On April 9th, I got a tip: Cardamom, a restaurant owned by the DDP Restaurant Group would “eliminate” (their word) their host/server roles effective April 12th. The group said they would replace them with QR codes, bussers, runners, and counter service.

All day on Friday, April 10th, workers from across the industry sent me this tip over and over and over. It spread like wildfire. This isn’t the first time that Daniel del Prado has gotten into a squabble with workers. You can read about union drives at Colita and now-shuttered Café Ceres on Racket.

I spent Friday and early Saturday talking to workers at Cardamom. Here are some of their stories.

Note: In order to verify employment for this piece, workers had to submit pay stubs and IDs to me. I am including my sources here on a first-name basis so that one of the first hits when you Google their name isn’t this article. Protecting my sources matters a lot to me.

An Impersonal Approach

Workers found out about the news that they were being replaced by QR codes in a variety of ways.

Micky, who has worked as a bartender since 2023, found out after waking up from a nap. She told me, “The news was frustrating but not surprising. We all know this isn’t an isolated incident.” She was referring to the shuttering of Café Ceres.

As for her role, she already had another job lined up, but bartenders’ roles “are not being eliminated,” per the restaurant group.

Brigetta, a server at Cardamom for almost three years, learned her role was being eliminated during her shift, not by being told by a manager, but through an email.

Brigetta talked with me and said, “Right when I got into work, HR was sitting at our biggest 10-person table. One of my coworkers said, ‘Did you get the email? Our positions are being terminated.’” She hadn’t.

“Together, we read this pretty long email stating they will no longer be having host and server positions.”

HR was visible to them, but they had to navigate the news alone.

“Only one of three managers talked to me to ask me how I was doing,” Brigetta said. “Two of them didn’t say anything to me. One person from HR sat at that big table all service. It was super scary and intimidating.”

Maya, another server at Cardamom for around two years, learned via a group chat, “I found out through our work group chat. A coworker sent a picture of the email right at 5:13pm. I felt sick to my stomach. I’ve never felt as disrespected at a workplace as I have been at this time. This is the final kick.”

And Jade, who was on staff for almost three years and was on an official leave of absence, said she found out via a group text as well. “No one let me know, I wasn’t going to find out I was fired unless I asked.”

She said, “I found out about my termination yesterday, after I realized I didn’t even get the email about a severance package or anything else. I texted my manager and asked why that was - she told me that HR had her discharge (fire) anyone who was gone for a month or so.”

The letter sent to staff is included in full below:

Hi team,

We are writing to share an important update regarding Cardamom’s service model.

Effective April 15, 2026, Cardamom will transition from a full-service model to a QR code and counter-service model. As a result of this change, the structure of our front-of-house team will also change.

The Host and Server positions will be eliminated effective April 12, 2026. In place of those roles, we will be introducing a new Food Runner/Busser position to support the updated style of service.

Bartender positions will remain in place and are not being eliminated as part of this transition. Current bartenders will continue in their role.

Employees currently working as Servers will have the opportunity to be considered for the new Food Runner/Busser role. Available positions will be offered to interested Servers based on seniority. If you are interested in being considered for this role, please submit your name through the link below by no later than Sunday, April 12, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. The link is also available through your employee portal by selecting the Talent option.

Internal Job Posting for new Food Runner/Busser Position (LINK REMOVED)

In addition to this change, the Servers who are offered the new Food Runner/Busser role following this transition will be expected to move from part-time schedules to full-time schedules. We anticipate these roles will require availability to work approximately 4-5 shifts per week.

Please note:

• Hosts whose positions are eliminated will be eligible to receive severance pay.

• Servers that do not want, or who are not selected, to move into a Food Runner/Busser role will be eligible to receive severance pay.

• Tenured Servers who express interest in and who are offered a Food Runner/Busser role and choose not to accept the new role will also be eligible to receive severance pay.

We understand that this news may be difficult and that changes like this can create uncertainty. We are committed to communicating as clearly and respectfully as possible throughout this process. Team members whose roles are impacted will receive additional information regarding next steps, timing, and severance details directly.

If you have questions, please reach out to HR.

Best,

DDP HR Team

The Human Impact

Workers talked to me about the human impact of potentially losing their jobs. While workers are being paid out for their hourly wages with severance, it’s unclear if those who choose to take severance or are not hired into new roles will be receiving any compensation for lost tips, which multiple workers told me regularly work out to over double their hourly wage.

It’s also important to note that counter service workers often make less in tips than servers because many people don’t know that they should tip, or don’t value that kind of service.

Maria, a server who has been at Cardamom for under a year, said, “Everyone knows they would be tipped much less.”

You can’t mince words here. This is a mass demotion for serving staff and likely will result in lower hourly wages.

There’s another toll for many of these workers, though, that goes beyond wages. They’ll miss each other. “I love Cardamom,” Brigetta said. “This group is a really creative, quirky, tight-knit group of people. We’ve formed this really awesome, cohesive bond. The loss of not working with this exact group of people again in this really beautiful space is really sad.”

Jade told me via text, “ALL of my coworkers have looked out for one another, given each other rides, constantly showing up, and even helping each other move apartments or with groceries. Most people here are truly friends for life.”

That extended to the guest experience. “We’ve gotten numerous comments and compliments from customers about how much they love our dynamic and the people, how us staff made the experience at Cardamom so great!”

One of the things that stuck with me most was how much these workers also cared about you, their guests. Ella was originally a server and moved over to being a bar lead recently, she just learned that her role will be eliminated, even though she is technically on the bar team. She said, “I think it’s an impossible ask for the remaining staff to maintain the level of service we’ve provided in the past. It’s hard not to feel like Cardamom is being set up for failure.”

Brigetta had concerns for guests, too, “We’re so busy,” she said. “It’s going to be a shit show.”

Still Up in the Air

From inside the restaurant, I got a comment from the Assistant General Manager, Jorie. I’m including it in its entirety below.

I reached out to and did not receive a comment from corporate AKA DDP Restaurant Group.

It’s important to note that, based on this timeline, at least some staff here will find out after Sunday if they are staying on or not, leaving their fates up in the air, and the option to enter the hiring pool wasn’t offered to workers directly in the email that was sent to them.

Maria told me, “We weren’t told anything about other DDP jobs at all. They said if you work part-time as a server and want to stay on, you have to take a full-time position on instead. I work a second job and couldn’t stay on full-time even if I wanted to.”

This rapid transition was entirely preventable, as interviews could have happened two or three weeks before the change, not on this fast timeline. This has a real impact for workers’ ability to pay their bills.

For Maya, the economic impact can’t be understated. This is their only source of income, “I’m worried that I won’t be able to find another job that will pay my cost of living before rent is due and my cupboards are empty. It’s been a turbulent time and they pulled the rug out from under us and gave us no time to find something else or offer us other positions in the company, and we know that they are hiring for other positions because it’s about to be patio season. They have the power to protect and support us and they’re choosing not to.”

This isn’t the first time in the Twin Cities restaurant scene that roles were “eliminated” with little to no notice, and, again, it’s not the first time that DDP Restaurant Group has wound up in a tussle with workers. Many of the other workers I talked to wanted to speak directly to you about how you can help.

Maya told me, “If you care about your money showing your values, going to eat at Daniel del Prado’s restaurants is showing that you don’t care about working-class people.”

Finding a job in two weeks is really hard for front-of-house workers in this market. Many people I talk to who are out of work are looking for months. Operation Metro Surge has impacted restaurants in such a large way that hiring is really hard right now.

As for Micky?

She said, “They think we can be replaced by a piece of paper. I personally would not want to give my money to people who treat their staff this way.”

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Writer’s note: I’m currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer. I wrote this piece one day post-chemo, in the middle of a chemo crash and heavy brain fog. Breaking news doesn’t wait—and neither did this piece. There might be a few small formatting errors or typos. <3

I bet when you saw that I was going to start naming restaurants, you assumed I would name ones like Demi and Myriel. They, too, can compete nationally, but the reason I opened with some of our more casual spots is to prove a point: when Michelin comes to star our restaurants, those won’t be on the list.

I chase Michelin stars. I have a trip planned for New York in the fall and my bucket list includes mostly starred restaurants. I’m known to coordinate with restaurants to eat at three starred restaurants in a day. I honed my palate in these rooms. Those dining rooms matter a lot to me. They mean something. Pushing for that kind of artistic dining is something that inspires me as a writer. It’s how I got my start. But there’s also something about these restaurants that can feel like the whole point is pushing for the star and not pushing for locals to be able to go to the restaurants.

They’re expensive, and when restaurants get a star, their prices often skyrocket. They’re sometimes stuffy and feel inaccessible, not always because of the workers in them, but often because of the guests who look down their noses at my Hoka tennis shoes. And the staff are eagle-eyed, trying to determine if you might be a Michelin reviewer, which has made for more than one awkward solo dinner on my watch.

Minnesota is the opposite of that. You can wear a hat into Demi and Kado no Mise. I wore a goth Labubu shirt and sweatpants into Myriel and the staff were delighted to tell me it was, “Giving Hot Topic.” Even our fine dining scene is casual, with warmth coming from Minnesota’s unique style of hospitality that focuses on giving you space. Michelin says they don’t star based on these kinds of things, but if you look at the stars objectively and ask what most have in common, they do. Similarly, they say they don’t star based on cuisine. But French and Japanese restaurants are starred far more than, say, Vietnamese and Mexican ones, meaning there’s also a culinary bias deeply rooted in racism.

I worry that with Michelin coming, restaurants might change how they’re cooking to try to be star worthy–and I worry about how we’re always pushing to be seen as worthy by external sources, instead of realizing the best part about Minnesota dining is that it’s special to us.

A list of the best restaurants in Minnesota that focus on fine dining is a list that focuses on the least accessible places–and that’s what Michelin is. Michelin will likely star both or either Diane’s Place or Vinai, but not individual stalls at Hmong Village. It will likely star Oro but not any of our taquerias on Lake Street or Central. It will likely push new restaurants that open to consider their menus based on if they might get a star, meaning that a concept for a French bistro might turn into a stuffy French restaurant that feels more at home in New York. I don’t want that. I think if this happens, we lose what makes us special.

When I tell people that our dining scene isn’t like New York City at all, they always bristle, like I’m saying it’s worse. Other writers have said that the dining scene is less “mature,” whatever that means. But I’m a born and raised Minnesotan who loves that most of what makes our state special is that you can likely walk into our best restaurants and grab a seat at the bar. Where NYC is a rat race for reservations, most people’s favorite restaurant here is just down the street. Our food scene is well-rounded enough and good enough that our middle-of-the-road casual restaurants are excellent.

Will Michelin star a Somali restaurant? A Salvadoran spot? Any of our Dinkytown Chinese restaurants? Probably not. But this is my view of Minnesotan dining. If Michelin comes in and defines us, if people start using it to choose where to eat, I worry some of our best restaurants will fall off the list of spots people want to go to. And then I worry that some of them will close.

Most of the writers who are dropped into Minnesota to review our restaurants from afar miss who we are. They’re comparing us to New York and Chicago, and I just… don’t care to do that. What we have here is special without that comparison, distinctly regional, and built for locals.

This is what I love about Minnesota dining. I worry that with Michelin, we might lose it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope that every Minnesotan can feel what I feel. As the only critic that covers the entire state of Minnesota, not just the cities and the cabin towns, I see fine dining everywhere. To me, it’s not white tablecloths and the folding of a napkin. It’s hospitality that’s driven by Minnesotan values of wanting you to feel welcome. It’s farm-driven menus, even in the backroads of the country. It’s burgers and cheese curds, yes, but also the tradition of whole fried walleye at Chinese and Thai restaurants. Minnesota dining is the state fair and drive-ins. Now, we’re in an era of a statewide boom of Asian-inspired cottage bakers and rural taco trucks. None of these spots will make Michelin’s list.

Our history is not, and I hope it never will be, that our best restaurants are tasting menus with pomp and circumstance. As much as I love them, more than that, I love that diners have turf wars and everyone has a favorite burger recommendation at the ready. When Michelin comes here, as your critic, I’m asking you directly: don’t let it define us. Fight to keep who we are alive.

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Sometimes, it feels like video, photography, and virality come before the writing at presses today, which isn’t the fault of writers. They often are working harder than ever to get eyes on their writing. Where a critic used to be responsible for just writing their review, now they have to show up for professional video shoots where they get mic’d up to compete with influencers on social media. None of them signed up for that–and the shy restaurant critics with sharp takes? Well, they likely can’t compete in job interviews where social media charisma is required.

Every time I hear of another food department being gutted, I feel gutted. Every time I see a layoff announcement from a food writer who is clearly one of our best, I feel like the presses are missing the point. Every time I see another paper change over to reviews that read more like profiles and less like criticism, I say out loud, “No,” as if this somehow can stop the changing tide.

This is why beyond beurre blanc exists. In 2020, I started seeing changes that felt cataclysmic. I was just a passionate reader of restaurant criticism, not a critic. After COVID, mixed reviews in my market seemed to disappear. Everywhere else, they got sparser. Robert Simonson of The Mix and The Mix Milwaukee saw it, too. When we talked on the phone in late March, he said, “I’ve been a journalist my entire life, since I graduated from college. I’ve been covering cocktails for 20 years, and I covered the cocktail revolution, and I can tell you that from 2006 up until COVID, the pitches that were accepted were based on merit. After COVID, slowly but surely, I realized that’s not how they are making decisions. It didn’t matter if it was a good story, the question was, was it going to get that kind of viral attention?”

I spent all of 2023 going into the archives, reading old school food writing from 1950-2000 across the country, sitting in libraries with physical papers that had yellowed with time. I spent a year reading, learning, and writing. I fell in love with the new school voices in the 60s, where food writing was punchy. It was voicey.

In contrast, today, the writing itself is almost completely stripped of voice. Sometimes, when I listen to critics speak about restaurants in the videos their presses make them sit for, I hear a voice that sounds nothing like their writing. It’s louder, more human, more real. Once, while listening to a series of critics speak about their reviews back-to-back while reading the reviews, I asked out loud to one of my cats, “Why am I only hearing their voices when they’re speaking?” The answer to this is, again, not the critics. Shorter word counts and demands to stay within the “voice of the press” have replaced the old school voices of the critics, who were voicey. Modern-day criticism feels like opinion pieces devoid of the specific style of a writer, which feels antithetical to me.

Emily Wilson of the IACP Award-winning bicoastal Substack, The Angel, told me she started partially because of this drive towards the press being the voice. She said she started her Substack because, “ I wanted to make sure that my voice could be heard and reflected, and when I was writing for Eater, it would be edited in an Eater-y way, which makes sense, but it can end up feeling domineering over the individual writer’s voice.”

Reading the reviews of critics and listening to the videos back-to-back left me feeling strongly that part of the reason the presses need video to get their work out is because critics aren’t allowed to write the articles that make people sit down and read long-form pieces. In fact, in an interview with a press last year, I was informed directly, “No one reads long-form criticism anymore.”

But the writers on Substack show that isn’t true, as most of us write longer pieces. Amy Cavanaugh, who serves as the Dining Editor at Chicago Mag and is half of the team behind American Weekender, a travel and food Substack, said, “I don’t think that people want everything to be 100 words.” She runs articles that are 2,500 words at Chicago Mag for features. “A variety is good. People should be open to still running longer food pieces.” Except, word counts, on the whole, have shrunk significantly for most writers over the past decade. Amy’s work is compelling at American Weekender, partially because it’s in-depth, detailed, and gives a human perspective.

While presses are turning to video, lamenting that no one reads long-form reviews anymore, I have a different perspective. Maybe the problem is that people don’t want to read long-form reviews without voice.

In a world where it feels like the papers are pushing their critics to compete with influencers and stay within “brand” voice, there’s one place where the writing takes center stage and where voice comes first. It’s Substack. I sat down with some of my favorite writers on Substack to talk to them about the future of food writing and how, unbound by restrictions of the press, Substack allows them to do some of their most meaningful work.

ORIGIN STORIES

Ryan Sutton, who covers New York City in his Substack, The Lo Times, and is a critic at The New York Times, started on Substack as many writers do: after a layoff. “I was laid off by Eater along with many other people. This is my life’s work. I wanted to tell the stories I wanted to tell, and Substack reached out to me. It seemed like a good fit.” It sure is. Sutton is one of the top 100 best sellers in food and drink and is considered widely, by most of the people I talked to, as one of the critics they look to for a Substack model that works.

Both Cavanaugh and Simonson started writing at the start of the pandemic. Cavanaugh wanted to cover places that didn’t get the attention they might deserve. Her and her co-author, Kenny Marlatt, purchased every single food and travel magazine from around the country and found a gap. “There was no publication fully focused on America and American food. We thought that was our way in,” Cavanaugh said. They wanted to do something fulfilling and meaningful. “We want to cover Oxford, Mississippi, with the same seriousness that publications cover New York.” Their field guides cover Philadelphia to Saugatuck, Michigan, filling a gap that American readers have responded to. The pair has over 4,000 subscribers–and counting.

Mahira Rivers, writer behind Sweet City and critic for The New York Times, also found a niche to fill. “I began in 2024. I was working in legacy media at the time. I just couldn’t land a story. It was discouraging,” she said. So she decided to find her niche. “At the time I was a generalist, so it was hard for editors to know how to reach out to me. I wondered how do I create regularity in my day and create a niche for myself?” She decided the answer to that was writing about dessert in New York. She pitched it at a column with a press and they turned it down, so she made it her own. “Bakeries were becoming a culturally significant food space,” Rivers said, “I wanted to cover it, and in a way, it became my calling card.” Traditional media started reaching out to her to cover bakeries. For Rivers, it was never about staying indie, but finding her way in. “My goal has always been to make my income from traditional media,” she said, “Substack helped me do that.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Jake Mike Boy. He, like Rivers, kept pitching presses but couldn’t place a story. “I started GUTS because I didn’t have an outlet,” he said. While Rivers scored a job at the New York Times, Boy leapt off Substack and went into print with his publication focused entirely on offal. “It’s food that is overlooked, but it’s also everywhere,” he said. When he decided to make the jump to print, he found writers for his first issue on Substack. They weren’t traditional writers. They were chefs, butchers, and writers outside of traditional journalism. “I want to find the people who aren’t big-time writers but still have a story,” he said. I was the first order placed at GUTS when the magazine dropped, because Boy was doing what many deemed impossible: making the leap from digital to print without a formal press background. It felt exciting to me. It felt alive.

What Rivers and Boy both have in common is that Substack gave them a niche. “ At the time, I was the only person dedicated to dessert in NYC,” Rivers said. “Finding my voice has been the best part of this. As a writer in this age of AI and generative AI, voice is the thing that I don’t think you can replicate.”

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ON VOICE

Voice kept coming up again and again in my interviews. When I asked people what they gained by writing on Substack, their answer was, “My voice.”

“I get to be voicey,” Cavanaugh said. “It’s fun!”

When I asked Wilson what she gained, she said, “Being voicey. I don’t need to get an editor to say yes to me, and it doesn’t need to fit into the type of stories that X publication is accepting from freelancers. That is the thing that has drawn me to Substack and the thing that keeps me on Substack.”

Simonson said, “More and more, you’re constantly told by mainstream media, ‘The voice you’ve written in doesn’t match the voice of the publication.’ Now everything I write is in my voice.” His excitement about this was palpable, with us going back and forth about how writers on Substack can be a return to the voice of new school journalism.

As for me? Voice matters a lot to me. It’s why people follow me. I’m one of the rare critics who punches up at the presses, much to their chagrin, and I’ve been dubbed by a few chefs as, “The critic of the critics.” While presses don’t always like this–and some writers tweet directly at me asking me to stop–it’s built a trust between myself and my readership that is unshakable. And that is who I’m accountable to: my readers and my readers alone. Most writers have someone else to be accountable to before their readers: their press. The power of Substack is that the reader is your boss, and so everyone who writes on Substack writes for their readers.

My readers take road trips to go eat where I eat in rural stretches of the state. They send me tips, and I regularly ask them where to eat on Instagram through polls. Often, hundreds of people respond. My readers send me photographs of restaurants they went to after my recommendations. Many of them approach me in public to say hi. While out with another writer, four people approached me on a single visit. “I’m never recognized,” that writer said. I think the reason is that I’m collaborative and I talk directly to my readers. I posted photographs of myself online before the presses started shedding their disguises, and my voice is reader-centered. beyond beurre blanc isn’t my project–it’s our project.

My readers trust me precisely because they are the only people I’m accountable to, and because I’m not afraid to get into the mud, punch up, or say when a restaurant has had a misstep. “You have my back,” one of my readers said when I met her while sitting at the bar at The Briar. “I know if you say something is good, it’s because it is.” I asked her what I ask everyone when they say this to me, “Why?” And her answer was, “Because when it’s not good, you say so.” To have one, you have to have the other.

My voice, and my big opinions, are my two biggest muscles. In an interview with a press last year, an editor tapped her pen on a paper and said, “You know you wouldn’t get to keep your voice.” I wanted to ask her, “Who am I, the little mermaid?” But I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why I was there. My voice is who I am. It’s why people read my writing. And there are tradeoffs to keeping it, tradeoffs that other writers also feel, too, when they write solo.

