Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Dan spent many hours on the phone with the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Douglas County Historical Society trying to uphold my family’s name. He did find decent confirmation that my grandfather invented butter brickle ice cream, which nobody in my family really cares about—I’m not sure why. I spent many hours on the phone with my mother, assuring her that yes, of course, I believed the family story. No outsider could shake my concept of who we are.

  In the end, Dan saved the day. His Irish heritage and storyteller pride led him to understand, far better than I did, how important it was not to let the Reuben go, how gutted and lost we’d all feel if we let our history get stolen. “New York has everything, and now they’re coming for the sandwich!” Dan reminded every Nebraskan who would talk to him. The tactic worked. Within a week, the Nebraska State Historical Society unearthed a menu from the Blackstone coffee shop from 1937, offering a Reuben sandwich for 35 cents, 50 cents “with chicken.” The Douglas County Historical Society found a 1934 menu from the Blackstone’s main dining room offering a Reuben for 40 cents. Smith conceded—“Many, many thanks!” he wrote. “These are the earliest references for a specific ‘Reuben sandwich,’ and they do indeed support your grandfather’s claim to naming a sandwich!”—though not without noting that he found the chicken option “worrisome.” But that’s his problem. We’ve all got only so many stories, and never any new ones about our pasts. I’m sticking to mine.

  How My City Eats

  The Slow and Sad Death of Seattle’s Iconic Teriyaki Scene

  BY NAOMI TOMKY

  From Thrillist.com

  Seattle-based writer/editor/photographer Naomi Tomsky has eaten her fair share of teriyaki, the once-ubiquitous signature street food of Seattle. Is its decline a symptom of the city’s exponential growth, or a sign of the food world’s increasingly restless trend toward globalization?

  Teriyaki, the dish that the New York Times called Seattle’s version of the Chicago dog, is fading from the collective food brain of the city, as the residents who remember its heyday get priced out of their neighborhoods—along with the restaurants that served it. For the newly arrived inhabitants taking over, teriyaki holds none of the worldly authenticity of pho nor the trendy uber-local appeal of foraged mushrooms. As the city continues to grow at one of the fastest rates in the nation, its signature dish is getting left behind: there are a third fewer teriyaki restaurants in Seattle today than there were a decade ago. What happened?

  Sweet and sticky with sauce, all Seattle-style teriyaki stems from the basic formula Toshihiro Kasahara developed when he opened his first shop, Toshi’s Teriyaki, in 1976. The meat, traditionally chicken thighs slippery and brown from marinade, gets slapped on a hot grill. The high heat caramelizes the sugars, crisping the meat and leaving it with a crunch of barely burnt soy on the outside. Sliced into bite-size pieces, it’s served fanned out across a molded mound of white-as-snow rice, the sauce seeping down between the grains. The salad, like the meat, is sweet and crunchy, the iceberg lettuce and slivers of carrot and cabbage reminiscent of coleslaw, with only the rice vinaigrette separating it from old-school American picnic fare.

  Toshi’s Teriyaki opened its doors on Roy St. in 1976 to almost no fanfare. Business started off slow for the transplant. After graduating from Portland State University, Kasahara had moved to Seattle from Portland, looking for better opportunities. He attended school as a competitive wrestler, but wanted to become an interpreter. However, that’s not exactly how things turned out. “All of my friends had restaurants,” says Kasahara, so he figured why not follow suit. While his pals ran traditional Japanese restaurants, Kasahara wanted to specialize. Specifically, he wanted to find something he could operate without depending on other people, “so when they quit, I could still manage it.”

  “I wish I could say it’s from my ancestors,” Kasahara remarks of the recipe he developed. He always liked cooking growing up, but the closest he can come to defining the origins is to say that what he makes is similar to the Japanese version of teriyaki—a light finishing of soy sauce, sake, and mirin (rice wine) brushed onto grilled or broiled proteins, often seafood.

