy. Though the Red Room as it stands today is by far the youngest performance space of the building, it maintains a busy schedule, hosting readings and jazz gigs every week. The Red Room is also reminiscent of the days of Kraine Gallery as it frequently hosts art shows, showcasing different visual art forms on the walls of the space. While Denis views KGB Bar as his “25-year-old dive bar,” he sees the Red Room as a performance space, a place to take a date, “you can have live music, but it’s not so loud that you can’t talk.”

In everything Denis does at 85 East 4th, he sees himself as someone who is there to serve and support artists. “[Artists] need to commune. No one is an artist in a vacuum. They’re usually part of a movement…. I’m here to give people the opportunity to share their art.” Denis smiles. “I’m here to serve my community. What can I get you?”

Felicity LuHill

Come see this historic place at our launch party. You can also visit KGB Bar & The Red Room.

Felicity is the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. A recent graduate of The New School Creative Writing MFA program, her work has been published in Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, and Enchantress Magazine. Her writing can also be seen with Barbershop Books and Healthy Materials Lab. Felicity enjoys writing in all its forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

Featured image by Jennifer Boyer via Flickr

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‘Hot Off the Press: Profile of Oliver Ressler,’ by Felicity LuHill

When you think of a New York deli, words like “cool” and “hip” aren’t usually the first ones that come to mind. They do, however, when you walk into NoHo’s The Press Shop.

Though you wouldn’t know it by his mature and down-to-earth nature, owner Oliver Ressler founded The Press Shop at the ambitious age of 24, a little over a year ago. When taking into account its fresh design, eclectic music and creative take on sandwiches, you can see how the shop was curated to perfection by an innovative mind. Recently, I got to sit and chat with Oliver about his journey.

Felicity: Why sandwiches?

Oliver: It’s funny, a lot of people ask me that in New York, because when you think of big cities, you think people are more health conscious. I wanted to disprove that sandwiches are unhealthy. I disagree with that. Also, sandwiches were my favorite food growing up as a kid. When I thought through this concept, all the emotions, all the memories, all the nostalgia came from having sandwiches with my father at the Jewish deli, going to my favorite Italian sandwich shop in LA after school with my buddies. That’s what gave me the impetus to want to come in and start the shop. For me, it was all about what foods I loved as a kid. Sandwiches were where this whole thing started.

Felicity: What was your vision for The Press Shop?

Oliver: I couldn’t find a place that put heart and soul into the sandwiches that they were making. I wanted to try to create something that put a little bit of story and nostalgia into how they did it. You come to New York and there are thousands of restaurants, and one of the things that struck me as amazing is there was nothing that bridged the gap between the sit-down, fancy sandwich panineria-type concept and Subway or Potbelly. I was looking to do something in that niche, in that in-between, because, I think people want to enjoy an experience, and they want to come to a place where they’re listening to great music, where they’re seeing cool people, where they’re seeing cool food, and enjoying that all under the guise of it being pretty damn good food.

Felicity: It’s like a work meal but still an enjoyable experience

Oliver: That’s exactly right. I think that’s where a lot of fine casual’s starting to move. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating out of a cardboard bowl or if you’re eating it off of fine china, the food has to taste really good and it has to give you an ambiance. That’s what I love about the differences of quick service restaurants, you can help tailor an experience that’s ten minutes long. Our job is to brighten someone’s day when they think it’s gonna be a pretty monotonous normal experience. Our job is to make them bob their heads in a line, and then get a sandwich that’s really good. The idea is to have them savor those ten minutes, and say, “We hope you come back for another ten minutes.”

Felicity: When did you start cooking?

Oliver: In college my senior year, one of my roommates bought a book of recipes. He wanted to learn how to be a better home cook. We started cooking two or three times a week, and more of our friends would come over to pregame at our apartment, because we had food. It was something that was bringing people together, and I thought it was pretty funny. For us, it was easy and fun and therapeutic, and for other people, they just really enjoyed free food. He became a better home cook and I became passionate about how food gets made, who buys it, and why you buy it.

Felicity: How did you come up with the name The Press Shop? It’s funny, when I first heard the name, I thought it had been around for years.

Oliver: What’s funny about it, going through the trademark process, I was like “100 percent, The Press Shop is taken. Has to be.” and by some grace of something, the trademark lawyer was like, “You’re not gonna believe this, but the name’s available.” I always loved the idea of pressed sandwiches, but to me, being in New York, we have a lot of allusions to newspapers here. The way we thought about the name was a little double entendre, because we’re in a city where the press dominates our daily lives. I’ve always had a passion for reading the news every morning. I wake up and, if I don’t have my coffee and read the news a little bit, I feel like I’m naked for the day. That was one thing my dad harps on me a lot, “You got to know what’s going on,” whether it’s in your neighborhood or globally, you got to know what’s going on in your world. Reading the news was a way for me to connect with my dad, who’s one of the most important people in my life.

At around this point, one of Oliver’s employees comes over to us with a Nutella sandwich. Dessert sandwiches is another facet that makes The Press Shop unique. Oliver and I split the sandwich, which is warm and absolutely delicious.

Oliver: The Press Shop sandwiches are supposed to make you feel something. They’re supposed to make you feel like a kid again when you’re having a bad day. We have a lot of ladies and gentlemen come in here, and they’re like, “I need a grilled cheese and tomato soup,” and they have it, and a lot of them come back in and say, “It just brightens up my day.” And that’s our job.

Felicity: What were some of the challenges that you faced when you were starting?