THE EDITOR GAP

When I asked writers what we lose when we go indie, everyone had the same answer. Cavanaugh told me, “We lose editing, and as a professional editor, that’s important. I see errors in everyone’s posts, including my own.” Boy does, too. “I see typos. I have typos,” he said.

Rivers talked to me about the deep respect she has for editors. “I gain a lot when I have an editor provide guardrails, push back on an idea, or rein it in,” she said. “I appreciate working with a good editor. It makes my work better. It makes better writers.”

Wilson felt the same way, but she also had another perspective: “A lot of Substack is unedited. But I’ve had experiences as a freelancer where I barely get an edit, simply because legacy publications are under-resourced. It feels like the landscape in general right now, on and off Substack, feels unedited. It’s a bummer, because a great editor can make a story so much better.”

Two of the writers I talked to worked at two-person operations. Cavanaugh has someone to look over her work, and so does Simonson. He said, “I am lucky to have Mary Kate. We read each other’s work and we make it better.” The trade-off there is that it takes longer to break even, because you have to fund two people’s salaries instead of one person’s.

While Sutton also talked about how we lose editing, he also sees the plus side in being indie. “Everyone on Substack has more creativity because they don’t have an editor.” I think that’s true, too, and the messy, rawness of reading reviews with a couple of typos is worth the trade-off for me. I love reading people’s unadulterated thoughts on Substack, because in a world in which tight word counts mean that every article seems overedited, it feels like we’re finding the pulse again.

After I broke even on food, I hired a copy editor, because I have a really hard time seeing my own typos, but my work on beyond beurre blanc has never been professionally edited. It’s just not in my budget. I’m not afraid to say that I think sometimes when you read my work you can tell. I think some of that rawness is what has driven my success. Still, I yearn for an editor to tell me when I’ve gone astray, and most of the writers on Substack do, too.

THE COST OF BEING INDIE

When I tell people that I’m an independent restaurant critic, they often act like it isn’t a job. I’ve been on dates with men who divide my labor into work (my 9-5 that I still have to work to pay my mortgage) and pleasure (my work of being a restaurant critic). But the reality is, this is work–and being indie means the cost of writing is higher both literally and figuratively.

Rivers sees the challenges of being indie as not just personal, but structural: “There is no institutionalized safety net. You don’t have health insurance, colleagues, a mentor, or an office. As the industry is shrinking, a lot of people are being excluded, and that’s dangerous because we lose a lot of diversity in our viewpoints. I don’t see a lot of Black or Brown people starting their own Substacks.” The reason for this is that the start-up is expensive and the personal risk is high.

Cavanaugh told me, “We are lucky right now that our subscription income covers our food and drink when we travel. It does not cover our travel expenses, hotel, flights, or gas.” Similarly, I self-funded my $18,000 food and travel budget for 18 months by working 60-hour weeks before I broke even, which is something that not every writer can do. At the same time, I put in 40 hours a week on my writing and traveled 7 days out of the month. “We work 9-5,” Simonson said. Then he laughed and corrected himself, “Often, we work longer than 9-5.” That’s true for me, too.

In order for indie writers to support themselves on their work, it’s important that our readers see this work as labor. Many of my colleagues demonstrated some hesitation around charging for certain parts of our work, like Sutton, who said, “I’m a little more nervous about charging for news. People are less inclined to pay for a news post and don’t always expect to be charged for it. But it can be just as labor-intensive, if not more so, than writing a restaurant review.”

I often get DMs from people lamenting that all my work should be available for free, even though all of my long-form work, like this piece, is available for free. I want people to read my long-form restaurant reviews, because I want to show legacy presses that people want to read that kind of work. So I give my most expensive and time-intensive work away for free, charging for my guides and “darn good” pieces.

The cost of doing business for us is higher, not just because we have to cover our own health insurance and our own restaurant bills, but because of the time it takes to write each piece. “You have to be everything,” Rivers said. “You have to be your photographer, copy editor, and fact checker.” In being everything, this work is often far more labor-intensive than writing for a press.

The time investment is higher because of the additional labor, but for some writers, like me, it’s also higher because we write more. Most food writers deliver one piece a week to their editors. At beyond beurre blanc, I aim to compete with the local presses and so I release 8-10 pieces a month. I try to be the place you get your restaurant recommendations, which means I have to produce as much as a local press might. That means I work longer hours than the average writer, but it also means my Substack is high value for my readers.

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Multiple people told me the emotional risk is higher, too, like Sutton, who said, “It’s a little scarier to write a tough review. I’m just one person versus a larger network of editorial support.” Simonson had a similar take, saying, “If you write for the New York Times and you say, ‘I’m calling from the New York Times, no one questions you.’ They say, ‘I will talk to you, absolutely.’” And if you say something negative in something you write, they’re not going to come back at you. This is totally independent.” My point of view on this is different, as I’m the only writer in my market who has written a purely negative review since 2023. For me, the only way those reviews seem to get written is simply by being indie.

But, behind the scenes, my hope is that my writing pushes the local presses to have more diversity of opinion in their reviews. I’m not just writing mixed or negative reviews to build trust with my readers. I’m doing it because I’m hoping to turn the tide at the presses in my market who read my work and see how it resonates with their readers.

YOUR ROLE IN SAVING FOOD WRITING

When I talk to everyday people about food writing, they all seem to grieve its demise. Even people who were casual readers feel like things have changed. And they have, in big ways. I personally believe that the most creative and inspiring work is happening outside of the presses, on Substack. If you do, too, there’s a role you play in this ecosystem.

If you want to save food writing and create a space where independent restaurant criticism and food writing thrives, it’s up to you to fund us.

Currently, my food writing pays every single bill except my mortgage, meaning that I have to work a second job to keep up. I’m not alone. Many of us are writing because we love it, while hustling to place freelance pieces or working a traditional job to pay our bills. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If there’s a writer you love who is writing on Substack, you becoming a paid subscriber directly impacts their ability to write more for you. “Every penny that comes in means we can stay one more night and try one more meal,” Cavanaugh said.

My ask for you, the reader? Invest in us. Subscribe to any of the writers mentioned here. As independent publications, we rely on you to fund our meals and our salaries. If you, too, miss the days of voicey criticism, it’s happening here. But to keep going, we need you to invest in our work. The more people who fund us, the more we show the presses that you want this kind of work.

Wilson has similar dreams, “I still think that well-sourced collaborative journalist teams are able to do impactful and meaningful work beyond what an individual can. I hope that there’s a way for all of this energy on an independent level to be able to evolve into something that is ultimately more collaborative and more thoughtful.”

When you show that people want this, you do more than just fund independent writers. You also show the legacy presses that long-form, voicey work is the solution for low readership–and if the writer you subscribe to is looking for a job at a press, you also might help them secure a staff writer position by demonstrating that you want to read their work.

As for me? After going through two rounds of interviews for critic positions, I’ve decided that being indie is my career path. I’m putting my back into this work day in and day out, hoping that by the end of the year, my readership covers everything, including my mortgage. I believe in this work and this space–and I want to keep writing directly for you. Simonson said it better than I did. “This is end game for me,” he said. “I want to be here.”

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A LIST OF INDEPENDENT WRITERS

I asked everyone I interviewed to tell me their favorite writers on Substack or independent. Here’s that list! Subscribe to them–and if you find someone you love, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Alicia Kennedy

a periodic table

A Small and Simple Thing

Attitude Adjustment Facility

Bootwood

Cocktails with Sudermen

David Lebovitz

Dining Well in DSM

Everyday Drinking

Expedite

Food Time with Matt Rodbard

Gareth

Last Call

No Bad Days

Robert Sietsema’s New York

Ruhlman’s Newsletter

Sam Loves the Market

Sweet City

TEXTURE

The Columbus Food Letter

THE FEIRING LINE

The Food Section

The Party Cut

The Sweet Hearts

The Sweet Release

Vittles

What are we having?

xtine

That’s Morgan. She’ll remember your order, the name of your kid, and I’m sure if you told her, she’d remember your favorite color.

I was hoping to pull her aside and chat for a few minutes, but there was a line wrapping around the bakery. I quietly got a couple of cookies and donuts and asked one single question while someone packed my order. “How has it been?” I asked.

“Slammed,” she said. She paused for a moment to look around her bakery “It’s been slammed.”

“Good,” I said.

It was a big difference from the last time I talked with Morgan in the summer of 2025. I was at Bread People at its old location for an hour and a half. I was the only customer. Morgan sat across from me at a table and looked over at the Caribou Coffee as customer after customer walked into the chain next door. I asked her if she thought she’d renew the lease when it was up and she winced. “I don’t know,” she said. At the end of that day, nothing had sold out. Now, at 10:30am, the only things left were cookies and donuts, and all it took was a change of scenery.

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I love Bread People. It’s one of my favorite bakeries in the state. Morgan’s sourcing is top-notch, and her baking is, too. Around the bakery are breads stuffed with Mr. Potato Head accessories to look like, well, Bread People.

The old space was sunny with big windows, but tucked away on a back road. The new location has less light, but more people. There are the old standards like those iconic cardamom buns that have a real heft to them. They still have their signature bread that started it all, The Townie. There are cookies and scones and an egg and cheese on a Kaiser roll that’s good enough for a New York bodega, and there’s lunch goodies served with housemade focaccia.

Now, there are sourdough donuts, too, because it’s part of the history of the space. Morgan hopes that soon, they can add more, but for now, they’re trying to get volume down with their classics in their new home.

“This move was not planned,” Morgan said to me on the phone.

“The owners of Robin’s Nest reached out on Halloween asking if we’d be interested in the space. I went to look with two years left on my lease.” The Robin’s Nest space downtown had always been on the radar for Bread People, though, with Morgan joking with her husband that it was their Dream Location. It was the former Quality Bakery, a legacy bakery in Northfield, and the Robins’ Nest kept the space alive with donuts and full-service breakfast.

“I emailed them back that I’d go look at it. They emailed me back right away. I was over there in an hour,” she said. After her tour, she called her husband and said, “I don’t think we can say no.” That’s Morgan, too. She makes business decisions based on gut feeling.

She started baking professionally during COVID and opened her brick-and-mortar in a similar fashion. Yes, she ran the numbers to make sure the new space made sense, but the business of baking is all heart for her.

If it felt right, it was right, and this felt right.

When her husband came to look at the space, he kept whispering in her ear, “Lock it down. Lock. It. Down.” They did. They signed a lease and in three months that Morgan described as “nutty,” they fulfilled Thanksgiving orders, Christmas orders, brought plumbing up to code, and recipe tested donuts.

At the same time that she was excited for the new space, she also had a healthy fear. “The number of bakeries that have closed during the time between us signing the lease and opening here is staggering.” This move is a risk for her small bakery and her family. But Morgan and her husband knew this was the best chance they had to make a real go at the bakery standing the test of time.

“We were struggling in the fall. Really struggling,” Morgan said.

When I asked her if she had hope that revenue would turn around in the new location, she paused and then answered, “I think we can get out of the hole–and stay out of it.” Business has increased four times in the new location versus the old one, though Morgan knows some of that will die down as the newness does. But running the numbers conservatively? This new location means that Bread People has a real shot at being sustainable.

On the call, Morgan kept going back to what that means for you, not her. “I have a deep-seated Jewish grandmother waiting to get out of my body,” she said. “I want to be able to do more volume because I want to feed more people.”

There’s that old cliche in the restaurant business, “Location, location, location.” We’ve all seen incredible restaurants and bakeries move off the beaten path, hoping to attract customers. For some rare restaurants and bakeries, it works, for others, it’s signing the death certificate before they even open. “Our volume has gone up four times since we moved,” Morgan said. “I thought I planned for it. I started the week with 1.5 cases of eggs. Then I had to order two more right away.” She ended the week having purchased 9.5 cases of eggs.

Moving from a strip mall tucked away outside of the main drag into downtown has increased Bread People’s volume so much that Morgan said, “I thought, ‘Oh God, what have we done?’” She was laughing.

I remembered the last conversation I had with Morgan in 2025. At that time, she told me that her “egg guy,” as she calls him, is the banjo player in her husband’s band. Yes, Morgan remembers your order, but she thinks about herself as the middle person between farms and you. Morgan uses local eggs, butter, milk, flour, and produce.

She has relationships with all of her farmers and often buys direct. This is rare in 2026, when most people work through distributors almost exclusively.

She knows the farmers just as well as she knows you.

“The idea that we can be that big of an account for them consistently is awesome,” she said. “Especially because some restaurants in the cities have had to scale way back. It’s nice to be able to step into some of that void.” Every pastry, every loaf of bread, every sandwich is tied directly back to the farming community for Morgan.

She told me in 2025, “The only way I want to do this bakery is local butter, eggs, and flour, but it’s a hard business for the farmers–and for us.” I asked her how the new location helps her live that dream.

She got a little emotional, saying, “The idea of having a place that can do more for farmers and they become more sustainable, too, that’s the dream. This location makes that possible.”

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You can visit Bread People in their new location at 410 Division St S in Northfield, MN between 7am-5pm Wednesday-Friday and 7am-3pm Saturday and Sunday.

In the morning, change your sheets. Go to the grocery store and buy yourself a dozen red roses. Linger in the grocery store to watch men scramble for roses. Buy Cheetos and a birthday candle. Put the roses in a vase. Get a chocolate croissant from the best patisserie in your town, no matter the length of the drive. Drive to your other single friend’s house and hand-deliver a croissant with a Valentine’s Day card. Tell them you love them. Hug at their front door while the winter wind rips around you.

Shower in hot, hot water. The kind of shower you normally might save for men. Stop saving it. Paint your nails red. If you have the kind of skill that lets you put a heart on one nail, do it. Brush your teeth, floss, and swirl Listerine in your mouth. Feel mint between all your teeth. Do your hair, but don’t wear make-up. Go barefaced into the night, with all your age and all the scars showing on your skin.

Try on all your favorite dresses. Take photos in a full-length mirror. Change the shoes until they are just right. Sometimes, the shoes will be right and the dress will be wrong. So, again, change the dress. Bring the birthday candle you bought and a light.

Do not make a reservation. Go somewhere romantic. Sit at the bar right at 5:00pm. Turn off your phone. Bring a notebook. Listen to the men to your right and left go on and on about how they simply did not have time to plan dates. They’ll tell their partner, “But, see, it still turned out.” Smile at the bartender. Order champagne. Write down a list of all the things you love about your life alone, even if half of them feel half true.

Order dessert. Something rich and chocolatey. Ask the bartender if you can put the candle into your cake and light it. Watch it burn. Make a wish for something other than finding love. Make a wish for something like selling your first painting or finding the perfect set of dishware at a thrift store for dirt cheap. Blow out the candle. Tip for two.

On the drive home, listen to music that makes you feel sexy and lustful. Say, Do You Like That, Baby? By Baby Nova. When you get home, pour yourself a glass of a beautiful drink, like Brunette by EdeM or really good sherry. Take a bath, with the really good salts you save for special occasions. Stop saving them. Balance the glass of something special on your knee. Listen to music at full volume, with candles lit and no overhead light.

Do not run from the thoughts where you hope for love, but talk to them like a good friend. Tell your thoughts, “But this is so beautiful.”

Put on your favorite lingerie, the one you save for special occasions. Stop saving it. Turn on a movie and watch it not from bed, but the couch. Take Cheetos and chopsticks out of the cabinet. Put on a face mask. Eat the Cheetos straight out of the package while drinking your fancy drink and letting the serum soak into your skin. Turn down your kitchen in your lingerie, wiping the counters and the sink, a ritual that always feels like you completed one small thing. Go to bed early on clean sheets.

Do not dream that next year you will not be alone. Love that you want, the kind where he already has the flowers ready and where he had the reservation months ago, is half luck. But this life is all of your making.

Instead of love, wish instead for more days like this one, where there are roses on your table and wishes to be fulfilled. Because this, too, is romantic.

My choices for a romantic, solo Valentine’s Day in different Midwest locations:

Minnesota

• Twin Cities: Myriel

• Rochester: Marrow

• North Country: The Pines

Wisconsin

• La Crosse: Lovechild

• Madison: The Harvey House

• Milwaukee: Ca’Lucchenzo

Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota

• Chicago: Dear Margaret *Dear Margaret may be closed but if they reopen it is still my choice. I won’t be able to update you as I am out of office recovering from surgery.

• Des Moines: Django

• Omaha: The Boiler Room

• Fargo: Mezzaluna & The Drawing Room

I am currently undergoing cancer treatment and all of my January and early February pieces were pre-written. If you want to help me sustain an income as a writer, as my standard job is on pause while I recover, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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This change of having non-alcoholic beer in the most rural stretches of Minnesota signals some kind of shift that I’ve only been able to track as a person who has spent a lot of time on the road over many years.

I decided to write a piece that maps the state of Greater Minnesota’s NA scene by regions or categories that I think have distinct NA cultures. Every single major city has its own NA culture, with places like Minneapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee having distinct non-alcoholic scenes that are often influenced by other local restaurants and bars versus what is going on nationally. Chicago, LA, and New York also have distinct scenes that are exceptionally different, more so than their standard bar scenes. Certain beers, large-format bottles, spirits, and even philosophies of NA pairings influence the ways that cocktail menus read (and taste).

Some other writers are paying attention to that, but I don’t think anyone has sat down to look beyond major cities to analyze what’s happening outside of them. This makes sense, because it would require a writer to be two things: 1) sober and 2) on the road enough in rural places to map them. That’s a very, very small faction of writers. Still, this has become something that’s really interesting to me as I travel. I’m watching a shift that feels major and exciting in real time. I wanted to write this piece to have a specific analysis of this moment in time, so that in the future, as different regions develop their own NA cultures, it’s trackable.

Niche? Sure. But what’s happening in Greater Minnesota is a heck of a lot of fun.

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Breweries

It probably is surprising for people to hear that breweries are the first place I check out in Greater Minnesota. Rapids Brewing in Grand Rapids has a rotating menu of NA cans, including my favorite NA beers, Athletic. Sylvan Brewing has an entire fridge of non-alcoholic options, ranging from craft sodas to a significant number of NA beers. Every single brewery in Duluth has NA options ranging from Athletic beers at Ursa Minor (RIP to their NA in-house brew) to craft cocktails at Canal Park Brewing.

The Brainerd Lakes Area has Montgomery Brewing and Spilled Grain which both have their own house-brewed Root Beer! Other breweries like Hayes Public House in Buffalo, Giesenbrau Bier Co in New Prague, and Cuyuna Brewing in Crosby all have their own NA options ranging from canned beers to tap root beer or kombucha. In 2025, I did not go into one greater Minnesota brewery that did not have some kind of NA option–and that wasn’t true in 2023. Most breweries have more NA options than actual brick-and-mortar restaurants, which is a ton of fun!

Bottle Shops and Lounges

Non-alcoholic bottle shops and lounges are popping up around Minnesota, mostly in the north, with Lady Superior in Grand Marais leading the charge. Ollie Birch Lounge in Alexandria is an entirely NA destination with really good and complex non-alcoholic cocktails. Laporte has a dedicated NA shop in Mrs. Sippi, and Deer River has Lady Sippers. Even standard rural liquor stores are getting in on NA, with the Alexandria Liquor Store, which has so many NA options that it rivals some Twin Cities’ liquor stores. Most of these shops that opened in the last year are run by women and are exceptionally thoughtful. I’m excited to see how this grows in 2026.

Fine Dining

Restaurants in the Fine Dining category across Greater Minnesota are trying to build programs that pair well with food. Take The Pines, for example, where there are seasonal drinks that range from a soda to tea cocktails. This menu is relatively small, and without the complexity of NA spirits you might find in an urban center, but it’s well-curated, and every drink I had was a lot of fun. There’s also Cup N’ Saucer, which has a small list of non-alcoholic wines and NA cocktails to go with your meal. At the very southern edge of the Minnesota/Iowa border, I was delighted by those options, even if they aren’t the “trendy” wines.

Alto Pino in Duluth has a small but mighty NA menu, with Kolonne Null (my choice for bubbles) featured on its own and in an NA cocktail, along with a drink that mixes NA whiskey and vermouth with pomegranate and citrus. Also in Duluth, New Scenic Cafe has a mostly-can driven program that has something for anyone, including beers that read from light to dark on their menu.

These menus are smaller than those of similar restaurants in the city center, often with styles of drinks that would have been popular a few years ago. In the same way that Chicago and New York are at the cutting edge of NA and the Twin Cities are often a few years behind in terms of craft, so too is Greater Minnesota. Unlike the Twin Cities a few years ago, these menus often have defined points of view in a way that makes me really excited to see what they look like two or three years from now.

North Shore

The North Shore (stretching from Duluth to the border) has the most advanced NA scene of any Greater Minnesota region. Lady Superior is a bottle shop in Grand Marais with a ton of hard-to-find bottles, including the only Athletic tall boys I’ve seen in the state. Vikre in Duluth has some of the most fun non-alcoholic cocktails I’ve had, with seasonal drinks that are as well considered as their alcoholic menu.