  Wherever it came from, teriyaki was a knockout. Kasahara owned—or franchised—as many as 17 stores, including one in Phoenix. Copycats and rogue former franchises sprung up, as the Seattle Times put it, “like mushrooms in a damp meadow.” There was Toshio’s, Toshi’s Teriyaki the Original, Yoshi’s, Yoshino, Yasuko’s, and so on. Today, there are nationwide teriyaki chains: both Teriyaki Madness and Glaze Teriyaki operate around the country. Teriyaki Madness, which stemmed from a local shop partnering with two former customers, now operates an impressive 31 outlets in 14 states, with 18 more opening this year. CEO Michael Haith is bullish on the popularity, both with customers (“It’s a flavor that everyone can relate to, it’s healthier, and it’s on the go”), and his franchisees, many of which are now opening a second or third location. But for Kasahara, after building up the franchise business, he had to admit he wasn’t cut out for it. “I didn’t really have the management skills. It was a hassle.” For a while, he stepped out of the teriyaki business entirely, but he couldn’t stay away. Now he cooks in a single three-table shop buried deep within the buildings of a Mill Creek strip mall called Toshi’s Teriyaki Grill.

  As quickly as the teriyaki tide rises around the country (part of the Asian fast-casual category that’s the fastest growing restaurant segment in the country), it’s ebbing in Seattle. The shops fall victim to the same problems as any other small, family-run business. Of the 15 teriyaki shops we rounded up as the best in town in 2014, two have closed (Yasuko’s and Setsuna), one changed hands (Katsu Burger), and another is slated to close later this year (King Donuts, as the owners have decided to retire and have no one to take it over). It’s a testament that even the best can’t survive.

  In 2015, Yasuko Conner closed her namesake teriyaki shop on Broadway after more than twenty years. Long a haven of affordable food alongside the now rapidly gentrifying tracks of the new streetcar, a combination of declining business and rising property taxes—the assessed value of the building increased 129% that year—sounded the death knell for the tiny Yasuko’s. The bare walls (blank except for the haphazardly posted and amended menu) hid the vibrancy of the flavors served. The floors, tables, and chairs were all colorless save for mysterious stains, remnants left behind by the customers, homeless, working-class, and affluent alike, plus a good smattering of Seattle’s high school students, coming together in a place serving simple food at eminently reasonable prices. Teriyaki was the ultimate everyman meal.

  These days, Amazon workers living in new high-rises get whisked by the building’s corner aboard the streetcar. For lunch, they’ll choose between sushi delivered by Uber and pizza cooked by one of Seattle’s star chefs. Teriyaki doesn’t enter the equation. Its legacy in Seattle, the city where Kasahara created it, is fading.

  In 2010, John T. Edge wrote an ode to Seattle teriyaki for the New York Times. He quotes Knute Berger, elder statesman of Seattle media, as saying the shops are “so ubiquitous as to have become invisible.” And once invisible, they actually disappear; two of the four restaurants Edge focused on have since closed. For those who grew up in Seattle, teriyaki was a way of life. Eula Scott Bynoe of the podcast Hella Black Hella Seattle tells the story of bringing a dying relative teriyaki from a favorite spot: “I was there to say goodbye,” but the relative, a Seattle native, she joked, “just wanted the teriyaki.” For new transplants, the simple dish doesn’t fit the narrative of the shiny, new city. Teriyaki shops—dirty and run-down—aren’t listed on any hot lists of where to eat in Seattle. Not in Seattle Metropolitan’s 30 restaurant experiences you “must have,” nor in alt-weekly The Stranger’s “Eat Like a Local.” To Seattle’s latest Amazon and Microsoft recruits—living here as Seattle earned (and is still earning) acclaim for its culinary scene—the city was built on Copper River salmon and Taylor Shellfish oysters. A place where neighborhood restaurants
like Anchovies & Olives shuck bivalves fresh daily and serve pristine fish, even away from the waterfront tourist traps. To have arrived in Seattle in the last five years was to watch Zoi Antonitsas and Jason Stratton both win Food & Wine “Best New Chef” awards and appear on Top Chef, to see Ethan Stowell’s combination of Northwest and Italian cuisines spread to more than a dozen outlets, to taste Blaine Wetzel’s food at Willows Inn and Jamie Boudreau’s drinks at Canon—as each were celebrated for being one of the world’s best restaurants and bars, respectively.

  But for all the seafood and all the awards, former Seattle Times food writer Nancy Leson admits of Seattle’s iconic foods, “When people talk about ingredients, I would go with the salmon and oysters, and that’s fine… but when it comes to definitive dishes, teriyaki is on top of the list.” In the 2010 New York Times piece, Berger offers insight to why such a major dish isn’t more prominent. “Seattle yuppies love the idea of going to some obscure Chinese place for dim sum, but they won’t dare tell you that they eat chicken teriyaki.”