Oliver: You’ve got to pick the right people. You’ve got to find ways to inspire outside of how much money you offer them. You have to separate yourself by creating a good work environment, and just make sure that you care. There’s a lot to do, but I don’t do it alone, not even close. If I did, I wouldn’t have a business. The food can be great, but it’s only as good as the people and the care that they put into it. They’re doing an amazing job. One of the toughest things for me, being young, you want to tell everyone that you know everything. We’ve gotten bit in the ass by me thinking I know everything. The power of “I don’t know” is one of the most important things I’ve learned in the early parts of this business. Asking for help is not weakness, forgetting how to ask for help is, in my opinion.

Felicity: How do you feel celebrating the Shop’s one-year anniversary?

Oliver: It feels crazy that we’ve had a business for a year. Most businesses don’t make it to this period of time. Most businesses don’t have this ability to work hard to stay consistently good, while coming up with new innovations and new things, in their first year. We’ve gotten to see what works, what doesn’t work, and adapt quickly. Another thing about being open a year is, you see what didn’t stay open for a year. Our block was totally different a year ago. It’s kind of crazy, because you see how New York changes in that regard. You see the waves of people coming and going.

Felicity: How do you see the shop growing? What do you see for the future?

Oliver: So a year from now, I’d like to have more Press Shops. I’m not sure what format we’d like them in. Maybe they’d go in urban spaces, maybe they go in hospital food courts, maybe right smack on campus, but I’d like to have a couple more. Because you want to see what you can do on number two. I have no delusions; it’s super hard to get there. Certain days, you’re cold, you’re waking up early, you’re staying late, you’re doing monotonous tasks that you don’t want to do, like when we put the letters on that board. No one in the shop who worked on that loved doing that. That was not great fun. It was screaming across the shop at 8:30 PM, “Hey, can you throw me an S, please? No, not that S, I need an S half that size.” I remember when I went to get those signs, I called ten places, and one of the guys was like, “You got to come now to show me what you want.” They were an hour-and-a-half outside the city, deep Long Island. I had to call a big Uber, because they were big signs. We were just sitting in putt-putt traffic for JFK, and in that moment I was like, “Man, I really like what I do.” Stuff like that changes the way you look at tough businesses.

Felicity: The restaurateur has to do a little bit of everything.

Oliver: There are days when I’m up on the line, there are days where I’ll help chop stuff downstairs. Yesterday our dishwasher came in late, so you hop in and you wash dishes. That’s probably what I’m best at, because everyone else is so much faster than me at everything else in the shop. They always double take when I’m washing dishes, and I’m like, “Dude, I’m better at this than anything else I can do here. I don’t want to screw up your guys’ efficiency.”

Felicity: Do you have any advice for fellow foodies or cooks?

Oliver: Make up your own mind on food. Food’s supposed to be something that you love. Make food yours. Don’t just go to a place because it has a nine on Infatuation. Go because you want to go. If it happens to have a nine on Infatuation, awesome, that means that you have the same taste as Infatuation that day. Go out and find that place that makes you happy, and ask yourself “Why?” Go find stuff that you love, and keep having it, over and over.

You can learn more about The Press Shop here.

Felicity is the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. A recent graduate of The New School Creative Writing MFA program, her work has been published in Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, and Enchantress Magazine. Her writing can also be seen with Barbershop Books and Healthy Materials Lab. Felicity enjoys writing in all its forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

Featured image courtesy of The Press Shop.

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Fiction

‘An Interview With Mr. Peanut,’ by Charles Rubendall

Last week, Amedeo Arachide, known to most of the world as Mr. Peanut, filed a lawsuit against Planters, the peanut company, over its continued use of his likeness after his spectacular departure from the company in 2012. I met up with Amedeo on a dilapidated billboard to find him, not surprisingly, grinning like a Cheshire cat and naked but for his signature white gloves, spats, monocle, and top hat. “I’m going to take those accursed peasants for all they’ve got,” he told me conspiratorially.

Amedeo joined the company as its mascot in 1916 and served in that capacity until late October 2012. “I wanted to be a model,” Amedeo said, “but I was too much man for the era’s taste so I went with the whole peanut what-have-you on a lark. Selling peanuts made me feel like a prostitute, but I loved the attention. I guess that’s why I put up with it for 96 years.”

When I asked Amedeo why he had left the company when he did, he began to look physically ill. “They wanted to add this ugly bow-tie to my ensemble and give me sunglasses,” he said, shuddering. “Can you imagine? The bow-tie didn’t go with these shoes and how are sunglasses going to sell peanuts?”

Since his departure, Amedeo has been keeping a low profile and has not been seen in public since last October. “I’ve had my pout and now I’m ready to kick ass and take names,” Amedeo said exuberantly. “Who doesn’t love a little scandal?”

Will there be more peanuts in Amedeo’s future? “I’m all about pistachios now, honey,” he chortled rakishly, and added with a wink, “Brazil nuts when I’m feeling dangerous.”

Charles Rubendall is a freelance writer and professional eater residing in the West Village. He enjoys scrimshaw and shooting marbles. He doesn’t have any pets.

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Video Archive

Food Studies at The New School with Fabio Parasecoli

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1tcx08ia48&feature=relmfu]

How do your personal food choices influence larger social and political issues? Listen as Fabio Parasecoli, coordinator of Food Studies at The New School, discusses the rise of food studies over the past decade, and its emergence as a truly urban discipline.

THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu
http://www.newschool.edu/foodstudies

For more information, contact the Food Studies program at foodstudies@newschool.edu

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