Every single restaurant in Grand Marais seems to have good options, with Fisherman’s Daughter having an exciting line-up of non-alcoholic cans and The Raven having one of the most extensive NA beer programs I’ve encountered anywhere. Just south in Lutsen, Cascade has a handful of non-alcoholic beers, including Guinness and a small list of cocktails that are more complex than the average restaurant of its size. And in general, every place in Duluth has some kind of non-alcoholic program, with varying degrees of success.

Rochester

Rochester has a really interesting micro-culture of non-alcoholic drinks, mostly focused on fruit-forward concoctions. Marrow has a small but mighty NA list that includes a housemade Orange Creamsicle Fizz that is a solid non-alcoholic cocktail, though for the caliber of dining, I’d love to see a couple more NA options. Thai Pop has eight non-alcoholic cocktails that all include fruit. Bitter & Pour also has a menu of six drinks that vary in flavor profile, but all except one of them have housemade fruit syrups, cordials, or sodas of some kind. Five West also has a long NA cocktail menu, with really affordable drinks at $6 or $7. All but one is fruit-forward, with the lavender, mint, and cream + club soda as the non-fruity option.

These four programs are good for fruit-forward menus, which are exceptionally common across small cities in the Midwest. My hope for the region is to move beyond the obvious combinations of fruit, soda, and bubbles to more nuanced drinks that fit into the complexity of the burgeoning food scene.

The Great Rural Expanse

Driving down roads I don’t know and looking for full parking lots is one of my favorite activities. Over the past year, I’ve stopped off in a bar on every trip where I didn’t bring my dogs. Hayslips Corner, the oldest bar in Minnesota, located in Talmoon, had non-alcoholic Michelob Ultra and Budweiser beer for me. Pour Willies in Tenstrike, which invites you to bring the kids and encourages no pissy attitudes, also had two non-alcoholic beers: Bud Light Zero and Guinness Zero. Walnut Grove Bar & Grill in Walnut Grove offers four non-alcoholic beers: Blue Moon, Coors Light, Michelob Ultra, and Busch. Thirsty Beaver, which has the world’s cutest beaver logo in Elysian, also had a Busch NA.

I didn’t find these because those menus are available online. They’re not. Some of them have their official website linked to the city’s page with no menu. I found them because the parking lot was full and I decided to go. I wouldn’t have expected any of these bars to have non-alcoholic options, but they do, and it’s a delight for me as a sober traveler.

Hey, PS, if you like my work, there’s no one else in Minnesota doing this boots on the ground testing in the rural expanse of the state. It’s expensive and becoming a paid subscriber helps me do more of it.

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Travel Destinations

As a person who lived in a tourist town, I hate the phrase “tourist town,” because it implies that the town is defined by tourism, not locals, so travel destinations it is instead. You’ll be hard pressed to walk into any bar in a travel destination that doesn’t have one NA option. Every single bar and restaurant in Lanesboro has an NA beer or mocktail, for example. Every single Zorbaz I’ve been to has at least two NA can options.

My server at Lakes Tavern in Pequot Lakes took my sobriety so seriously, I would define it as touching. In the same region, Bar Harbor Supper Club in Lake Shore had 5 NA beers in their 2025 open season, along with two (good) wines and five cocktails. The Frisky Otter in Ely has Bud and Heineken 0.

Three years ago, most of these options didn’t exist, and I’m assuming a lot of this is driven by an increase in tourists asking for non-alcoholic options, which means that sober people who live in these regions year-round have more options in the off-season.

I’m exceptionally excited to see how the rural NA scene grows and was surprised that it’s more integrated than in the Twin Cities, where many restaurants still don’t have options for sober drinkers. I’ll keep mapping this, to keep up with changes as they evolve!

My most read piece of 2025 was titled: Will 2025 be the Year that Restaurants Take Sobriety Seriously? Since it appears 2025 was not the year restaurants took sobriety seriously, I’m re-posting it for Dry January, with slight edits, below.

Two days after my three-year anniversary of sobriety, I ordered an NA Bloody Mary at Duluth Coffee Kitchen like this, “I’m an alcoholic and I want to order an NA Bloody Mary.” The restaurant was loud, with kids yelling, and the sound of a coffee grinder. I wasn’t carded. I wasn’t asked to clarify. I was just delivered a Bloody Mary I assumed was NA.

I started telling restaurants I was an alcoholic when saying, “I don’t drink,” or, “I won’t be ordering alcoholic drinks,” didn’t work. I say it out loud to try to avoid being served alcohol.

I do everything I can short of making my own drink to ask restaurants not to serve me alcohol. Still, somehow, this is the second time in 2025 that alcohol has crossed the bar.

I’ve written already (and at length) about how you can prevent this.

I will say, Duluth Coffee Company’s response to me was stellar, and I want to include it here. Though it doesn’t change the outcome, it is welcome to hear.

Thank you for reaching out and sharing this with us, and most importantly, congratulations on your three years of sobriety. That is a huge milestone, and we’re truly sorry that your experience here could have threatened that in any way.

This is absolutely not acceptable, and we take it very seriously. Our intention is always to create a space that is safe, welcoming, and respectful of all people, especially those in recovery. We’ve already initiated a conversation with our team to review our process around non-alcoholic orders and will be implementing updated training immediately to ensure this never happens again.

Thank you again for your honesty and grace in the way you brought this to our attention. You’ve helped us be better, and we’re grateful for that.

With sincere apologies,

Duluth Coffee Company

In 2024 and early 2025, I spent most of the year handling the three times I was served alcohol quietly. I reached out to owners, talked to them over the phone, and told them I wouldn’t post what happened to me. I came to them genuinely hoping to change things.

They all told me they’d make changes ranging from training to NA drink menu changes, so that drinks sounded different than the alcoholic versions, even in a rush. Two of those restaurants told me they’d make changes and didn’t. I was just placated, brushed off, when I was really trying to do the thing that chefs were asking me to do: not make it a thing on the internet.

The one restaurant that did take it seriously implemented immediate and sweeping changes, ranging from asking people if they drank before getting drink orders, changing the names of drinks, and confirming drinks were NA upon arrival. That restaurant also knew where the problem was. The server rang the drink in right. The bartender made an NA and alcoholic version of that drink. The wrong ones got run out to tables.

One of the restaurants that didn’t make changes said if I’ve been served alcohol so often, it must be a “me” problem, like I’m not ordering right, when maybe it’s a volume problem—I go to over 400 restaurants a year and restaurants don’t have the protocols in place to handle it, even when they have NA drinks on the menu. I am normally served alcohol in fancy or hip restaurants, never in dive bars, always in restaurants with an NA section on their menu.

Earlier in 2025, a sober influencer was served a beer at a restaurant when she ordered an NA one and publicly addressed her relapse after that. The comments section went wild defending the restaurant. Somehow, when addicts get alcohol at restaurants, it’s always our fault.

When I thought I was allergic to shellfish, I was only ever been served shellfish once in a restaurant. It was also an accident. I handled it quietly, knowing that the chefs at that restaurant would take it seriously. They did.

I found myself, on the other side of these two very different experiences, feeling helpless. How do I get this industry I care about so much to give a damn about people like me?

I don’t know the answer, but maybe being vulnerable and emotional is the right way? Maybe not seeing me as a girl calling you out on the internet, but a girl telling you how hard this shit is, might change your mind. Or one person’s mind.

When I realized Duluth Coffee Kitchen served me alcohol, I felt my stomach drop. I was woozy. My first thought was, “I’m two days out from three years sober.” And then I pulled up my relapse prevention note on my phone. This is a document that guides me on what to do when I feel like drinking or was served alcohol unintentionally.

I was supposed to go to two more restaurants that morning and then on a walk, but instead I went through the following list:

1. Write a list of all the things you love about being sober.

2. Write down how the alcohol feels in your body.

3. Read the promises.

4. Call your best friend and tell them you were served alcohol.

5. Tell your boyfriend.

6. Call two sober people.

7. Go to an AA meeting, the soonest one.

8. Call your therapist.

When you serve me alcohol, I won’t relapse, but you do impact my day. Because alcoholism lives in the shadows, I do my best to bring it to light.

After Duluth Coffee Kitchen served me alcohol, I cried in my car. I cried in my car because I don’t understand why the industry sees this as such a flippant thing. I cried in my car because I knew that another addict wouldn’t have walked away unscathed—and all addicts are my siblings. I pulled out the three year coin I keep in my wallet and I started the process of working through my relapse prevention list. The first thing I wrote down about what I love about being sober is: I am alive.

People act like my anger when I’m served alcohol is unjustified, but I don’t know how to tell you that this matters. I’m tired of asking restaurants to care about my sobriety. When you talk about it being a “mistake,” a “service error,” or “an organic part of restaurants and the risk you take,” you aren’t taking sobriety seriously.

There are restaurants where shellfish never winds up in the hands of people allergic to it. And there are restaurants where alcohol never crosses the bar.

For lots of people, they will relapse. Addiction is a beast. Especially early on, lots of people don’t have the skills to handle it. And maybe your response to that is, “Okay, well, don’t order the NA Bloody Mary then,” except this is who your restaurant is catering to when you have one. You have made a choice to include us. You don’t have to. Diet Coke is fine. But if you make a menu for us, you have to consider us.

In 2025, it’s time to admit that if alcohol crosses your bar, you have included addicts in your menu design with the idea of profiting off them without really caring about us. And that’s not just for your guests, it’s your cooks, too.

The restaurant industry has the highest rate of illicit drug use (19%) and the highest rate of substance abuse disorder (17%) of any industry. Any. All of them. Every other one.

Acting like a lack of care for alcohol crossing the bar is a “guest” problem ignores that the lack of care about alcohol is an industry problem. The “guest” problem is a symptom of a bigger problem, where the industry eats its own.

Here are some stories from the trenches.

An ex-boyfriend of mine drove himself to rehab after a shift where he tried to turn down cocaine and was taunted the entire shift for saying no. This is at a restaurant of a lot of acclaim in the Twin Cities.

At a Michelin-starred restaurant, someone shouted, “Is there a doctor in here?” I said no but that I had Narcan. A young cook had received laced drugs. While he was being taken away to the hospital, I found myself saying something I say to restaurants all the time, “You should have Narcan.*” He wasn’t given the resources he needed to get sober. He was fired by the person who gave him his first bump.

*Hey, chef/owners! You should have Narcan!

In the small city of Kingston, a cook wasn’t so lucky. He ODed during service. There was no Narcan. The EMTs were too late. He died.

A chef in a highly awarded restaurant in NYC messaged me after he relapsed with coke he found in the kitchen to tell me that his chef/owner said, “You’re more creative high.” He wanted to know what he should do. He felt the coke was planted. He opened the restaurant. It was his baby. It’s fighting for a star. “Will this eventually kill you?” I asked him. He said, “Yes.” I said, “You have two options then. Leave or die.” He left. He hasn’t returned to the industry. He’s one of its most promising stars.

There’s a chef/owner with a lot of local acclaim who has vodka in his quart container of “water.” When someone brought it to his business partner’s attention, that person said, “Eh, that’s just [insert name here].” When a cook dumped it out, sick of being yelled at by his drunk boss, all hell broke loose.

On a more everyday, mundane level, cooks reach out to me all the time because they got sober and are having a hard time returning to the industry. The constant alcohol in kitchens gets to them. The being offered coke gets to them. The higher up in fine dining you are, the harder it is. Many sober cooks become pizza guys or work at country clubs or work at a brunch spot that crushes their soul. Or they leave the industry entirely. These are cooks who have a ton of talent and the sobriety to execute clear visions. The industry purges its brightest by being inaccessible to them when they’re going to be at their best.

Lots of chef/owners will say, “Not in my kitchen,” not realizing that vape pens and coke baggies are passed around when they’re doing something else in the back. More than one chef who has told me, “Not in my kitchen,” I haven’t wanted to be a narc, but I wanted to scream, “Yes, in your kitchen. I know, in your kitchen. A chef is newly in AA from your kitchen.”

But I can’t, so I smile and say, “Lots of chefs say that when it isn’t true.”

Then there are moments like these.

In a small town restaurant in Minnesota, when a cook got sober, he returned from rehab to a new NA section on the menu.

Somewhere in New York City, a sous chef got sober, and the chef/owner implemented a sober kitchen upon his return.

A head chef somewhere in this country got sober, quietly, and now fine dining cooks straight out of rehab stage in his kitchen to get back into the industry with a toe in before diving back into the monster of a kitchen with a lot of booze.

I firmly believe that these are the kitchens restaurant industry workers deserve—and I think it starts by caring about alcohol crossing the bar.

Or, at Smyth, early on, someone acknowledged my sobriety to make sure I knew that I was safe there.

At HAGS, there are fent test strips in the bathroom, which was enough to make me cry.

At Lakes Tavern, when I said I was an alcoholic, my server appeared to have never taken a task as seriously as making sure that my drinks were NA. It was incredibly, especially, touching.

At Khaluna, the first thing they ask you at the bar is if you drink alcohol or not. If you don’t, your welcome drink is NA.

Once, on a kitchen tour, I saw not just Narcan in a prominent place but a how-to sign. I pointed to it and said, “I really love that.” From across the kitchen, the chef said, “We take it really seriously here. We’re a dry kitchen.”

After I published this in 2025, at least 13 kitchens got Narcan, including four restaurants with Michelin stars.

I went viral in the restuarant industry and sober chefs reached out to me in droves, saying thank you.

A couple chefs reached out to me in 2025 to ask me how to support a staff member that was obviously struggling.

I took half a dozen restaurant workers to their first AA meeting in 2025, with one of them saying, “I didn’t know where else to go.” Now, six months sober, he’s the place to go.

These moments were ones that will stay with me forever. They also normally happen at restaurants where sober addicts in recovery have a say. They should happen everywhere, not just when one of your own gets sober.

When you make the choice to take sobriety seriously in your bar program, cooks struggling with alcoholism are more likely to tell you when they need help or support.

They’re more likely to feel like they can turn down shift drinks. And then those sober cooks and servers find you, so that when sober guests come in, they have friends at the bar. Nothing feels as much like home as when a chef or bartender comes out to talk to me, with a quiet and well-placed, “We have a mutual friend. Bill W.”

As giant after giant in the industry dies from substance abuse, it’s up to chef/owners to lead the charge to turn the tide. I just don’t know how to ask you to care about us any other way than I already am.

Will this be the year that restaurants stop serving me alcohol? Probably not, but I won’t stop trying, because as more and more restaurants are adding NA programs and more cooks struggle to stay sober, it’s more important than ever.

The lull between New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day is brutal in Minnesota’s restaurant scene.

We see closure after closure in the heart of winter because of it–and the thing is, it’s entirely preventable, and so much of it is rooted in the promises you make to yourself on New Year’s Eve.

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Every year, countless people make resolutions around food. They want to eat out less, eat “better,” or just straight up eat less. In the age of Ozempic, we see this kind of sentiment rising, with many of my baker friends constantly assaulted by guests saying they aren’t ordering anything because they want to “Be good.”

In 2025, every celebrity seems to be shrinking. Dessert is the cause of all of our ills. Seed oils are out, beef tallow is in. Everyone is protein maxing. Low-carb is back, baby, and with it, people are getting their fiber from soda instead of whole grains and plants. Even hunger and cravings, now called “food noise,” are seen as something to be removed.

The return to glamorizing 2000s thinness has set us back in terms of accepting that people have different bodies. I worry about that a lot.

But I also worry about what it means for restaurants, especially as we approach January.

Now, look, I’m a restaurant critic who eats out almost every single day. I am not telling you to eat out like I do. Recently, a friend who came on a trip described it as, “Brutal.” It’s not as glamorous as it seems.

And I am certainly not telling you to get the steak and pasta every time you go out.

What I am suggesting is that in the darkest days of winter, what if we all made a new kind of resolution: to eat out more, not less?

As restaurants sit empty in January and February, they fill up again in the spring. Some years, that’s March. Other years, it’s April. That’s because these temporary promises we make to ourselves often are not sustainable and we always go back.

We go back because restaurants are the cornerstore of life. Memories happen here. Birthdays, anniversaries, first dates, nights with friends where your relationship feels like it gets so much deeper.

But what if there’s nothing to go back to? What if your favorite restaurant closes in the lull of winter? And what if instead of letting that happen, we all intentionally did our damnedest to make sure our favorite spots stay open?

Here are some ways you can support the restaurant community in January, regardless of your resolutions for the New Year.

• Go indie! Big restaurant groups don’t need your business to stay open. Small indie places do.

• Take advantage of the restaurants that are normally booked up by booking one reservation you normally can’t get, but focus mostly on reservations outside of the hype cycle.

• Look at your calendar right now and make reservations for January-March. It doesn’t have to be any more than you normally go out! Just put it in your plans and follow through.

• Do not cancel your reservations day of, even if the cancellation policy allows you to.

• Go out for a drink! You don’t have to order food. If you sit at the bar and order an NA or alcoholic drink, tip well, and bring a friend, you’re helping restaurants get by.

• Make a reservation with a group of friends you haven’t seen in a while so you’re bringing multiple people into a restaurant you love. Grab a bottle of wine if you drink. The margins on beverages help restaurants get by.

• If you’re really committing to a new way of eating, find spots that can meet your needs. Lots of restaurants will accommodate you!

• Buy gift cards in January to give to your friends for their birthdays throughout the year (or for yourself!). That little boost really does make a difference. While we’re talking about gift cards, use the gift cards you do have in a different month than January and February, when margins are thinner.

• Tag the restaurant on social media when you go so people in your circle can see a place you love.

• Bring baked goods to work or to friends so that you can support a local bakery you love that might be seeing a slowdown.

• Tip well! You should always tip 20% (yes, always), but if you can afford to, tipping a little extra in January helps your servers have consistent income. Tipping is down in general–and helping close the gap is one of the best ways to show you love restaurants.

• Don’t use DoorDash. Order takeout directly from the restaurant and spend the extra few minutes to pick it up. There are so many ways to do this that aren’t a full meal, too. Let’s say you’re making chicken for dinner but don’t want to worry over a salad. Go pick it up! On my way to a friend’s house, I once grabbed a to-go gjetost cheesecake from Bar La Grassa for a surprise treat.

• Shop a spot’s grab-n-go. Wise Acre has a whole section of veggies and meat. Churchill St. has local milk and goodies. Alma has the best buttermilk salad dressing your money can buy. Isles Buns has frozen cinnamon rolls. Support Mucci’s by buying the world’s best frozen lasagna. Grab tortillas at Oro. There are lots of spots that have grab-n-go for you to peruse.

If we all do a couple of these things, more restaurants will get through the winter. That’s what I want for 2026. How about you?

New to me

What happens a lot with influencers is that they walk into a full restaurant that is new to them in a neighborhood they don’t normally frequent, and then they call that restaurant a hidden gem. This happens in all types of cuisine, but I see it happen the most with Asian cuisine, specifically small shops that specialize in something particular, like pho. In these cases, the term hidden gem is a bit racist. In reality, these places are not hidden gems. They are just new to you, because you don’t actively seek out this food for yourself, often because it’s not culturally important to you. New to me is the most accurate way to describe this!

Unexpected place

When I gave my recommendation for my favorite cake donut in the state, I told people it was somewhere unexpected. Where that donut is located is for paid subscribers only. But I tell you that while looking for that donut, I went to places like cottage bakeries in rural trailer parks, churches, gas stations where women had set up a little stand, and Amish spots at flea markets. All of those are unexpected places to find good donuts. It’s not a hidden gem; it’s just somewhere you might not expect.

Your new favorite (blank) spot

There are legitimately times when I go into restaurants and I know that the average person who is reading my content hasn’t been to that restaurant before. This is often because those restaurants are out in the suburbs, don’t have a ton of acclaim, and the people who go to them are actively seeking them out. I’m working on my favorite Indian restaurant piece, for example, and I know that most of the places on the list are not places that people who live in Minneapolis or St. Paul have been to. But people who live in the suburbs sure have! That doesn’t mean that they’re hidden gems, it just means it has the potential to be your new favorite spot if you don’t regularly drive to that suburb.

A spot that could use more love

It’s no secret that I love Herbst. I think it’s an incredibly ambitious and beautiful restaurant. It’s also far less full than it should be. I think a lot of people would walk into this restaurant and define it as a hidden gem, because they might be one of only five or six tables dining that night. But the reality is calling it a hidden gem actually doesn’t get the result that you want. The result that you want is for people to go there. When I tell people that a restaurant could use a little bit more love, they’re more likely to go, because the people reading my work care about restaurants.

Worth the drive

Sometimes, places are “hidden” to city people because they are… far away from where you live. Flour & Flower is one of the best bakeries in the state but you have to drive over an hour to get there. It’s not a hidden gem, there’s a line out the door. That line is full of locals. One way to define this is a spot city people maybe haven’t been to without erasing local support is to say it’s worth the drive.

Beloved (neighborhood) spot

Many places that influencers call hidden gems are actually just beloved neighborhood joints. These are places that are not going to make a best of Minnesota list because they’re prioritizing making good, consistent food for their neighbors and they’re not pushing for awards. The average person doesn’t learn about these places if they don’t live in that neighborhood. I’ll never forget when an influencer called Nightingale a hidden gem. Nightingale is both a beloved industry bar and a beloved Uptown bar. It’s not hidden, when I was dating in 2023 it was everyone’s recommendation for a first date who lived in uptown. It’s far more interesting to say, “Head to this beloved Uptown bar,” than to make the locals mad by calling it a hidden gem when it is consistently full all the way to closing time.

Just state the facts

Sometimes, you don’t even need the qualifier. Sometimes you just need to state the facts. For example, it feels like every influencer who goes up into rural Minnesota defines everything up there as a hidden gem, ignoring the local people who live there. It’s far more interesting to say something like… dive bar with excellent lake views or burger that rivals the best burgers in the Twin Cities than it is to call a spot a hidden gem. Similarly, in the Twin Cities, let’s talk about Good Times. Instead of calling it a hidden gem, you could explain that it is giving family-friendly CC Club vibes, you can draw on a plate that they’ll put on the walls, and they’re playing something like Baywatch on the television over the door. This is far more interesting than calling it a hidden gem and far more likely to get people to visit.

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I walked into a restaurant I was deadset on reviewing six months ago. Most of my reviews are long-form like that, happening over a series of months instead of weeks. For this review, I went on seven visits over that timeframe, finding a decidedly mixed bag of some Very Good (Very Special!!!) Options and some Very Bad Options. It was a true mixed review, but a lean recommend with strict parameters on what to order to have a good meal.

On every visit, I asked one question, “Is the [insert seafood item here] farmed or fished, and where is it from?”

On all seven visits, no one was able to answer my question.

So I called and asked the same question on more than one occasion. Then I said to myself, “Okay, maybe it’s… me?” I had someone else call, too. She works front of house and is the kind of person who can answer those questions outright at her restaurant. Still, no dice, and her response to how her phone call went was this set of emojis: 😅🥲.

We both asked other questions, too. One of them was a fact-check confirmation on the style of some dishes. Let me give an example totally unrelated to the restaurant. Let’s say I called to ask, “Is this white or rye bread?” And the cashier said, “It’s just bread.” That was the level of question I was asking and the level of response I got. I knew the answer to that question (which has nothing to do with bread), but the staff… did not.

Here is what I learned immediately about this restaurant through this:

1. No one who purchases (leadership) is in the kitchen regularly.

2. Leadership doesn’t care enough about the sourcing to train people in on it (and because their restaurant brand hinges on being high quality, to be clear, they should).

3. No one on the team had the curiosity to find out when asked that question over a long period of time by the same (kind of annoying, I’m sure) lady.

Now, you might be reading this and wonder to yourself, “Kirstie, couldn’t you just have… called the chef?” And, actually, yes!

But can you call the chef if you want to know the answer? Probably not!

I could call the chef. I just don’t… want to, because one thing that sets a good restaurant apart from a great restaurant to me is that an average guest who isn’t a critic can get their questions answered in the restaurant, too. This is part of the reason that I don’t normally do interviews before I release a review. I want my experience to be as close to yours as possible.

I reached out to the restaurant and they gave me the chef’s email, but after hunting for this information for months, I decided that this wasn’t a review I wanted to write. In order for me to write this review, I would have to tell this whole saga and story of a restaurant by name. While I think it’s fair for me to do that, I also think it’s important for you to know that the vast majority of mixed and negative reviews I stumble into, I just don’t write.

I write a mixed or negative review when a lot of your hard-earned money is on the line, the restaurant has an outsized amount of acclaim or hype that I don’t think it lives up to, or I think a specific review will build reader trust.

None of these things are true of this restaurant.

I think most people will order “correctly” here, missing out on the truly bad dishes, and if you don’t? You’re out $30. I realized that if I was going to write a review, this piece I’m writing right now would have been the point of it, and I can write this piece without naming the restaurant.

So this was supposed to be a review, but it isn’t. Here’s the piece I wrote instead.

One Detail that Sets a Restaurant Apart, According to a Restaurant Critic

I ask a lot of questions in restaurants.

At tasting menus, I regularly ask who designed a specific dish. If I love an olive oil, I ask after it. Sometimes, I can feel a dish has a story behind it, and I ask what that story is.

Once, I asked a restaurant if they made their own soft serve. No one at the restaurant knew the answer to that question. One of the people there was the General Manager.

There’s a restaurant somewhere in the Twin Cities where you think the pasta is housemade and it is not anymore, my friends. I know that because when I saw it wasn’t highlighted on the menu as “housemade,” anymore I asked. The server looked at me, kind of concerned, and took a big breath before telling me where they get their pasta from.

Once, I asked about the butter being served at a Michelin-starred restaurant. They were adamant that it was from France when I asked. I knew it wasn’t. I asked if I could see some of the packaging. My server never brought it. “It’s from Wholesome Farms,” he said. “You mean Sysco,” I said. “What?” He asked. “That’s Sysco,” I said. He couldn’t get through serving me any of my remaining courses without cracking up. “Do you think it’s from Paris, Texas?” he asked me when he brought dessert, and I had to go to the bathroom I was laughing so hard. He and I are friends now–and he no longer works there.

Another time, I asked after (bad) caviar. “It’s sturgeon,” my server said. “Right,” I said, “What kind?” Flummoxed and flustered, he said, “Farmed?” Then, “From China, I think?” I never got an answer that night of where the caviar was from, but on night two at that restaurant, I did get access to see the whole tin and it was grade 2 caviar priced like grade 1, wild-caught and not farmed like the server thought, and not from China. This restaurant is over $150 per person and this is an answer the staff should know.

I ask these questions because I learn something about the restaurant through them–I’m guessing as you read this, you did, too.

As a critic, these interactions are invaluable to me. It’s part of why I rarely do formal interviews when I write my pieces. Most of what I want to know I can find out in the restaurant, and when I can’t find it out, well, I learned something, anyway.

I ask about the sourcing of meat and seafood on the regular, not just as a critic, but as a guest who really cares about where the meat comes from, personally. At a spot serving raw fish, this is also information I should be able to get pretty easily for a myriad of reasons. Every other spot that serves [insert seafood item here] in the Twin Cities has been able to answer this question for me without checking with the kitchen. Servers just know this.

So, at a spot serving supposedly high-quality [insert seafood item here], why did nobody know?

The answer to this is that the kitchen at this restaurant has a lot of potential, but right now? It’s a mess, with leadership not present over any of my seven visits or five phone calls, and inconsistency that follows from lack of leadership. This is something that gives a messy restaurant away.

I wrote this piece because I have something to say about the restaurants I immediately know are doing something right, too, not just the ones I see faltering.

One thing that sets a restaurant apart for me is when I ask these questions and someone doesn’t have to check.

This is rare, probably less than 10% of my interactions, where I can ask multiple questions in one night and someone knows the answer to all of them.

You might think that happens at Michelin spots, but it actually doesn’t. I rarely can get my questions answered there without someone checking. Once, a restaurant in Chicago literally just handed me their entire stack of weekly orders, because no one could figure it out, and they thought maybe I could. (I couldn’t, but it was fun to look through.)

Servers not having to check normally happens at farm-to-table restaurants like Myriel, Birch, and Pietramala (CONGRATS ON YOUR GREEN STAR, BESTIES!). They have relationships with their farmers and so they know how to speak about them. But sometimes I’m surprised by other spots, too.

The teenage worker at Sue’s Drive-In, for example, knew the answer to where their beef came from. Another teenager at Gordy’s Hi-Hat knew the name of the honeyberry farm where the honeyberries came from in my honeyberry shake (A SUMMER MUST!!!). At Fisherman’s Daughter, a teenager could name the actual fisherman who caught my fish by name.

On all of these instances, I was floored, because it turns this idea that many chef/owners have about this concept on its head. Often, when I talk to chefs about this, they’ll tell me the reason staff don’t know is because, “They just don’t care enough to learn,” which 1) okay way to tell on yourself about not liking your staff and 2) YIKES, way to tell on yourself about your leadership.

These teens learned it and so can your highly competent career hospitality staff. When I asked the teen at Sue’s how she learned that information, she told me, “Oh, I just hear that name of the farm all the time.” The teen at Gordy’s said, “We were told it’s a really special farm.” It is!!! And being told that, he remembered it. At Fisherman’s Daughter, the cashier looked at me with a confused look when I asked her how she knew that. “Why wouldn’t I know that?” she asked. At Fisherman’s Daughter, it’s an expectation, not an exception.

When I walk into a fine dining farm-to-table spot, I sort of expect the staff to know these facts, but when I walk into a restaurant that is in a different category and they know it? It sets off my spidey sense in a few ways.

It tells me leadership is present, leadership is good at the storytelling of the restaurant in a way their staff can hear, and everyone there really cares. And that? That’s at least half of what makes a good restaurant.

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For a while, Michelin always seemed behind other world-class best-of lists. Some of the best fine dining restaurants wouldn’t get a star and there are some clear snubs that chefs in every major city say deserve their stars.

The system was frustrating for a lot of people, but I… kind of liked it.

I felt that Michelin was the last bastion of best over time.

There was no rush to award. There was a sense that the list deserved patience.

Now, I didn’t and don’t always agree with Michelin on who gets and doesn’t get stars. No one looks at a list in their city and says, “Yes, those are the exact restaurants I’d star.” That’s because we all have our own sense of taste and preferences.

But I appreciate Michelin, chase Michelin stars, and have a cat named Michelin Starred Cornbread. I’m a fan.

Even when I felt like a restaurant maybe is on its downturn on the list and a restaurant on the upswing is left off the list, I really admire the Michelin system, Michelin reviewers, and the high standards that are required to make the list. I love that a group of people create these lists. I love the spectacle and anonymity of it all. I also loved the lag, because I felt that it kept restaurants pushing for greatness over time.

But… something interesting has been happening in the Michelin world.

In the last few years, in the United States at least, they responded to this criticism of being “behind” by awarding stars to some restaurants within their first year.

I went for a few of those, like Alma Fonda Fina (opened December 8th, 2023, and was awarded September 9th, 2024) and Cariño (opened on December 28th, 2023 and was awarded on December 9th, 2024).

One of those restaurants, Cariño, was one of my best meals of the year for me. When I was there, the kitchen was in a moment of transition that I was able to feel in the restaurant. It was their first big staff change over and I could acutely feel that Chef Norman Fenton was coaching his team to maintain the level of excellence that preceded them. That demonstrated to me a grace under pressure that I, personally, think is Michelin-worthy.

But in the year that Alma Fonda Fina got a star, when I went, the restaurant was… messy. Don’t get me wrong. I loved it! But it didn’t feel like it hit the same level of excellence as other Michelin restaurants. Service was bumpy. Plates were a bit sloppy. Staff were stressed. Ticket times were long. This is nothing alarming. This is just what it’s like to be a new restaurant! I left feeling like they got their star too soon and that waiting a year would have made the restaurant better, because when a restaurant gets a star, of course, they think, “We’ve made it.” Most people I know who went to Alma Fonda Fina in 2024 felt that this was an excellent restaurant that still had work to do before a star, and one has to wonder if a star hindered the restaurant’s internal push for excellence.

Lots of people had big feelings about these stars being awarded. Online forums exploded. Chefs were in my DMs pointing out snubs who have been waiting years for their stars and now these two restaurants just got one in their first year.

I don’t think you can know if a restaurant is one of the best in the city after year one and I certainly don’t think you can know if they’ll be worthy of a Michelin star long-term in year one.

So when Mamani, a Dallas restaurant, got a star in 57 days, I found myself floored. I think this departure is a big mistake–and I’m going to tell you why.

There’s already American guest distrust with the Michelin system

Recently, I told a chef that a lot of American guests distrust the Michelin system. When I recommend my favorite Michelin restaurants, guests often ask me, “Are you sure it’s worth it?” I have to defend Michelin all of the time.

This chef’s response was, “Who cares?”

He felt that guests who felt this way were uncultured and didn’t really “get” food. But guests aren’t alone. Almost every critic I know who has gone to Alinea in the last few years has left feeling that there are far more exciting restaurants in Chicago. Some chefs have been mad that critics are coming for Thomas Keller, but… I went to Per Se, in 2023. It was my most expensive meal that year. It wasn’t close to being in my top 10. And it was so unbearably stuffy.

I think, at its heart, this distrust is rooted in the fact that guests are looking for different things than those reviewers are much of the time.

The solution to this isn’t awarding brand-new, untested restaurants stars to try to stay current. The solution is an internal assessment of why American guests and American critics aren’t having experiences that match those of Michelin reviewers. I think a lot of that is that, in the US at least, guests are looking for things that Michelin reviewers aren’t: value and a welcoming, warm environment versus a stuffy feel are at the top of that list.

A 57-day-old restaurant is still a baby

Opening teams leave. The hustle sometimes dies down. Restaurants that open with clear visions sometimes go wayward when the hype comes their way. Sometimes, the flip happens: a restaurant has a hard opening and gets better. I don’t usually even step foot into a restaurant before day 90 because the first 90 days of a restaurant the team is building the plane while flying.

I don’t have to step foot into Mamani to know that they’re still in the beautiful, chaotic process of learning who they are.

I am sure that Mamani is putting up beautiful plates and is a great restaurant. I believe that because I trust Michelin reviewers. But I also know that they’re in the mess of figuring out their identity, flow, and staffing structures. That’s a process restaurants should get to do without the pressure of maintaining a star. Giving out a star to an unformed restaurant that is still figuring out its footing doesn’t set them up for success.

You have no idea if a restaurant can maintain that level of excellence beyond their first year, because the team is untested in terms of those staff shake-ups, seasonal menu changes, and long-term planning.

This matters on its own, of course, but it matters more if a restaurant doesn’t maintain that excellence in the next round of Michelin starring.

This would be a crisis for the restaurant, of course (see below), but also for Michelin. If Michelin awarded a star to a young restaurant that ended up not being as strong in year two, their reputation is on the line, too. And they would have two options in that case: remove the star and take the PR hit, or keep the star and further hurt guest trust.

Removal of a star is newsworthy in a way that hurts restaurants

Chef’s Table in Brooklyn lost all of its stars in 2023 due to closing and reopening with a new head chef and here are two snippets of the articles about it. Not just plastered all over the internet about the star loss, but deeply personal and highlighting the internal ugly dispute at the restaurant.

Here’s the news about Jean-Georges losing one star from three to two. Equally damning, described by Michelin guide director Michael Ellis in Eater as “Unfortunately, we saw a slow glide downward. It started off with small things ... and it didn’t get any better.” As if the restaurant didn’t just lose one star but everything it was known for.

Two stars is still amazing! It’s a feat to be celebrated! But this news cycle made it seem like the biggest fall from grace, like Jean-Georges was going from a beloved fine dining establishment to a restaurant on par with Applebee’s.

Giving out stars early means that this kind of thing is more likely to happen because the only data you have is less than one year (or in this case, two months) of meals. And I think that’s reckless and irresponsible on Michelin’s part to do. The loss of a star is a huge PR nightmare for restaurants, one that not every restaurant is able to weather.

Chasing the hype cycle hurts the restaurant industry

More than any of these things, though, I felt like Michelin was the last bastion of restaurant lists that didn’t put newness above quality over time. Seeing this shift breaks my heart, because I know what happens when we start to value the new restaurants over the tried and true: the tried and true restaurants close.

While Michelin used to set the standard for other lists to follow (wait and see), it feels like Michelin bent down to influencers and Eater-type “hot” lists in their search for new, buzzy, and hype with their new way of ranking restaurants within their first year.

For me, as a lover of the Michelin system, I worry about what this means for legacy restaurants on the list, but I also worry about what it signals to guests. Guests have limited funds for their celebration dinners–and that’s what Michelin dinners are. When Michelin starts awarding restaurants that are still young and messy, they’re telling guests that chasing the new restaurant is a more worthy pursuit than keeping the restaurants that have been excellent for years and years alive.

To me, this way of ranking doesn’t support restaurants or build trust with guests, and while I hope Michelin changes course, it seems they are hellbent on going down this path. For us, as restaurant guests, that means we have to make choices to put legacy restaurants at the top of our dining lists by ourselves.

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To start, Kyle says the new location resembles a “hawker stall,” when Sern Sapp is a standalone restaurant, not resembling a hawker stall at all.

It honestly felt to me like Kyle read Hawker Fare in preparation for this review and that’s where he got the reference. This is a restaurant with a classic Midwestern interior. For reference, this is the interior of Sern Sapp and this is a hawker center.

This sort of reference flattens Asian restaurants into known structures, which Kyle does throughout his review. For example, there is absolutely no need for the words “crab rangoon” to appear in this review and yet, somehow, they do!

Another faux pas is when Kyle calls a common Lao dish, Nam Khoa, “fascinating.”

The idea that the dish is “fascinating” sat wrong with me. Fascinating to who? You? As someone who has never eaten it? As an outsider? “Fascinating” defines otherness and betrays a lack of knowledge about Lao cuisine in the same way that influencers calling bustling Asian restaurants “hidden gems” does. Often, those are very good restaurants in neighborhoods white influencers don’t frequent. They aren’t hidden. You just don’t go there. Similarly, this dish isn’t “fascinating.” Kyle just hasn’t had it before.

He says that dish is “hard-to-google,” which is something I don’t think we’d see with, say, a rare German dish. It is again a way to define the “otherness” of this restaurant. He also says the only way he could understand this dish was with a phone call to the owner. But that’s all he says. He doesn’t actually tell you what he now understands from that phone call to help you understand the dish, too. That in and of itself is frustrating and of course, as critics, we often need to fact-check, but imagine if a critic called a restaurant and said, “Hey, can you explain Neapolitan pizza to me?” Some of this is Kyle’s work that he’s putting onto an Asian restaurateur.

He compares this dish to a Denver omelet when it is… nothing like it? Kyle also keeps using the word slippery to define this dish, three different times in the write-up, like he can’t find a thesaurus.

Or, like he doesn’t understand the food.

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Imagine if a European food critic came to the U.S. and called hot dogs “fascinating” and “slippery” as their main descriptors. All of us, likely, would be a little pissed. It would get a write-up in The Sussmans. And for good reason! It shows ignorance about American cuisine. But it’s also sooooo boring. There are better words for Nam Khoa.

It’s a textural delight, with the chewy rice batter contrasted against crisp peanuts in the brown sugar sauce and fried, teeny tiny strips of mushroom. This is a perfect breakfast, with egg and pork mixed in. That pork against the sweetness of the brown sugar sauce is a classic sweet and savory combo. It’s a beautiful dish–and you can’t find it anywhere else in Madison.

With a dish this complex, slippery doesn’t cut it. And here’s the thing: the dish isn’t slippery at all.

The batter is akin to a thick spring roll, or any other rice batter. I think it’s important to name that because eating this kind of texture is incredibly common across Asia—and not having a reference for it shows a massive gap as a food critic.

My biggest gripe, though, is when Kyle says, “It’s hard for me to not be prescriptive with Sern Sapp, because I just want a little more from it.”

Kyle built an entire review around lack: lack of entrees on the weekends, lack of availability for his own personal schedule preferences, lack of crab rangoon, and lack of curiosity in his writing.

He seems hellbent on defining the restaurant based on what it isn’t and not what it is. No wonder he left wanting more!

I couldn’t help but feel it was because he did not understand Sern Sapp. He can’t even google one of their dishes properly or find words to describe it. But… I also felt like he kept looking for Ahan or Lao Laan-Xang instead of seeing Sern Sapp as it is.

He even says, “The intense khao soi soup comes in the same northern Lao style you’ll find at Ahan, with less coconut and more tomato in the mix.” Or again, he mentions lack of crab rangoon, which can be found at Lao Laan-Xang. I feel like every single dish was held up against another restaurant, whether the family’s sister restaurant Lao Laan-Xang or Ahan. Both of these are beautiful restaurants!

But again, just imagine if a critic spent an entire review comparing a new Italian spot to two other Italian spots with little else.

That likely wouldn’t get past editors. They’d likely send the critic back and say, “Okay, you have to figure this restaurant out.”

To me, Kyle’s review reveals ignorance around Lao cuisine not befitting of a critic reviewing it.

Kyle says at the end of his review, “Diners have become more savvy to the differentiations between Lao and Thai and Hmong and Korean over the years; thank god, the old days of embarrassingly monolithic cultural awareness are (mostly?) behind us,” when his review is actually doing… just that but for Lao food. He has flattened Sern Sapp to references of Denver omelets, chicken noodle soup, Lao Laan-Xang, and Ahan. He is not letting all three restaurants exist as separate, vibrant examples of the diversity of Lao cuisine.

At the end of the review, Kyle says he wants “more” by way of more dishes and longer hours. With that complaint, I was surprised that Kyle didn’t even cover a significant number of dishes in his review. He names six dishes he ate, not even clearing half of the 19 dish menu. 19 standard dishes is more than Mint Mark 1.0’s menu and, as of this writing, more than L’Etoile–hardly remarkable. The restaurant has their standard menu of 19 dishes, noodle Saturdays, and then community dinners. He wants more where? That’s, honestly, a lot!

Kyle also says he wants the restaurant to be open more hours like he’s completely ignoring the beautiful note in The Capital Times that, “Because the couple has young children, they want to keep their evenings free for their family.” Kyle would rather they get a babysitter so he can get soup at 6:00pm. In all likelihood, Kyle wouldn’t make this complaint about an American brunch and lunch restaurant that closes at 3:00pm, so why is he making it here?

Is it because critics and the general public expect certain things of Southeast Asian restaurants (crab rangoon, constant availability, and endless back-breaking variety) that they don’t expect of other cuisines? And might that be something a critic should try to combat instead of feeding into?

This is not a nuanced review.

It’s a write-up where a white person is trying to talk to other white people about a restaurant by centering shared whiteness.

A generous reading of this review is that it is lazy. A worse reading is that this review is written without cultural competency. Regardless of your reading, Kyle Nablicy is wrong about Sern Sapp. It doesn’t need something more. He just doesn’t understand it. I went back to read a lot of his other reviews in the process for this piece, and well, I’ll let this clip speak for itself.

Kyle can’t seem to let diaspora cuisines be what they are. He is constantly searching for references familiar to white people (and himself) to define them, but also, why is he going to a South Indian restaurant looking for Northern Indian dishes?!?!

Diaspora foods in Madison deserve better than that.

When I went to Sern Sapp, I left with a wildly different assessment than Kyle. Mine isn’t centered around what Sern Sapp doesn’t have, but its place in Madison’s history. The most compelling story about Sern Sapp isn’t about not being able to get noodles at 6pm. It’s that after two decades away from Wisconsin in Laos, Madison called owner Ounprason Inthachith (who goes by Son) back. A better story than there’s no crab rangoon here is one that centers what home means. A better story is one that highlights Midwest cuisine as a place not of meat and potatoes, but of diaspora. A better story highlights the history of Lao immigrants in Madison and how important Lao food has become to the tapestry of the city’s culinary quilt.

The most exciting story, one that I don’t doubt Kyle would have told with a white chef who returned home after time cooking in Chicago, is that after two decades away, Ounprason decided Madison, not Laos, is where he wants his family to build their home.

He’s doing that not by cooking in the restaurant his family has had for decades, but by forging his own path, and it’s a beautiful path full of complex flavor, day-long broths, and handmade noodles. How can you leave wanting more in a restaurant like that?

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Correction: An earlier version of this article mis-attributed the reason for Ounprason’s return to Madison. That has been corrected.

Executive Pastry Chef Alexandra Motz, Alex to those who know her, is a household name in the Twin Cities. I don’t have to clarify at Spoon and Stable for people to know I’m suggesting we get dessert there. I just have to say her name.

Alex’s pastry program is as much a part of the definition of this restaurant as Gavin Kaysen’s signature refined and subtle style is. She’s been there since they opened and you can often spot her in the open kitchen in the back.

I walk up to the bar at Spoon and Stable and normally turn down dinner menus, ordering a non-alcoholic Amaro while I peruse the dessert menu. Over the past 12 months, I haven’t missed a single one of Alex’s desserts. Vanilla sweet pea crème brûlée, a trio of melon sorbets Alex dubbed Rainbow Froyo, chocolate cake set up on top of balsamic mousse, and a peanut mont blanc set in a nest of chocolate are just some of the desserts I’ve had over the past year. All of them have been a masterclass in the art of pastry.

I am a dessert fiend. I never skip it.

To me, a good dessert program matters so much because it’s the last thing you eat. Dessert is where you blow out a candle and make a wish on your birthday. Dessert is meal-defining. Dessert is holy.

There are few people in the Twin Cities who do dessert like Alex.

When I asked Alex when she realized she wanted to be a pastry chef, she told me it was while watching Extreme Cake Challenge on Food Network. She laughed. “I wondered how you get to do that,” she said. She put it into her dial-up internet, looking up Le Cordon Bleu. “They called me and told me they saw me looking at the school,” she said. She signed up.

You can tell a lot about the time Alex came of age by her using dial-up internet, but also by how she got her first job. Alex got her first real pastry job with Diane Moua at La Belle Vie by responding to a Craigslist ad, emailing over a resume she described as, “An absolute mess.” She couldn’t believe they called her and she showed up for two stages to show Diane how determined she was. She got the job–and she ended up working with Diane for 10 years across multiple restaurants.

Working for Diane, you might think that her pastries are a mirror for her mentor, but a sign of Diane’s strength as a teacher is that they aren’t.

The first dessert that Alex got on the menu was a honey and cream cake. “I brought it to Diane. I didn’t have the tools to put it together but she brought my idea to life.” Diane coached Alex’s vision to life. “We had menu meetings and I pitched the idea to her. I wasn’t even a sous chef at the line, I was CDP.” That’s industry speak for chef de partie (line cook). That kind of mentorship is rare in kitchens. A line cook getting a dessert on the menu shows an incredible amount of faith in her.

This was eleven years ago. Today? It’s Spoon and Stable’s top seller.

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If the honey and cream cake reminds you of a tres leches, that’s because it’s meant to. It’s one of Alex’s inspirations for the cake. This cake is soft, topped with fluffy honey meringues that look like vanilla wafers and a beeswax ice cream that showcases how Alex thinks about dessert. She often uses one ingredient multiple ways. Maybe there are three presentations of peaches. Or two types of chocolate–or, in this case, more than one way to look at honey.

This dessert included a tableside pour before those were trendy in desserts. It’s timeless, with a subtle seasonality from rotating fruit through the seasons.

Talking with Alex, she kept telling me how color is so important to her. It’s as big of an inspiration as her former boss and mentor Diane Moua is. So the fact that her first cake is monochromatic, with a pop of color from fruit, was something I found really interesting. Color in dessert doesn’t just mean blue dyes or brightness, it’s also about how you work with different shades of the same color. Here, this dessert is visually interesting because of layered shades of cream and off-white.

I feel like this dessert is a special part of Twin Cities culinary history. The idea is Alex’s. The execution–and color palette–feels decidedly Diane.

This cake used to be $10. Now, it’s $17.

I asked Chef Gavin Kaysen why those dessert prices have increased so much. His answer was, “A lot has changed in the past decade and I can understand that it may be difficult for guests to see why prices change over time.” He told me that the cost of almost everything increased from ingredients to wages, something I’ve written about extensively in other pieces. When it comes to raising prices, he said, “We don’t make these decisions lightly and we won’t compromise on quality to save on costs.” You can tell in the dessert program.

The other dessert that never leaves the menu is the budino and I think it exemplifies this commitment to quality. I am a notorious budino hater, and I think its ubiquitousness is a sign of most kitchens not hiring pastry chefs. Most budinos taste like pudding. Most are also single elements, maybe there are two if you’re lucky. The chocolate budino at Spoon and Stable is five elements.

This is the budino of a pastry chef, resembling the look of a cappuccino and the flavors of an elevated hot chocolate.

Chocolate mousse, caramel toffee crunch, and a crème fraîche espuma that is glossssyyyy and slightly sour, give the dessert its signature not-to-sweet feel. It is singularly the only budino I’m excited to order, and at $17 for that amount of chocolate, it’s a steal. The sourdough shortbread on the side is good enough that I wish Spoon and Stable offered it in to-go packages. Sometimes, I crumble those cookies on top for an extra bit of texture.

These are the staples. They are refined and rich. They are also easy to order regardless of your palate and preferences. The seasonal flavors are a balancing point to these honey or chocolate stars. They are wild, nuanced, and often daring.

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Alex’s seasonal desserts are explorations in color and surprise. As you drop your spoon into the dessert, the layers below reveal themselves to you. You might expect just peaches and all of a sudden your spoon hits sorbet. As you uncover new layers, you also uncover new textures. At first glance, it might look like all the peaches in her peaches and cream dessert are the same. They aren’t. Some are chips. Some are fresh, shaved. Eating Alex Motz’s desserts is eating spoon first. The plating style of this dessert is tight in the center, visually drawing you in so the dessert feels like one single element. Like all of her desserts, there’s a lot of the plate visible.

Alex’s plating style can be found in her art. She’s gifted at using white space and layering.

Her paintings look like that signature peaches and cream dessert. In this dish, she layers different presentations of peaches on top of one another, every year getting more and more nuanced with her plating.

The art from her Schmudgie Series has a similar feel. In her Instagram post about one of her pieces in this series, Motz said, “When plating food, I was always taught not to fill the plate and have a portion of the plate be empty. It was the empty space on the plate that added depth and importance to the food. It’s a visual.”

Motz came to pastry through a desire to make art. She lives that dream in her plating. Whimsical, layered, with an eye for white space, you can tell her background in art as soon as a plate is dropped in front of you.

Alex’s strawberry cornmeal tart from this year shows her deftness with white space, with two similarly shaped components like mirrors to each other. This dish is one only the brave will order, with listed ingredients like tomato jam and lemongrass. To hold all those bold flavors, and plating components, requires restraint. Alex has that. This dessert is exceptionally subtle. Plating like this also requires precision. Drips are more noticeable when you are drawing the eye to certain parts of the plate. Everything has to be wiped clean and carried with care.

Lately, restaurants have been cutting their pastry chefs. Lots of restaurants are opening and omitting pastry chefs entirely.

As a result, desserts that don’t require formal pastry training are on the rise.

Pastry is a dying art in many fine dining restaurants, where dessert plates as thoughtful as the ones you get for dinner are rarer than ever.

As a person who eats out a lot, I have noticed this acutely. I can normally tell if a dessert was made by a pastry chef or a savory chef who has gotten a little too creative with a whipped cream canister. That’s how I wind up at Spoon and Stable so often, asking for a dessert menu. I want to eat a good dessert, and Alex Motz puts out some of the best, most creative ones we have.

Spoon and Stable has the most daring dessert program in the Twin Cities, leading the way to show other restaurants what is possible when you put pastry front and center in your dining room.

As it becomes rarer and rarer to see pastry plates composed with the same care as their savory counterparts and fewer restaurants hire pastry chefs to lead complex dessert programs with an eye toward artistry, Alex Motz is needed now more than ever.

But you’re needed, too. Because the next Alex Motz is fresh out of culinary school, working somewhere in a kitchen in the Twin Cities right now, trying really hard to make her own dream of running a pastry program a reality. The only way a pastry program will be there for her to run when she’s ready is if all of us re-commit, right now, to ordering dessert.

His girlfriend tried to explain to him how big the croissant was as a justification (it’s huge), but she couldn’t convince him.

I was in that same line waiting for that same croissant. It was a s’more’s croissant. It's a sourdough croissant soaked in homemade toasted vanilla syrup. Then it’s filled with graham frangipane and chocolate. After, it’s topped with marshmallow puff and toasted—twice. This same dessert at a fine dining restaurant would cost $15 easily, with far less pastry.

In line, I almost turned around to say something to him, but I didn’t. I just kept thinking of a story that Alex Althoff, co-owner of Dahlia, told me. Recently, she had told me that she was trying to play cards with her husband and couldn’t pick up the cards one weekend because of the amount of stress and strain on her hands from holding piping bags.

I wondered if this man had known about that, would he have changed his mind?

“Piping bags are brutal on your hands,” Morgan Morton, owner of Bread People, said. She went on to list a number of other things that are brutal on your hands: mixing cookie dough, shaping rolls, folding dough, making buns, lifting bags of flour… the list is never ending. Every Christmas, during cookie season, Morgan’s hands go numb. “It’s part of the job,” she said.

Every single baker I interviewed for this piece, all 10 of them, nodded intently when I told them about Alex not being able to play cards and Morgan’s hands going numb. They gave me other examples of physical challenges.

Diane Moua of Diane’s Place goes to a chiropractor once a month. Kelsey Endres of Eat Me Bakery talked about her carpal tunnel. Emily Lauer of Fruit & Grain talked about the burns. Everyone talked about how their feet hurt. Multiple mothers see pelvic floor specialists because they couldn’t take enough time off between giving birth and lifting 50 pound bags of flour. And all the bakers who work overnight shifts talked about the toll on their mental health. Erin Lucas of Flour & Flower said, “The mental side is stuff you can’t see.”

Rates of injury in the profession vary widely by study, but general consensus is between 15-21% of bakers experience baking related asthma.

Some studies suggest the chance of lung cancer is higher for bakers, too. In a metadata study of baker injuries, it was clear that the group that has the highest rate of injury is small scale bakers (think cottage bakers or single brick and mortar) due to lack of budget for things like lifts or sheeters. The data on baker injuries is limited and study quality is generally poor, but each study evaluated in the metadata showed high rates of musculoskeletal symptoms (consistently over 50% of respondents reported symptoms in each category tested: shoulders, wrist, elbow, etc).

I’m thinking of other jobs with these kinds of physical challenges or similar levels of skill. Often, they are well compensated.

Tabitha Blanchard of TABLA Bake Lab said, “People pay a carpenter over $50 an hour because it’s a craft, but bakers have a skill far fewer people have and make far less.”

In Minnesota, the average wage of a baker is $17.44 an hour. I thought back to that man standing in the Dahlia line during all of these interviews. At one point, he said, “They must be making a killing.”

US food prices rose 23.6% from 2020 to 2024, with no sign of stopping. Wages also rose 26.3%. “High quality European chocolate used to be $300 for 22 kilos in 2021 and now it fluctuates weekly from $650-800,” Erin of Flour & Flower said. Multiple bakers didn’t even want to talk about chocolate costs. John Kraus of Patisserie 46 laughed when I asked him what costs have gone up since he opened. “Everything,” he said. Prices have increased from $2.25 for a butter croissant when Patisserie 46 opened in 2014 to $4.50 now. That’s one of the best prices for a croissant in the city.

“We don’t fully pass the rising cost of ingredients off to you,” Sarah Botcher of Black Walnut Bakery said.

Alex at Dahlia said something similar. Butter cost per croissant at Dahlia is about $1. That price has recently gone up $.10 per croissant. “We take on that cost,” she said. Kelsey uses a lot of eggs in her baking. She said, “When egg costs rose, I just ate that cost.” Erin has a different strategy, “I’m trying to not pass cost along to customers by focusing on doing more wholesale, getting more volume.” That means longer days, more staff, and more work.

For many bakers I talked to, when their prices go up, the margin per pastry shrinks year over year.

Sarah said this eloquently, “I want everybody to have a fair price. We are charging what we need to charge and not much more.”

Data is less clear on rent increases for commercial spaces than it is for food, but when I talked to three bakers looking to open storefronts, they told me the cost is about $9,000 a month once you consider buildouts. I talked to Alex, Kelsey, and Emily during one Monday afternoon. We snacked on Kelsey’s mom’s cookies while they shared stories of $5,500 rents on units with no floors, no ADA accessible bathrooms, and illegal hoods.

“After all the improvements you would need to make, you’re looking at around $10,000 for that space every month. Rent costs have gone up about 40% since I started looking three years ago,” Emily said. They’ll keep rising. Emily and Alex are actively looking for space for brick & mortar bakeries and Kelsey has decided to pause her search.

It was palpable to me during this conversation how badly Emily and Alex both want storefronts. “We just can’t find one that’s affordable,” Alex said.

“When we opened, I was worried about backlash about an eight dollar croissant,” Diane said. “But I refuse to pay my pastry team less than my cooks.” Most restaurants do. Diane’s Place has 4.5 full-time staff working on the pastry team, not including Diane. That size of team means a lot of labor. “They come in at 5:00am. They’re dedicated. They deserve good wages, too,” she said.

Every single bakery owner I talked to told me that skilled labor is harder and harder to find.

“I get 100 applications for a barista position. I’m lucky if I get one application for a baker,” Sarah said.

It’s almost impossible to ask people to work overnights when that used to be standard in bakeries and even when you find someone who really wants to learn, they often don’t have that skill set already. John told me that it’s about six months before anyone touches the sheeter. “People start with mixing,” he said. “You start with ovens, cookies, poundcakes. Then mixing the croissant dough. Then in six months maybe you might have one day of books,” that’s a giant block of laminated croissant dough, for the uninitiated. That’s a lot of training. John said it’s because, “This work is a trade. It’s a craft. I’m trying to keep the trade alive.”

All of these owners talked about how much they love their staff. “They’re incredible,” Diane said. “They care so much about our guests,” John said.

Even with the smaller bakeries though, labor is a consideration.

For Alex? It’s just a team of three co-owners. Even with those $9.50 croissants, the margins are still razor thin. For Tabitha and Morgan who can’t charge those prices out in their regions and still buy high quality local ingredients, the margins are even smaller. “If we could change you less, we would,” Morgan said. She’s working on re-costing all of her pastries this summer, especially ones with chocolate. “There’s only so many more times we can increase our prices before people won’t buy from us anymore.” Every independent baker told me a similar story: even with those rising costs, they’re still not making living wages.

One thing was clear in every conversation. Bakers kept telling me how much they care about their guests.

Sarah gushed about how much she loves the guests at Black Walnut, stopping multiple times during our interview to talk about how great her guests are. John said, “Our guests are our family.” He pointed at people in the shop and told me their stories. That person came 10 years ago as a newlywed. Another person was someone’s Uber driver to the airport and they made a stop here, so he came back in to see what the fuss was about for himself. He’s not just a regular, he’s also sometimes a delivery driver now.

Hana of Crosby Bakery said, “It might sound silly, but I love customer service.” Kelsey does, too. She said, “When someone comes up to me at a market and says they waited all winter to eat one of my cardamom buns, it means the world to me.”

Alex of Dahlia said, “We get to know people. We become a part of each other’s lives in a way that is very meaningful. If I could give these things away for free, I would.”

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When I watched The Infatuation’s reel “How to Spot a Real Dive Bar,” I immediately watched it again. It opens with this line: “There’s a troubling trend not just in New York City, but across the US: real dive bars are an endangered species.” Senior Editor Allie Conti reports on this “trend.” You should watch the reel then come back.

I got personally invested on multiple levels. And I’m stone cold sober.

I’m not sure how often Allie hangs out in dive bars, but there are lots of assumptions about dive bars in this piece that are just wrong. To go as far as to say that you shouldn’t get a cocktail completely ignores that many people in the dive bar are drinking straight up vodka. To prescribe what to drink and eat in order to be “authentic” in a dive bar (a bump and a beer and a hot dog) reduces the dive bar experience to a drink often ordered by a specific crowd of people and a food type (hot dogs and popcorn) that requires no kitchen. To say that hot dogs and popcorn are the only food at dive bars ignores that some dive bars are the only restaurants in rural towns, and many dive bars serve great food.

This reel is a perfect piece to encapsulate how New York writers (yes, even transplants) often have no idea what is going on in the rest of the country’s food scene, centering New York like some kind of mirror for everything else going on in food. Are dive bars endangered in rural communities where they’re the only restaurant? Or in the Midwest? Or in Upstate New York? Does The Infatuation actually know the answer to that question?

I know almost every single food writer hated that Instagram carousel by Chef Kevin Smith about what critics get wrong about food writing (read it here). I don’t agree with all of it, but this is exactly the kind of writing Kevin is trying to stop. I want to stop it, too. The Infatuation did not do enough research before setting this piece into the wild.

The Infatuation took New York City and acted like the entire country is experiencing the same problems, reduced dive bars to a monolith, and didn’t give any context for why the cost of Modelos might be climbing.

The land of 10,000 dives

In Minnesota, we’re the land of 10,000 lakes and we’re the land of 10,000 dives. There’s a dive version of everything: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I do most of my writing in dive bars. Strange for a sober person, but true! I feel at home there. I get Diet Coke and a snack from a dive with a full kitchen and sit under dim lighting for hours. That’s where I’m writing this piece right now, at a dive bar, without a hot dog or popcorn in sight. I edited it in a dive diner, too.

I live in a part of Minneapolis called Uptown. For the unacquainted, Uptown is a neighborhood where gentrification was attempted and failed. Our neighborhood is full of punks, young queer kids, and students. During a very specific period, investment came into our neighborhood and tried to change it. Instead of investing in our iconic dive bars and Taco Taxis, they tried to fill us with party joints.

These were multilevel gimmicky bars and lots of rooftop bars, with restaurants built not for locals to the neighborhood but for people who come to play in our lakes in the summer. Clapboard buildings were put up all around town with some of the highest rents in the city. Bros and Target employees moved in. Most of the local residents, myself included at the time, were pushed out because of the pricing. The bros and Target employees left Uptown after the murder of George Floyd and COVID, but rents never came down. Because of that, many people who would love to move here can’t.

Business after business has shuttered. Much of that is diagnosed as being because people don’t want to come to Uptown anymore, but that isn’t the reason. The reason is that commercial rent is too high for businesses to move in and residential rent keeps apartments vacant. With that commercial rent being so high, it’s rare for businesses that are for the neighborhood to move in, and so they shutter because the businesses with investment move in and are expecting traffic from somewhere else. The types of businesses that historically thrive in Uptown are coffee shops (three new ones just opened on one block in the last year, all of which are constantly full), cheap eats (taco trucks, ramen, pizza, falafel, all-you-can-eat sushi, late-night sandwiches), Asian barbecue, ice cream, and dive bars. On the Hennepin side of Uptown, Thai, Indian, and date night spots reign supreme.

My neighborhood is full of empty storefronts. The THC restaurant closed. Those three story bars came down. “Neo-dive-bars” closed, too, as well as some beloved Uptown coffee shops and restaurants that could no longer afford the rent. Giordano’s, which moved into a giant glossy building, never stood a chance. All the fancy cowboy bars opened and shuttered.

What remains today amid a row of shuttered buildings? Some of our oldest dive bars.

Sure, some dives closed (Red Dragon was tough and Dulono’s was a tragedy), but if we look at it percentage-wise, in Uptown and across the city, it’s not as if more dives are closing than other types of restaurants.

To call them “endangered” ignores that many of them are actually quite full, recession indicators be damned.

In my neighborhood, the CC Club, the back bar at the VFW, Mortimer’s, The Bulldog, Bryant Lake Bowl, and Leaning Tower of Pizza remain steadfast. (Look, we might disagree about definitions of dives, but stick with me.) Just walk down Lyndale Avenue and every few blocks, you have a dive bar. We even have a dive coffee shop and good luck finding a seat without a hole in it at Cafetto.

This is just one Minneapolis neighborhood, but across the city, in mostly residential neighborhoods, our dive bars are full. They also define our food scene.

From our dive bar bowling alleys like The Nook to dive bars turned food destinations like Matt’s to local gems like Burger Dive, our most iconic burgers are in dives. There’s a history of Chinese restaurant dive bars all over the country, but especially in the Midwest (RIP Red Dragon). We even have a hot dog dive called The Wienery and one of our most famous restaurants, Al’s, is a dive (with no bar).

To say that dives can only serve “questionable” hot dogs and popcorn is an insult to the cooks who work in them. Dive bars are full of incredible, affordable food.

The best onion rings I’ve ever had? Rural dive bar. The best burgers? Minneapolis dive bar. The best fries? Colorado dive bar. The best cheese curds outside of the state fair? Minnesota dive bar. And yes, the best hot dogs, of course, are at a dive bar. Some dive bars don’t have food, or one single grill for burgers, but many of them do and some of them are the only restaurant in their town.

A friend of mine also had a good point. Equally upset about this piece, she said, “Also dives can be cute like why are they acting like there's never anything pretty at a dive bar?” Good point, Maria, as always. Twinkly lights in dive bars, pizza dives with children’s drawings on paper plates, and in some rural places, even Noritake China plates from someone’s late grandmother exist in dives.

Dives aren’t a monolith. They, like all restaurants, are wildly different spot to spot. Why is The Infatuation trying to define dive bars as a beer and a bump, popcorn, ugly decor, and hot dogs?

Okay, okay, I know, you get the point. So why does it matter?

To prescribe a New York City phenomenon to the whole country requires you to research if you’re right. The Infatuation didn’t. And they’re wrong.

It matters because, as a Midwesterner, I’m tired of New York editors and writers writing about national food scenes and cultures like it’s an afterthought to their own narratives. I’m tired of New York City writers centering New York City so much that they can’t even look north. Upstate New York (real upstate and not New York City’s definition of upstate) is a dive bar heaven. Endangered there? Not at all. Rather, in the most northern parts of the state, some small towns hold 2-3 dive bars, each with fierce loyalties and their own, unique menus. Even in the Capital District, Albany is full of dive bars, as is Poughkeepsie in the Hudson Valley.

I feel like I needed to say something about how this reel assumes “because it’s happening here, it must be happening everywhere,” and how that belief from New York City based writers overly centers their city as the epicenter of food. In reality, New York City is a beautiful outlier when it comes to food across the country, simply due to its footprint.

I wish, understanding that, New York writers paused and decided to learn about what it’s like living in other parts of the country before lumping us all in together to make a point.

Also, I care because I feel the need to defend “neo-dives.”

Why does the “neo-dive-bar” exist?

Back to that piece everyone hated by Chef Kevin Smith. One of the things he seems to be begging for is for food writers to understand the day-in-day-out business of restaurants. This is entirely missing from The Infatuation reel. It’s designed for clicks and it’s a good example of why video content is limiting.

Why might “neo-dives” be replacing other kinds of dives in New York? Is it a money grab? Is it posturing as something you aren’t? Is it stolen working class valor? Likely, no.

It’s likely that rents keep rising–and so do the cost of Modelos. In 2024, the cost of a 6 pack at a grocery store is $12. In 2014, the cost was $8.61. In 2014, the minimum wage in New York was $8.00!!!!!!!! Now, it is $16.50.

Let’s imagine in 2014, a Modelo cost you $4. The price of that Modelo likely has to double to keep profit margins the same, so let’s say you are charged $8. While the video claims that people are paying $15 for a Modelo, I am guessing that this is isolated to a handful of bars. Most “neo-dives” are going to be charging $8, a price that people still complain about in dives. After tip (20% or $1.60), tax (8.875% or $.71), and credit card fees (let’s say 3% or $.24), yep, that $8 Modelo is going to climb to $10.55. With tariffs, it’s going to climb even higher. Your Modelo might cost $10 this summer, before tax, tip, and processing fees.

This is not because bar owners are money hungry. It is because everything is more expensive and because beer costs more in a bar than at the grocery store.

Bar owners are re-costing because they have to in order to stay afloat. Those “neo-dives” are probably struggling as much as the “real dives.”

We have these “neo-dives” in Minneapolis, too, and some of them are truly wonderful. One of our best new bars, Meteor, fits the bill. Local chefs post photos of themselves after work there with hot dogs all the time. The cocktails are great, even for sober people like me. And the hot dogs? They fit the vibe of the bar and the neighborhood. This is a place with $14 cocktails and hot dogs.

Another “neo-dive” is Little T’s. In its former iteration, Little T’s was a Mexican restaurant with a manager who watched very questionable content on her laptop during business hours. It was saved and re-opened. This is also a local service-industry haunt that has palak paneer dip on the menu and nary a hot dog (or Mexican dish) in sight. A yuzu lemon drop might not scream “dive” to The Infatuation, but maybe the $5 Modelo will. This spot has something for everyone–people who want fun cocktails and people who want that iconic beer and a bump. It has expanded the idea of what a dive is. I, for one, love that.

Beckett’s in Uptown is also a “neo-dive.” They have plastered signs all over the ceiling. They’re in the space of what was my haunt for a long time: Country Bar. I used to live above that bar before I was 21 and this was my last call. Beckett’s is designed to look like a dive bar and is brand new. It also has Baja Blast margs that you can drink alongside your giant pretzel and, yes, a hot dog. I’m not mad at that, I’m into it. It feels like it fits my neighborhood.

And then there are other local dives that got renovations (like the Uptown VFW) that people say have “sold out.” They actually just made those changes to stay alive.

Is it selling out to try to save yourself from closing? Is it selling out to try to serve more people in your neighborhood?

Essentially, The Infatuation is saying that dives should, nay must, be not just affordable, but the cheapest thing around. In saying that, they are implying that an entire category of restaurants shouldn’t raise prices to respond to inflation in order to continue to be seen as a dive. But that $1 or $2 added to each drink you order goes a long way towards maintaining old buildings, replacing ovens that needed to go years ago, and paying the staff.

Maybe you like the seats with holes in them, but many owners with a sense of pride in their restaurant wish they had the money to replace those seats years ago. To keep prices low for you, they can’t.

Sure, seeing a $15 Modelo on a menu anywhere is quite shocking, but if the beer and a bump is $13 and not $10? That can still be a dive. Maybe if some of our closed dives felt they could raise their prices, they would still be here. As someone said to me recently in an interview, “If we could charge you less, we would.” I believe that. In every single independent restaurant I walk into, I know that is true.

To categorize all of these places as less-than or to act like maybe they are less authentic than a “real” dive ignores that this new type of bar is trying to make spaces for connection in a world that has never been more disconnected than right now.

When Allie said that a dive bar is a place you go to “hide away from the world,” it became immediately apparent to me that Allie is not a dive bar regular. In the Midwest and rural country, that’s antithetical to the whole concept of a dive. A dive bar is where you go to talk to strangers that have become, over time, friends bound by place and time. It’s a place to eat dinner after a long work day, to meet new friends, to find community when the people you love might not be around. It’s where transplants and no-contact kids spend Christmas. It’s a place where someone gives you their number to make sure you get home safe when you’re a single woman.

When I got sober, the bar I was a regular at commented on my Instagram post where I announced that I had 90 days with this: “We’re so proud of you.” One of the bartenders hugged me so hard when he saw me the first time I got sober that it hurt. He said, “I love you. Never come back.” This was in Kingston, New York, mind you, not somewhere far from New York City. At breakfast this morning, a friend of mine who was a server when The Four Horsemen opened in Brooklyn and is now a server at a local punk dive said that they made the first friends they had in this city at dive bars, including my boyfriend. Nothing makes you feel more seen than dive bars like that.

What’s our role as writers in all of this?

I really wish that The Infatuation had done deeper research about and questioned if dive bars are really endangered all over the country before running a hit piece on “neo-dives” disguised as a piece about how to find a “real” dive with criteria that are just totally made up.

As more New York City writers take on the rest of the country, I really hope they find the humility to understand that our dining scenes are not a monolith, just like how dive bars aren’t monoliths, either.

The disappearance of dive bars as rapidly as in New York City isn’t happening everywhere. It’s happening in New York City because of so many factors, like incredibly high rents. It is also happening partly because of something unique about how New Yorkers eat. New Yorkers wait hours in line for the new restaurants, leaving hoards of dives and old haunts to close. Yes, this happens in other places, but nowhere else are the reservations as hard to get as in New York.

If you’re someone who wants to open a bar who knows that about NYC (that guests will all come at once and leave for the next hot thing), might they have to consider that when they price the Modelos? Might it be the job of the Senior Editor at The Infatuation to educate people about how this way of eating kills the restaurants and bars we love?

Might it be the job of The Infatuation to consistently cover places like dive bars in in-depth profiles designed to knock people out of virality and into the real world of everyday restaurants? And if it is their job, are they doing it?

Sure, they posted this 1 minute 20 second reel that linked to a dive bar piece in their bio, but how common is that kind of writing? On August 6th, The Infatuation New York had 34 articles on the homepage, including a section called “How to Get that Elusive Table” that focused on restaurants so overflowing, you can’t even get in. This isn’t one article. It’s five articles and it’s a standard rotating column. There’s even a piece about where to hang out near restaurants with long waits (I can’t make this up) like other establishments are afterthoughts. Do those restaurants need The Infatuation to send more people into their queues? Probably not.

There were other articles like “New NYC Restaurants to Try Right Now” (only one of these is “cheap eats” as defined by Infatuation) and “NYC’s New Restaurant Openings” (0 of these are “cheap eats”), alongside “20 Trendy Restaurants You Can Get Into” (again 0 cheap eats). I’m not sure the differences between or the points of these pieces, except that they all focus on virality and newness. Many of them have significant overlap. Not one article was dedicated to dives, “neo” or not (though there is a best sports bar piece, not all of them are dives), and there are no pieces explaining the current, very difficult state of restaurants to hungry New Yorkers.

Of the 34 articles featured on the homepage, all but 4 were listicles.

There’s no piece about classic restaurants, no profile of a New York haunt where one week of really good business could buy them some time to figure out how to stay open, no deep cuts about neighborhood joints that don’t get a lot of love.

More than that, when you search “dive bar” in their search bar, you get three articles, one of which is, “20 NYC Bars with Private Rooms.” And look, if it has more than hot dogs, it might be a dive, but it probably isn’t if it has a private room.

Is it not an obvious leap that this is part of the problem? Is this video not a moment to pause and ask how The Infatuation can help keep more bars alive instead of tearing down an entire category of bars?

As the kids say on the internet: The Infatuation, it’s not too late to delete this and write another piece.

A piece that tells the story of how hard it is to own a dive bar right now. A piece about how “neo-dives” are the result of a restaurant and bar industry struggling to stay alive. A piece about the history of damn good food in dive bars and how New Yorkers maybe should follow a Midwestern motto from time to time: a burger and rail whiskey at a local haunt is always the way to go when the other option is a three-hour line.

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I also don’t know if chefs and critics realize that in this day and age, in most cities, people do not trust their critics. This is for a lot of reasons, ranging from soft reviews on mid to bad restaurants, omitting bad reviews on purpose, only touching on highlights and not lowlights, and top 50 lists or best of lists that look at star power or newness, not consistency.

In talking with chefs, I hear all the time from them that they want their critics to be sharper, but in reality, when we do that, chefs will still say they want a sharp-eyed critic, just … not that way. Not with the restaurants they love where their friends are. Certainly, not with their restaurant. Definitely not with a restaurant that opened with a bang or is up for an award. Just… maybe be sharp with the one chef in town they have beef with (and as much as chefs talk in the press about a united front, there’s always at least one restaurant they have beef with).

In the now-viral piece from MacKenzie Chung Fegan, it is palpable that Chef Thomas Keller thinks he is somehow above criticism, that he has reached a level of fame that means critics should act a certain way towards him. While this is a blatant example and not an isolated one with Keller, (writer after writer can tell you a strange story of being in one of his restaurants*) lots of chefs also have this same mentality.

*myself included—my experience was so strange, it inspired this newsletter and was my first (messy!) attempt at review.

In that piece, Keller even says he misses the days when critics and chefs were on the same team, as if he isn’t looking around or paying attention to anything outside of the walls of his Michelin-starred restaurants. Food writers mostly write puff in 2025. They mostly write listicles. They mostly write pieces about openings and closings and portrait pieces about chefs. There’s never been a time in history in which the critic is as much on the chef’s team as right now.

While Keller wishes it was more intense of an enmeshment, his restaurants don’t need review the way a small restaurant might. His restaurants will be fine even if people don’t trust critics. It makes sense that he has this resentment, as well as many other famous chefs. He doesn’t need critics to have guest trust in order for people to go to his restaurants. Charging $890 per person for dinner, he’s going to be just fine.

A mom and pop shop on a busy street in a hard-to-get-to part of town with no parking getting a glowing write up? For guests to go to that restaurant, they need to trust the critic.

And, hey, chefs, let’s face it: you’re more like that mom and pop shop than you are like Keller.

There has never been a time of fewer restaurant reviews than right now. Entire papers have laid off their review staff. We used to get weekly reviews from many papers. In lots of mid-sized cities, we see one a month.

I spent the better part of 2023 digging into eras of food criticism, reading old reviews and studying our best critics. The time Keller yearns for never existed—if it did exist, it would be now.

Guests feel that. They feel that sometimes, in order to respect the ego of a chef, critics aren’t giving us the truth.

There’s a rising tide of chefs kicking critics out of their restaurants for recommending it but also talking about the flaws. A chef in the Midwest chased out a critic for telling people to go to his restaurant and being honest with guests that some dishes were misses. This review was generous and understanding of the errors. That chef celebrated kicking that critic out with a champagne toast with his staff.

Now, with dwindling numbers in his restaurant, I wonder if he realizes he’s not Thomas Keller. He actually needs the press—and the press needs to be honest, whether he likes it or not.

The Keller incident is another example of things we are seeing, with chefs pulling critics aside and having jarring conversations with them and then doing things to be un-reviewable. Keller gave Chung Fegan a meal for $.93 in order to avoid a review. Lots of people who ridiculed her said she was ignoring his hospitality, that this was a gift. But she knew it wasn’t hospitality, it was strategy. A free meal can’t be reviewed.

I have jarring conversations all the time, ranging from chefs who know who I am pretending they don’t to chefs planting lines they definitely want in my review to one chef coming over to me and saying, “What the hell are you doing,” when I came in late after two of my friends ordered before I came in. My response was, “I’m doing my job.” If I want to know what food is like when you don’t think a critic is there, I have to not be there.

Chefs often want you to be sharp and creative in your criticism only when it aligns with their views (or honestly, their industry grudges), when in reality, most chefs (like most critics) get the best meals at other restaurants. People in restaurants know chefs. They treat chefs differently than the average guest. Which is not bad, it’s just hospitality. But it makes the job of a critic hard in the eyes of other chefs.

How do you push back when a chef says, “But my meal there was great,” without sounding like a jerkwhen you say, “Yeah that’s because you got better food than the person next to you and you didn’t notice. My job is to notice.”

And how do you do that when you just … disagree?

It’s made me realize that I’m not sure most critics, editors, or chefs remember the point of negativity in criticism. The point of negativity in criticism is not to be a meany pants. It’s about gaining trust.

You gain trust so that when you do have a positive review for a restaurant that might seem like a risk (expensive, untested, far away) or a dish that might be hard for someone to order because it’s new to them (foie, frog legs, smoked cheddar white chocolate bread pudding), guests will trust you.

Why? Because your experience at a restaurant that was just OK or inconsistent is similar to the reader’s experience in that restaurant.

Take two reviews I’m working on for example. The first is at a restuarant that opened to acclaim where my $80 steak splintered into sharp shards when I cut it and a pasta was tossed in what tasted like straight white vinegar. If I tell you that’s a great restaurant because it has acclaim, you won’t trust me. I also need your trust because later this fall, I’m going to tell you to go eat jellyfish and pork stomach at a restaurant. Has the average guest had jellyfish or pork stomach? No. The first review builds trust for the second. No one is going to get jellyfish salad if they don’t trust me, but if they trust me? I can get them to try something new!

When readers see their experience mirrored in yours, you begin to develop trust with them. A well-written mixed or negative review is what builds that trust, not positive reviews.

It’s the same way you build trust with friends, not calling them up to share good news, but calling them in tears because you just lost your job. Their listening to the second is why you trust them. Guests build trust when they read your review of a place with a lot of acclaim that you thought sucked, and they say, “Oh my god I also thought it sucked!”

This is not a pointless exercise. It is an exercise that critics can utilize to get people to go to the places they might otherwise not go to. It’s also a lost art.

Ruth Reichl’s critique of Le Cirque is a great example of trust-building. She describes the experience that she had when she was recognized versus the experience before she was recognized in this review. It built trust with a readership hellbent on not embracing her (she came from LA to NYC for the job of New York Times critic and chefs have always been harder on women critics than their male counterparts).

She was a new critic at the time and it was a bold review. Everyone in the restaurant world thought the restaurant deserved four stars, but she removed that fourth star because of the experience that she had when she wasn’t in disguise. She demonstrated that the service was better depending on who you are—and she was clear to the average guest how their experience would differ from her own. She wasn’t negative for the sake of it—she was honest.

Pete Wells did this too in a way that was extremely funny when he reviewed Shake Shack for the New York Times when it came to New York. You didn’t have to be a New Yorker in order to have your experience mirrored by his review. You could live anywhere in the country and you would be able to say, “My experience at Shake Shack was similar. I also once got a double burger with a really great patty and one very sad patty.”

He took that review seriously, focusing mostly on consistency. It’s one of my favorite reviews, both because of how seriously he took this fast food review and because it’s a prime example of how to write a one-star review and still highlight what might be redeeming qualities of a restaurant. By writing this review, he built trust with a national audience, but he also sort of bust open the idea that he was a snob by saying that he loved their hot dogs. That built trust.

This is restaurant reviewing at its finest. Each one of these reviews focused on the guest and did not focus on the restauranteur’s feelings or the restaurant for the restaurant’s sake. It was really focused on the experience of what it was like for you to be a guest there.

This is how you build trust with readers, not interview-centered reviews where you ask chefs to defend their mistakes, focus on the lore of their restaurant, or omit major errors.

The problem is, most reviews don’t do that. At least, not anymore.

Most reviews focus on the wrong things like the reputation of the chef or the chef’s narrative story or the innovation in the restaurant or the decor (why?!) or the history and food/service/beverage is less than half of it. When I asked a critic who writes reviews that heavily rely on interviews why they do that, they said, “I have a responsibility to both the chefs and the guests. I want to tell the chef’s story.”

My response to that was, “Your responsibility to chefs is to build trust with guests so that when you find a place worth going to, they go.”

They disagreed. They felt they owed the industry something else: a certain kind of silence.

The problem is if you don’t have any credibility with guests, then you can’t do your duty to restaurants. The duty you have to the restaurant industry (getting people to go to restaurants) can only happen if you are trustworthy to guests.

What chefs, critics, and editors have forgotten is that for guests to go to the places based on a review, they have to trust you. And if you see your duty as to restaurants first and guests second, you will never gain that trust. It is only gained in the trenches of “This restaurant is not worth your time,” or, “This restaurant is inconsistent,” or, “This restaurant has lost its way.”

Right now, we have a crisis of trust in restaurant criticism and I don’t think that writers, editors, or chefs really know the long-term consequences.

The long-term consequences of guests not trusting critics is ceding the ground to influencers, Eater, and video content. It’s saying, “The formats that rely on a massive number of clicks, rapid article generation, and ad revenue, the forms that do not rely on restaurant experts or multiple visits, they win.”

If we lose trust, we cede the ground to people who are just video producers or technical list writers.

If we lose trust, we lose an art form that tells the oral history of a restaurant. If we lose trust, we lose the ability to tell the guest’s story. Video can’t do it (it is an intrusion in the guest experience), nor photography, only words.

In the age of TikTok reviews after one visit, Eater lists, and influencers chasing the hype cycle, criticism is the last bastion of the old guard of restaurant writing that puts guests first.

The only way for us to protect it is to be trustworthy. The only way to be trustworthy is to write the hard reviews, too.

The worst of the southern biscuits are better than the best of their northern counterparts, as is true of other southern staples like grits, chess pie, and cornbread.

Just like cheese curds in Minnesota. When my friend Chris came to visit from California and ate one here, he said, “I’ve never had a cheese curd like that.”

Southern biscuits are tender, light (in texture and often in color), fluffy clouds. They are often (but not always) made with lard and soft wheat flour. That flour is hard to find in the north but ubiquitous in the south. It’s called White Lily. Sometimes I can’t find it online and I have to order it from a friend in the south, because White Lily flour is damn near impossible to find in the north. I’ve never met a southern biscuit that doesn’t use buttermilk, either, but when I ask some local restaurants what they’re using they respond with, “2% milk,” which makes me want to apologize deeply and profusely to everyone who lives in Alabama.

Northern biscuits are, well, they’re hard. They are often golden, not just on the top and bottom, but the entire sides. They are dense and flat. Unlike their crumbly counterparts, they are dry. That’s a distinction that sometimes is hard to discern, but is ever present if you’ve eaten a lot of northern biscuits. Northern biscuits use standard flour with its standard protein content (White Lily has less protein). I’ve also only encountered one or two biscuits in the north that use lard—here, butter or shortening reigns supreme.

Northern biscuits are a different variety of food altogether, just like northern cornbread uses oil instead of bacon grease, flour instead of straight cornmeal, and glass instead of a ripping hot cast iron skillet.

Northern biscuits are not southern cuisine, but what I’ve dubbed northern-southern cuisine. To me, these are two distinct styles of cooking.

Both of them feel defined to me—and I don’t actually hate all northern-southern food (sweet cornbread can be excellent in the right context). The problem is that the presence of northern-southern cuisine often eclipses true southern food in a way that is unfortunate. People’s palates in the north become used to northern spins on southern food in a way that often means that from the south southern restaurants don’t get their due in awards, national media, or cookbooks.

There’s no better example of this distinction between southern and northern-southern than biscuits.

When I asked people for biscuit recommendations in the Twin Cities, I kept getting hit with flat biscuits more akin to scones than their southern namesake. When I told people those were not biscuits, they lamented, “They are!” But here’s a side-by-side comparison of Alma’s biscuits (right) with Bird Bird Biscuit in Austin (left).

I love Alma, but this is not a good biscuit, and person after person told me it was. Some people defended it with such gusto that I went back to try it again. I followed that up asking those people, “Do you spend a lot of time in the south?” The answer was no.

I do. I feel a call to the south, regularly considering moving towards the most rural parts of Tennessee where dogs run wild on backroads and almost all the hikes are bushwhack.

Alma’s biscuit is dense and inside this biscuit is sometimes a layer that’s a little gummy.

If you look at the layers, it feels like they’ve been stifled. They want to rise more, but either due to lack of leavening, protein content in the flour, or being sealed by the knife that cut them, they can’t. It doesn’t crumble, it flakes. The one on the left is fluffy, with less focus on perfect layers and more focus on air and height.

Hot Hands has a similar problem. You can compare their biscuit (right) versus a biscuit at Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit in Charleston (left).

The right is a classic example of a northern-style biscuit that seems like a cross between a scone and a biscuit versus just a biscuit. If this is all you’ve ever had, you might think these are great examples of southern biscuits. They aren’t.

Still, for a while, this was the best we had. Sometimes best we have doesn’t mean good or great or drool-worthy. Sometimes best we have is just that. I tried dozens of biscuits looking for better. Finally, I just had to admit that we didn’t have good biscuits.

These flat, crunchy biscuits with dark outer edges* aren’t what I’m looking for in a biscuit. So I was resolved that to get good biscuits, I had to make them myself. Until now.

*Square biscuits bake less evenly, due to the sharp corners, and are less traditional than round biscuits. Sometimes, people who move here from the South lament over the lack of circular biscuits—I get it. But… lots of kitchens in the south make square biscuits, which, see the photos above for proof of that. The problem isn’t the square. The problem is the heat of the oven, the flour used, the fat, adapting to the other popular biscuits in town to meet locals where they are at, and technical skill.

Southern Style: Black Duck + Unicorn Barbecue

Black Duck’s dinner is a bit of an enigma to me. Is it Polish or Mexican or Southern or New American? I don’t know. But breakfast, to me, is clearly southern (with two Polish items on the menu). Chicken fried steak, biscuits and beef fat gravy, a corn pancake, hashbrowns sometimes stuffed with brisket, and a breakfast platter with a biscuit you can add for $3 feels like almost every southern brunch spot I’ve walked into. When I saw that menu, I knew I wanted to go try it.

If you know me, you know I don’t go to restaurants in their first 90 days. I also don’t go to brunch in its first 90 days or dinner service, if it’s added. I wait and give the team space to breathe.

But Chef de Cuisine Jake Benjamin Johnson at Black Duck is from the south—and I was craving a bit of southern food.

Chef Jake promoted that he was using Farm & Sparrow cornmeal for his blue corn pancake—and Farm & Sparrow and White Lily are the only two things I don’t source locally when faced with a head-to-head choice. He also posted the menu and I saw it feature a biscuit with jam, the same biscuit he serves with his Unicorn Barbecue platters of Texas-style smoked turkey and brisket (the one I got at Unicorn was round, but the one you get a Black Duck is square).

I woke up my boyfriend on his morning off and went to brunch (thanks babe). We didn’t just go on the first day, we were the first people there.

We ate half the menu, all of it was excellent. The corn pancake is a revelation worth eating. The brisket stuffed hash browns are wildly delicious. And even things like bacon are somehow better here than most other places.

I thought the pancake would be the star, but it wasn’t. It was the biscuit. “When we started brunch, it was the first thing I thought of for the menu,” Chef Jake said.

Chef Jake uses 50% AP flour and 50% cake flour, making this biscuit softer than most of its northern counterparts. He said he’s “trying not to develop too much gluten and the cake flour helps with that.” It does. This is a tender biscuit and you could have fooled me about its absence of White Lily.

The biscuit made me feel a little bit emotional, because it was the first soft southern-style biscuit I’ve ever eaten in my hometown. That’s because the recipe started in the south. Chef Jake’s mom decided to learn how to make a great biscuit when he was in his teens. She called upon her mom, her husband’s mom, and Alton Brown, who taught her not to overwork the dough.

It was a family affair to make it and now it’s a family legacy.

Chef Jake said, “She came up with a great recipe. I took that recipe and made very slight adjustments and its one of my favorite things to make.” You can taste it in the biscuit.

Not just basic, but storied, it’s our best biscuit.

Northern-Southern Style: Vikings & Goddesses

When the Vikings & Goddesses biscuit launched at the Mill City Market, I arrived to find them sold out. It caught the eye of everyone in the city, from your neighbor down the street to former Star Tribune critic Rick Nelson. Since that fateful miss, I’ve arrived almost every week right at opening to score one of these lopsided beauties. For me, part of biscuits is not worrying about perfectly straight rises, but rather, worrying about how it tastes. This is the way these are baked, mostly by baker Jacob Salzman who has been with V&G for four years.

Held in a little hot box, served (if you want) with whipped Hope butter and rotating homemade jam, this biscuit is tall (I had one that was 3.5 inches tall), fluffy, and can be torn apart by hand to reveal flaky layers. To me, it’s obvious that it’s made with hard wheat flour, lacking a bit of the softness of a southern biscuit, but it’s as good as it gets with hard wheat flour. And by as good as it gets, I mean it’s damn good.

Here, the biscuits don’t look like the layers are begging to rise. They’ve risen.

While Black Duck’s biscuit is for people who like soft outer edges and southern charm, this biscuit is for people who like a bit of a darker edge characteristic in northern-southern style biscuits, and yearn for height.

You might recognize these biscuits. The Lost Fox biscuits and gravy includes these biscuits, and years ago, Rachel Anderson used to make (different but similar) biscuits at Revival.*

*Revival’s biscuits used White Lily.

Incredibly buttery and immediately craveable, you have to arrive at the Mill City Farmer’s Market early to get one. Rachel told me, “We have been selling out by 10:30 consistently.” For me, even arriving at 10:00am is pushing it. I show up early with a Red Wolf Chai in hand to get in line. Then I eat my biscuit fresh and hot on the steps leading up to the Guthrie before shopping for strawberries and squash blossoms. It’s a perfect Saturday morning.

Never been to the Mill City market? Be warned, it’s incredibly busy after 9:00am with long lines and downtown prices. It’s also the market that often has the “firsts” of the season. This year, I got ramps, strawberries, tomatoes, and squash blossoms here before anywhere else.

That elusive southern biscuit with White Lily and lard? I’m not sure I’ll be able to get it anywhere in this city except my house.

But… one day I hope a chef is brave enough to make a biscuit and proudly write contains lard on the menu. (Feel free to send the complaints from guests straight to me, chef!)

Until then, these are the two biscuits I’m eating, not begrudgingly, but happily.

I’m currently working on my best of southern classics lists, with guidance from southern chefs. Next up is fried chicken, but I’m also looking for authentic cornbread (all or almost all cornmeal, bacon grease idealllll, and the cast iron skillet is required) and grits (good luck to me). Want to help me do that?

Eaterfication of food writing isn’t going away—and neither are influencers. So, you, guest of restaurants, whoever you are, you have to take changing your relationship with restaurants into your own hands! The media will fail you. The influencers surely already have. It’s up to you to define how you eat, where you eat, how you vet new restaurants, and how you choose the places you love.

I’ve spent a decade working on eating this way. I’m going to give you a step by step guide to do this, so that you can do it, too.

Step 1: Change how you get recommendations.

Most people get recommendations from influencers and food writers. Most influencers, you can’t trust. The whole point of their content is promotion, like unpaid ads—this is how they get more followers, go viral, and get invitations for free meals. Some food writers, you can trust. I personally think that Jon Cheng’s hidden gem posts were revelatory. In general, I trust J Lee out of NYC. And I often will ask chefs whose style of food I love for recommendations in their city.

Often, though, in 2025, you can’t trust influencers of food writers with your dinner reservation.

There are better and different ways to ask for recommendations. Some of these might lead you off on a wild goose chase eating bad food, but listicles will, too, and I think this is more honest.

1. Do not ask people for a restaurant recommendation. Ask them where they go back to time and time again. When you ask people for a restaurant recommendation, they will give you something random that is normally not the answer you want. This framing will help. Ask lots of people. And then go where most of them say they go back to. Lots of food writers are haters and say that average people don’t know shit about restaurants. I disagree. Some of my favorite restaurant recommendations come from everyday people with a neighborhood spot recommendation that hasn’t been on a newspaper’s radar.

2. Talk to your neighbors. Your neighborhood should be one of the places you eat out in the most. Ask your neighbors what they like and where they go. Then go there.

3. Ask restaurants you really love if anyone else is doing X like them. Is anyone else building relationships with farmers like them? Or using a similar technique on a dish? Or making drinks in a similar vein? This will get you the peers and contemporaries of that restaurant more often than not. You can’t just ask them for a restaurant recommendation, you have to ask them on specifics.

Step 2: Google Better.

When I posted this note, multiple people said it was a game changer for them after they tried it.

This will help you immensely. Does it take time? Yep. Is it a ton of fun? Yep.

Step 3: Eat your neighborhood—not tourist traps.

I always tell people that if you haven’t eaten at most of the restaurants in your neighborhood but eat out a lot, you should start over and start at home. I do this in every city I’ve lived in. I eat outwards in a spiral-like fashion. Why? Because the best spots are underhyped neighborhood spots—and as a girl who has lived in Uptown, Minneapolis most of her life, I can tell you that our best spots hardly ever hit the best of list but the “tourist trap” spots that appeal to the summer crowds that come to the lake always do.

Take Middle Child in Philadelphia for example. It’s on every best of list, but is called MID-dle Child by locals. A listicle will send you there, with lots of praise about the pancakes. As a former Philadelphian, I can tell you, most of the people I knew never went there.

Asking locals where to get breakfast in Philly will send you to spots far more interesting like breakfast banh mi or a diner that’s been around for over 100 years or hot dogs (yes) or soul food, once, it took me to a church basement. People only knew those restaurants because they ate their neighborhood. Becoming a neighborhood guide like that is incredibly fun.

Grab a friend. Use Google Maps. Play restaurant roulette in your neighborhood. And hey if it’s bad? That’s a damn good memory, which speaking of:

Step 4: Be okay with eating bad meals.

About a year ago, in June if 2024, I wrote a piece called Against listicles, in defense of eating bad food looking for magic.

It highlights the way that we used to find food was doing things like looking at menus on doors or asking friends. Now, we almost exclusively trust the palates of people who are creating content for engagement. Here’s a pull quote:

You’re going to eat some bad food along the way if you’re shooting darts looking for magic. I eat bad food all of the time.

That’s the journey we’ve lost with Eater and Thrillist and the New York Time’s best restaurants of X year. We’re picking other people’s favorites and calling them universally beloved–or we’re picking pretty plates or we’re picking most people could go there and call it good or we’re picking I like that chef or we’re picking new and shiny. And chefs? When you ask chefs where to eat, they just pick their buddies. It sends tourists and locals alike into a crap shoot of restaurants that are chosen based on a mix of reasons, but not always based on the best food, and definitely almost always omitting large swaths of the city and suburbs, mostly in diasporic foods. Most of the food on those lists is good enough. But I’ve found some of my favorite restaurants by digging around on my own.

So, I’m sorry, but if you want to find the best food in your city, you have to go out and find it yourself, and you’re going to have meals along the way that you wish you’d never had. But that’s the joy of finding the good shit.

Throw a dart. Roll the dice. Don’t use a list to find out where you go next. Choose a neighborhood or a random mall or a block of fancy pasta spots and then go there and figure it out yourself. And if it’s bad? Laugh about it. Some of my favorite most memorable meals of my life were terrible, horrible, god awful meals I found by poking around. My friend Dan and I shared the worst Indian food of our collective lives in Omaha over a decade ago. We still talk about it. I had the worst pasta of my life in Knoxville and I still tell the story of how I got out of there. I once went into a bakery that was obviously re-sold Dunkin Donuts and I laughed so hard in the car, deeply respecting the hustle.

It feels like, as a country, we’re so afraid of going somewhere untested that we all go to the same spots over and over again. I call that musical chairs.

Step 5: Stop playing musical chairs.

Musical chairs is a style of eating that kills restaurants. We go to a restaurant after an influencer video, a review, an award, an opening, a new viral dish, etc. As an entire city, we descend upon that restaurant all at once. They scramble to keep up with us, staffing up or expanding hours or crumbling a little bit under the weight. If you don’t get in line to get the viral pastry, someone else will. If you don’t go to dinner that night at that spot, someone else will.

Reviews include complaints about how things sell out. They also include barbs about the wait times, even as kitchens that normally get out at 11pm and now pushed to the limit and sending workers home an hour (or more) later and bringing staff in an hour (or more) earlier—all to feed you.

We’re all just playing the game of musical chairs, like some kind of labubu-style hype where we go online at midnight to get the reservation to the hot new it-spot and when we don’t get it, we don’t go somewhere else. We try again.

I’ve played musical chairs. When I travel to other cities, there are spots I must go to. It took me 14 attempts to get into Kasama, meaning I disrupted my sleep for about 2 weeks to get a spot (reservations open in the middle of the night). It took me 5 attempts to get into Ilis. To get a table for four at Diane’s Place, I tried for over 20 days—I finally gave up. We called ahead to make sure a four-top walk-in on the patio was okay and then sat on the patio (pro tip, the patio is walk-in and pretty big).

But musical chairs means that everyone goes to that restaurant over a relatively short period of time and then everyone leaves that restaurant for the next thing.

I do my best not to play musical chairs. When a restaurant is in a moment of acclaim or going viral, that’s when they need me the least.

I try to go to a restaurant that I love that has empty tables, because I know I can impact their bottom line. I’m not a musical chair there—I’m a table that otherwise would sit empty, revenue that otherwise wouldn’t be earned.

Does this mean you should avoid all the best restaurants, never go when a restaurant is new, and avoid every viral baked good? No! But balance it with places that aren’t in that moment of hype.

Step 5: Change your relationship with new restaurants.

When I tell you to stop going to restaurants on opening night, the tone of that is the girl in this GIF.

Restaurants are not at their best on day one or even in their first 90 days. They don’t hit their stride for 18 months most of the time. Imagine if you had to start a new business doing whatever you do and on day one you had paying guests. Terrifying.

Day 1-90, they are finding their footing. But they are also in the middle of a media and influencer shit storm that means they don’t normally need you right away. There are lines and reservation waits. At 90 days, once the hype dies, that’s when they need you. I set a timer and don’t go into restaurants in their first 90 days except on rare occasions (or because a friend who works there asks me to). Every single time I do this, the food and service is so much better when I go back after 90 days.

Also if you go to a restaurant day one and tell people it isn’t good, we need to have a (stern) word about how that isn’t fair.

But there’s something more insidious here. If people go to every new restaurant and then never go back, we’re essentially forcing restaurants to be brick and mortar pop ups for our entertainment. And that? I’m really not into that. So:

Step 7: Plan your visits with restaurants in mind.

January 1st is a day when a lot of people make this resolution: I’m going to eat out less. But January is gangbusters for me.

I go to all my favorite places all at once because they are emptier than any other month, struggling to get by. Because everyone is staying at home and trying to be keto for a month, restaurants struggle. I do my best, in that month, to show up. I’d love if your January resolution for 2026 was to do the same.

So, too, for going out to eat outside of the rush. A 5:00pm table is a table that might otherwise not be filled. Same with a 9:00pm table. Often, restaurants will not have any tables for 30-60 minutes and then get an entire restaurant sat at the same time which means the kitchen is rocked. I try to think of the kitchen when I go out and avoid those 7:00pm slots unless I need to be there for my writing or because of my schedule.

I also go to hyped-up restaurants on weekdays versus weekends. You’re less likely to be a musical chair. Weekdays are slower, sometimes painfully so. Going out on a Wednesday versus a Friday makes a big difference to restaurants—and I can promise you that weeknight dates are just as fun as weekend ones!

This is above and beyond, I know! But if you eat this way, you’re a true champion of restaurants.

Step 8: Learn the signs of a restaurant that needs you.

I do my best to support restaurants that need me. As a writer, I can often ask. People are honest most of the time and tell me how they’re doing.

But there are some telltale signs that tell you a restaurant that you love might need an extra visit from you that year. Here are some of them:

1. No reservations. Look at their reservation system online. If you see a ton of open spots, they might need you.

2. It’s empty. I know, duh, but if it’s 7:00pm on a Friday and it’s dead, they might need you.

3. The format or menu is changing. Going from a tasting menu to a la carte? All of a sudden the expensive ingredients are being replaced with cabbage? Trying new happy hours? Offering date night specials? Adding brunch? Removing brunch? Bringing in trivia? They might need you. Go to the trivia.

4. They’re understaffed. There’s a restaurant I love that regularly does not have enough servers—sometimes they have one for an entire restaurant and the patio. When they get hit with a rare busy night, that server goes down hard. This is because the labor cost is too high for them to keep two servers on for an empty restaurant. Waiting in line in the bathroom, a woman smack talked that server to me and I said, “Do you see any other servers here?” She didn’t. I smiled and told her, “It’s because she’s the only one.” She had more grace for her then. She just hadn’t looked up to notice. If a restuarant feels understaffed, they might need you.

If I think a restuarant I love needs me? I go. Often (for me—which is going to look different than for you). If every single struggling restaurant had their biggest supporters come an additional 1-2 times a year, they might just be able to make it.

Step 9: Make a list of all the restaurants you’d grieve deeply if they closed.

I have a top 10 list of local restaurants I’d grieve if they closed.

Some of these restaurants are on this list because they are favorite restaurants, like Myriel, BLG, and Diane’s Place.

Others are here because I believe in what they’re doing, like Herbst (haven’t been since Chef Ben Moenster took over? Straight to culinary jail for you. You must go.)

Others are here because they mean something to our history, like Tilia, which was an incredibly important restaurant when it opened with one of our first approachable tasting menus (they ditched the tasting menu in 2024) whose dining room is often empty in 2025.

Others, like Butter Bakery, are places where I grew up. I ate the biscuit sandwiches in the old location, which didn’t have AC. I could see the door from my first studio apartment and still go back to the new one. Plus, Dan is a mensch. Same with Modern Times, it means something to my history.

And then three are my neighborhood spots: Our Kitchen, Taco Taxi, and Bryant Lake Bowl. To me, these are my experience of Uptown. One of them closing would be a knife to the heart in an onslaught of closures in my part of town. For almost my entire life, the Uptown Dulono’s was on the top of this list, not because it had the best pizza (it didn’t), but because it was a keeper of my memories.

So what do I do? I go to these places more often than other places.

I know that isn’t possible for everyone to do with limited budgets, but it is possible for us to consider them. Maybe you can’t go out to eat every week like I do, but you probably are able to go to the one singular restaurant where it would break your heart the most if it closed at least once in a 12 month span.

If we all did this, fewer of our best restaurants would close.

Step 10: Make a reservation.

At the end of the day, what I’m hoping you do when you read this piece is make a reservation somewhere that you love and haven’t been to in a while. Tag me on Instagram @beyondbeurreblanc and tell me where you’re going and why you love that restaurant.

Because at the end of the day, supporting restaurants means going to them. Not just once. But again and again and again.

The ricotta toast, at Herbst.

Other chefs even weighed in, with Chef Neal Harden of abcv commenting, “What a snooze,” and James Beard Award Winning Chef Sophia Roe commenting, “noooooooooooo.”

When I read the piece, I had to put it down halfway through and go for a walk. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach that this article would do more harm than good. After all, I’m a writer, which was probably the first creative field that ChatGPT tried to conquer. There is such a thing now as “ChatGPT Voice,” telltale signs that something was written by ChatGPT, and a clear understanding in my profession that using ChatGPT requires less skill than writing from your own head.

Maybe you think that middle-of-the-road chefs are highlighted in that piece by Pete Wells, but that’s not the case. Two chefs highlighted are Chef Grant Achatz of Alinea fame, which has three Michelin stars, and Chef Jenner Tomaska of Esmé, which has one Michelin star.

I found myself staring at the article wondering if either of realized the Pandora’s box they just opened—and if anyone would (or could) do anything to stop it.

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Writer’s note: I wrote this from 10:00pm-midnight with a review at 6:00am before a 10 hour day. Are there typos? Surely! But that’s the trade off when I publish a piece within the hours that my copyeditor is asleep and alas, babes, that’s what we’re doing today.

If Pete Wells was nominated for a James Beard Foundation media award for one of his reviews and someone uncovered that review was written with the help of ChatGPT, there would at the very least be uproar and probably a meme carousel by thesussmans. If the entire review was written by ChatGPT from start to finish except a prompt inputted into the chatbot, Wells would probably be eliminated from contention for the award. And rightly so. It’s not his work.

Also, despite media spin, 45% of all text generated from ChatGPT is plagiarism and obviously, in my field, we don’t really like plagiarism.

In other art forms, if you are found to be using AI to create your art, you are definitely seen as stealing from other artists in your field. This is because AI and ChatGPT are derivative and they steal from, well, everything. It might not be definable, but it is clear: ChatGPT and AI can’t function without “internet resources” and “internet resources” are someone else’s intellectual property.

The ethical questions (plagiarism, water usage, sentient chatbots) aside, it is just true that anyone using AI or ChatGPT to write for them isn’t the true (or sole) author of the work.

When a writer tells me they use ChatGPT for their work, I struggle to take their work seriously. I become unclear about what their point of view is versus the machine’s.

But somehow, even with his journalistic ethics, Wells doesn’t question in his most recent piece The Year’s Hot Tool for Chefs? ChatGPT if ChatGPT has that same implication in kitchens or how chefs should disclose it (on some social media platforms, for example, you have to disclose if something is AI). The word “ethics” doesn’t even appear in the article, which is baffling to me.

Wells also doesn’t, ugh, seem to have his finger on the pulse because when I posted a question about how chefs feel about ChatGPT, it was astonishingly clear: most chefs don’t want a damn thing to do with it.

Like Chef Sean Pharr of Mint Mark, Hank’s, and Muskellounge who said, “If you are a chef and need to resort to AI to write a menu, you should throw the towel in and get a job testing fig jams at Sur le Table.” (Honestly, sounds like a dream job, Chef.)

Chef Ben Hunter, one of the cooks at Madison’s This is All Fabulous said "It sorta just puts you in the lacking imagination category by default."

One chef who didn’t want to be named said, “If I worked in a kitchen and a chef wanted me to use ChatGPT, I’d quit.”

My boyfriend Greg Baker and I talked about this at length yesterday. We both share values of sustainability and local food systems as the core of restaurants. He said, “Chefs should be stewards of the earth and reach for sustainability. Using AI usurps water and heats the planet you get your ingredients from and if you're unable to think of things on your own, then hang up your apron.”

James Beard Award winning and Michelin Green Star recipient Chef Rob Rubba of Oyster Oyster also had a similar point-of-view that he shared on his Instagram stories.

Other quotes I got (on the record) were too colorful to print, with tons of swearing and lots of anger. If what the New York Times wanted was publicity, they got it. This piece certainly hit a nerve.

It hit a nerve because it equates a few chefs’ usage of ChatGPT to a larger trend that doesn’t exist.

88% of people who answered my poll, the vast majority of them restaurant workers, said that they don’t want ChatGPT used in restaurants.

In Wells’ most recent piece, Chef Grant Achatz outlines how at Michelin-starred Next, he created fake chefs with fake backgrounds and asked ChatGPT to spit out dishes they might make. He says that he is trying to do as little as possible on his own, with ChatGPT doing most of the work aside from cooking. Any food writer who said this publicly about their own work would be slaughtered by chefs for lack of integrity. And chefs would be right to do that. Because the critiques are not ours. They are a chatbot’s.

Imagine if in my next review, I put a disclaimer at the bottom where I pretended to be a farm girl from rural Iowa and asked ChatGPT to write that review for me. Obviously, you would understand that while the biography of the made up farm girl that I put into ChatGPT might be my creative work, the piece ChatGPT writes is not (you might also think this is a bit silly as an exercise and I am sure chefs would roast me for it).

While maybe the kitchen at Next is run by Achatz and the chatbot is controlled by Achatz, the design of his menu is not his creative work. It is ChatGPT’s creative work.

The menu is a massive part of what a restuarant is. It’s not just cookery, but a chef’s vision. Sending the menu over to be created by a chatbot means losing the title of chef.

To me, I think a chef can use ChatGPT the same way other people can—with reckless, planet-destroying abandon. It’s free to use. It’s not illegal. People use it all the time for lesser things than restaurant menus, whether I agree with them or not.

But… I just feel like if a menu or dish is made from ChatGPT we have to acknowledge it’s not the chef’s recipe.

And in this ethical and artistic conundrum, I think that Chefs using AI for their menu design should be eliminated from award contention.

I’m not alone here. Out of over 200 hospitality workers who answered a question about if ChatGPT should eliminate you from contention for awards, 94% said yes.

Now, maybe if you’re Pete Wells or one of the Michelin-starred chefs reading this, you might wonder if those chefs are at the “same level” as you. The answer is 1) yes and then 2) who cares? But—every single Michelin-starred chef or chef with a James Beard Award who filled out the poll said it should eliminate you from contention.

One past James Beard Judge who wanted to remain anonymous said, “I think we would have an ethics question around a menu made by ChatGPT.”

When I asked if they thought the restaurant might be found in violation of the code of ethics for using it for their menu, this judge said, “I would hope so.”

The James Beard Award code of ethics includes a clause about antiethical practices that includes Misrepresentation of material facts, including fabrication, plagiarism, or false claims of ownership which would likely eliminate a chef from contention who covertly used ChatGPT to create a menu, but the James Beard Awards have still yet to answer the question of how they might deal with ChatGPT or AI making a full menu directly.

As these are often chef awards or restaurant awards, how would reviewers deal with the fact that the “chef” or person driving the vision is a chatbot? For me, the answer is clear: eliminate anyone who used ChatGPT or AI to write their menu from contention.

It is factually not your creative vision and the best chef award deserves to be awarded to someone who is taking on a bold creative vision from concept to execution.

For the Michelin Guide, one of the criteria is the personality of the chef in the cuisine, which means that even Esmé’s usage of generative imaging seems contrary to. And because Achatz made up multiple personalities for the meal at Next, it seems his concept is contrary to that, as well (though you could argue that this type of innovative dining is his personality as a chef, but I strongly disagree).

The Michelin guide also does not currently have standards set out for ChatGPT, but I personally feel like any reviewer eating at Next during the ChatGPT menu-run should consider the personality of the chef as not present. While Achatz is known for his creativity and pushing the boundaries, this is one step beyond that. He’s not reimagining a dish from another chef—he’s literally just using a chatbot to make a menu.

He is creating a world here through the stories he gives to ChatGPT, but he’s not creating a menu. The chatbot is doing that—and that distinction matters.

More than awards, though, I worry about the future of food. Writing that uses ChatGPT is clearly created with ChatGPT. You can see its unique voice over the writer’s, even if the writer fed ChatGPT a lot of their work. So, too, for art, where AI spits out similar images over and over. When ChatGPT and AI are used in creative pursuits, we can tell.

In fact, you can ask ChatGPT, “Did you write this?” And ChatGPT will tell you if it did, claiming a sense of self. The chatbot doesn’t say, “I made that recipe, with the help of Chef Grant Achatz.” It would say, “I made that recipe.” Which, creepy factor aside, it’s telling that ChatGPT operates this way. It’s because even the creators of ChatGPT know that you are not creating by using this tool—they just want you to think that you are.

If chefs start to use ChatGPT liberally, I worry that they, too, will lose their individual craft to a chatbot.

If we lose the personality in cookery, we lose the last thing keeping the industry alive in a world that seems hellbent on tearing it down.

I’ve eaten at both Next and Esmé in the past two months under pseudonyms.

Both restaurants gave me memorable hospitality experiences that were decidedly human. Both of the NA menus in these restaurants are stunning. Stunning, babe.

My hospitality at both was tender, including receiving a purse hook from Esmé because I always talk about how I need one, and never get one. At Next, I read a book, and a member of my service team paused to say, “I heard you like eat quickly. Would you like us to slow down?” Aside from realizing someone in the restaurant knew who I was, this was a human moment. I said yes. They let me linger. I got to go back in time to Achatz’s early days. Alinea is a restaurant I’ve struggled with and the meal at Next helped me understand Achatz in a way I hadn’t before.

While Achatz had a chatbot create a caviar ice cream for the Wells Piece, I always revel in eating Tomaska’s signature ice cream caviar course, which I equate to ants on a log (affectionately).

I just know that Tomaska’s ice cream would be better than the chatbot’s, because Tomaska spent so many hours trying to get it right, and unlike the robot, he can taste what it needs.

We all know those people who are just using a flavor thesaurus like gospel instead of playing around with their concept on their own—you can tell in the food.

ChatGPT is one step down from this kind of thinking, because it doesn’t have the memory of creme fraiche and caviar to build off.

But also, if I told you that I was making creme fraiche and caviar ice cream for a course at a Michelin-starred restaurant, you might say, “Oh that’s never been done before,” sarcastically. It has. That’s the whole thing about ChatGPT. It’s just regurgitating what’s been done before. Nothing new will come of it.

The delight of these chefs has always been and will always be that they taste things in a way other chefs don’t and hire chefs who have similar creative visions. This is true of all great chefs. Both of these chefs are wildly creative, with art at the center of their restaurants in their own unique ways. Sometimes, I struggle with this. Sometimes, for both of them, art comes before cookery. But their visions, love them or hate them, are clear as a sniper’s. For that, I respect them. You can spot an Achatz dish from a mile away and need only to look at the plating of an Esmé dish to know whose kitchen it comes out of.

Seeing Esmé use AI for plating sort of broke my heart, because they have some of the most stunning plates of food I’ve ever seen. Once, eating a dessert in the shape of a sunflower, I started to cry. Another time, the simple plating of a watermelon cut in half and filled in on one side with tomato gel was a perfect study of color and transparency. The signature clay they use for their main course came from the brain of a human looking to delight you. The treats they hide over your head (sorry for the spoiler) are full of whimsy. You feel that when you eat it. I just don’t think a chatbot can ever plate as well as that team does on their own.

I can’t stand the idea of losing the creative vision of chefs like Esmé’s Jenner Tomaska and Alinea’s Grant Achatz to a chatbot. Can you?

I started telling restaurants I was an alcoholic when saying, “I don’t drink,” or, “I won’t be ordering alcoholic drinks,” didn’t work. I say it out loud to try to avoid being served alcohol.

I do everything I can short of making my own drink to ask restaurants not to serve me alcohol. Still, somehow, this is the second time in 2025 that alcohol has crossed the bar.

I’ve written already (and at length) about how you can prevent this.

I will say, Duluth Coffee Company’s response to me was stellar, and I want to include it here. Though it doesn’t change the outcome, it is welcome to hear.

Thank you for reaching out and sharing this with us, and most importantly, congratulations on your three years of sobriety. That is a huge milestone, and we’re truly sorry that your experience here could have threatened that in any way.

This is absolutely not acceptable, and we take it very seriously. Our intention is always to create a space that is safe, welcoming, and respectful of all people, especially those in recovery. We’ve already initiated a conversation with our team to review our process around non-alcoholic orders and will be implementing updated training immediately to ensure this never happens again.

Thank you again for your honesty and grace in the way you brought this to our attention. You’ve helped us be better, and we’re grateful for that.

With sincere apologies,
Duluth Coffee Company

In 2024 and early 2025, I spent most of the year handling the three times I was served alcohol quietly. I reached out to owners, talked to them over the phone, told them I wouldn’t post what happened to me. I came to them genuinely hoping to change things.

They all told me they’d make changes ranging from training to NA drink menu changes, so that drinks sounded different than the alcoholic versions, even in a rush. Two of those restaurants told me they’d make changes and didn’t. I was just placated, brushed off, when I was really trying to do the thing that chefs were asking me to do: not make it a thing on the internet.

The one restaurant that did take it seriously implemented immediate and sweeping changes ranging from asking people if they drank before getting drink orders, changing the names of drinks, and confirming drinks were NA upon arrival. That restaurant also knew where the problem was. The server rang the drink in right. The bartender made an NA and alcoholic version of that drink. The wrong ones got run out to tables.

One of the restaurants that didn’t make changes said if I’ve been served alcohol so often, it must be a “me” problem, like I’m not ordering right, when maybe it’s a volume problem—I go to over 400 restaurants a year and restaurants don’t have the protocols in place to handle it, even when they have NA drinks on the menu. I am normally served alcohol in fancy or hip restaurants, never in dive bars, always in restaurants with an NA section on their menu.

Earlier this year, a sober influencer was served a beer at a restaurant when she ordered an NA one and publicly addressed her relapse after that. The comments section went wild defending the restaurant. Somehow, when addicts get alcohol at restaurants, it’s always our fault.

I’ve only ever been served shellfish once in a restaurant. It was also an accident. I handled it quietly, knowing that the chefs at that restaurant would take it seriously. They did.

I found myself, on the other side of these two very different experiences, feeling helpless. How do I get this industry I care about so much to give a damn about people like me?

I don’t know the answer, but maybe being vulnerable and emotional is the right away? Maybe not seeing me as a girl calling you out on the internet, but a girl telling you how hard this shit is, might change your mind. Or one person’s mind.

When I realized Duluth Coffee Kitchen served me alcohol, I felt my stomach drop. I was woozy. My first thought was, “I’m two days out from three years sober.” And then I pulled up my relapse prevention note on my phone. This is a document that guides me on what to do when I feel like drinking or was served alcohol unintentionally.

I was supposed to go to two more restaurants that morning and then on a walk, but instead I went through the following list:

1. Write a list of all the things you love about being sober.

2. Write down how the alcohol feels in your body.

3. Read the promises.

4. Call your best friend and tell them you were served alcohol.

5. Tell your boyfriend.

6. Call two sober people.

7. Go to an AA meeting, the soonest one.

8. Call your therapist.

When you serve me alcohol, I won’t relapse, but you do impact my day. Because alcoholism lives in the shadows, I do my best to bring it to light.

After Duluth Coffee Kitchen served me alcohol, I cried in my car. I cried in my car because I don’t understand why the industry sees this as such a flippant thing. I cried in my car because I knew that another addict wouldn’t have walked away unscathed—and all addicts are my siblings. I pulled out the three year coin I keep in my wallet and I started the process of working through my relapse prevention list. The first thing I wrote down about what I love about being sober is: I am alive.

People act like my anger when I’m served alcohol is unjustified, but I don’t know how to tell you that this matters. I’m tired of asking restaurants to care about my sobriety. When you talk about it being a “mistake,” a “service error,” an organic “part of restaurants and the risk you take,” you aren’t taking sobriety seriously.

There are restaurants where shellfish never winds up in the hands of people allergic to it. And there are restaurants where alcohol never crosses the bar.

For lots of people, they will relapse. Addiction is a beast. Especially early on, lots of people don’t have the skills to handle it. And maybe your response to that is, “Okay, well don’t order the NA bloody mary then,” except this is who your restaurant is catering to when you have one. You have made a choice to include us. You don’t have to. Diet Coke is fine. But if you make a menu for us, you have to consider us.

In 2025, it’s time to admit that if alcohol crosses your bar, you have included addicts in your menu design with the idea of profiting off them without really caring about us. And that’s not just for your guests, it’s your cooks, too.

The restaurant industry has the highest rate of illicit drug use (19%) and the highest rate of substance abuse disorder (17%) of any industry. Any. All of them. Every other one.

Acting like lack of care for alcohol crossing the bar is a “guest” problem ignores that the lack of care about alcohol is an industry problem. The “guest” problem is a symptom of a bigger problem, where the industry eats its own.

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Here’s some stories from the trenches.

An ex-boyfriend of mine drove himself to rehab after a shift where he tried to turn down cocaine and was taunted the entire shift for saying no. This is at a restaurant of a lot of acclaim in the Twin Cities.

At a Michelin-starred restaurant, someone shouted, “Is there a doctor in here?” I said no but that I had Narcan. A young cook had received laced drugs. While he was being taken away to the hospital, I found myself saying something I say to restaurants all the time, "You should have Narcan.*” He wasn’t given the resources he needed to get sober. He was fired by the person who gave him his first bump.

*Hey, chef/owners! You should have Narcan!

In the small city of Kingston, a cook wasn’t so lucky. He ODed during service. There was no Narcan. The EMTs were too late. He died.

A chef in a highly awarded restaurant in NYC messaged me after he relapsed with coke he found in the kitchen to tell me that his chef/owner said, “You’re more creative high.” He wanted to know what he should do. He felt the coke was planted. He opened the restaurant. It was his baby. It’s fighting for a star. “Will this eventually kill you,” I asked him. He said, “Yes.” I said, “You have two options then. Leave or die.” He left. He hasn’t returned to the industry. He’s one of its most promising stars.

There’s a chef/owner with a lot of local acclaim who has vodka in his quart container of “water.” When someone brought it to his business partner’s attention, that person said, “Eh, that’s just [insert name here].” When a cook dumped it out, sick of being yelled at by his drunk boss, all hell broke loose.

On a more everyday, more mundane level, cooks reach out to me all the time because they got sober and are having a hard time returning to the industry. The constant alcohol in kitchens gets to them. The being offered coke gets to them. The higher up in fine dining you are, the harder it is. Many sober cooks become pizza guys or work at country clubs or work a brunch spot that crushes their soul. Or they leave the industry entirely. These are cooks who have a ton of talent and the sobriety to execute clear visions. The industry purges its brightest by being inaccessible to them when they’re going to be at their best.

Lots of chef/owners will say, “Not in my kitchen,” not realizing that vape pens and coke baggies are passed around when they’re doing something else in the back. More than one chef who has told me, “Not in my kitchen,” I haven’t wanted to be a narc, but I wanted to scream, “Yes, in your kitchen. I know, in your kitchen. A chef is newly in AA from your kitchen.”

But I can’t so I smile and say, “Lots of chefs say that when it isn’t true.”

Then there’s moments like these.

In a small town restaurant in Minnesota, when a cook got sober, he returned from rehab to a new NA section on the menu.

Somewhere in New York City, a sous chef got sober and the chef/owner implemented a sober kitchen upon his return.

A head chef somewhere in this country got sober, quietly, and now fine dining cooks straight out of rehab stage in his kitchen to get back into the industry with a toe in before diving back into the monster of a kitchen with a lot of booze.

I firmly believe that these are the kitchens restaurant industry workers deserve—and I think it starts by caring about alcohol crossing the bar.

Or, at Smyth, early on, someone acknowledged my sobriety to make sure I knew that I was safe there.

At HAGS, there’s fent test strips in the bathroom, which was enough to make me cry.

At Lakes Tavern, when I said I was an alcoholic, my server appeared to have never taken a task as seriously as making sure that my drinks were NA. It was incredibly, especially, touching.

At Khaluna, the first thing they ask you at the bar is if you drink alcohol or not. If you don’t, your welcome drink is NA.

Once, on a kitchen tour, I saw not just Narcan in a prominent place but a how-to sign. I pointed to it and said, “I really love that.” From across the kitchen, the chef said, “We take it really seriously here. We’re a dry kitchen.”

These moments were ones that will stay with me forever. They also normally happen at restaurants where sober addicts in recovery have a say. They should happen everywhere, not just when one of your own gets sober.

When you make the choice to take sobriety seriously in your bar program, cooks struggling with alcoholism are more likely to tell you when they need help or support.

They’re more likely to feel like they can turn down shift drinks. And then those sober cooks and servers find you, so that when sober guests come in, they have friends at the bar. Nothing feels as much like home as when a chef or bartender comes out to talk to me, with a quiet and well placed, “We have a mutual friend. Bill W.”

As giant after giant in the industry dies from substance abuse, it’s up to chef/owners to lead the charge to turn the tide. I just don’t know how to ask you to care about us any other way than I already am.

Will this be the year that restaurants stop serving me alcohol? Probably not, but I won’t stop trying, because as more and more restaurants are adding NA programs and more cooks struggle to stay sober, it’s more important than ever.