  And while new Seattleites might dismiss the dish, elsewhere people are just discovering its allure. Middle America, for one, doesn’t care that teriyaki didn’t descend from a centuries-old Japanese tradition or from Kasahara’s grandmother. “We’re in Jonesboro, Arkansas, for God’s sake,” laughs Teriyaki Madness’s Haith. He confesses that the idea of authenticity never occurred to him. He’ll even go so far as to compare it to Tex-Mex: “it’s authentic Americanized-Japanese food. They [the customers] like the volume, they like the healthy aspect, and they like the customization abilities.”

  In the end, it comes back to a universal appeal: “There’s a sincerity to it, from the owners, that really translates. It’s comfort food,” states Haith. And he’s right. What Teriyaki Madness does is not only imitate the meals that have drawn in Seattleites for decades but also the environment that bred it. The corner store–style service, the friendly face behind the counter, the bare-bones atmosphere. The dish that Kasahara came up with to open his small Queen Anne shop, with its mangled roots… if it’s authentic anything, it’s authentically old Seattle.

  But new Seattle—with the locals priced out of the area, those that remain forgetting teriyaki exists, and newcomers ignoring it—risks losing those real shops for good. Teriyaki could be heading the direction of deep-dish… just ask a Chicagoan about it and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s for tourists.” Teriyaki is from a different era, and it’s fading as fast as traffic-free days on I-5. Since teriyaki came to town, Seattle’s waved goodbye to the Kingdome, Kurt Cobain, and the Sonics. A signature stadium, a signature musician, a signature team—and now, perhaps, a signature dish.

  As cryptic as that may sound, it’s still not too late. There are still shops that marinate their chicken and make that perfect teriyaki rice, that use fresh ingredients behind the closed doors of their sauce-stained kitchens. Sixty-six shops remain in Seattle with teriyaki in their name—plus one special one in Mill Creek. And Kasahara, like Seattle teriyaki itself, isn’t ready to be counted out quite yet: “I’m not quitting. I’m waiting to see how things go here.” Meanwhile, it’s up to Seattle’s umbrella-shunning stalwarts, incoming Amazon hordes, and everyone in between to know—and support—what’s great about Seattle. To eat teriyaki. To support the small businesses, the independent shops, the unique and wonderful cuisines that define the town. By eating an affordable, delicious meal, you can save one more bit of old Seattle from going the way of grunge. And wouldn’t that be something?

  The Story of the Mission Burrito, Piled High and Rolled Tight

  BY JOHN BIRDSALL

  From Bon Appetit

  Ah, the Mission District—a storied San Francisco neighborhood, which even comes with its own iconic food: the burrito. Award-winning Bay Area food writer John Birdsall is an ideal guide to lead us on a pilgrimage in search of the perfect, and true, Mission burrito.

  The carnitas, frizzled a deep brown from braising in fat, have fibers that splay open as I chew. The pinto beans are earthy and soft, the pico de gallo a dense hash. The fresh avocado option, essential here at La Taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District, unifies everything in a buttery medium where the line between flavor and texture is indistinct, irrelevant. I’m still sweaty after a four-block jog from the nearest parking spot on a Saturday night, but I don’t care because the burrito my friends have waiting is as good as it’s always been, since my first time here three decades ago. I can even look past the evil eye of the woman peeved about my friends hogging a table. To find a seat at perennially jammed La Taq you face the kind of public aggression that this historically chilled-out city isn’t known for—except when it comes to scoring one of the best burritos in America.

  You see a mix of old and new Mission here, friends in their 20s loitering with coworkers over Tecates, and older couples in their black-and-orange Giants caps, stopping on the way home from a day game. There are plenty of out-of-towners, people who left the Bay Area and still come back to Le Taq as soon as their flights land at SFO, and others checking items off their tourist to-do lists: In 2014 Nate Silver’s ESPN-owned statistics website, FiveThirtyEight, chose this as the winner of its nationwide burrito bracket.

  It’s hard to believe in this age of the burrito emoji, but before the ’90s, burritos existed mostly in Latino neighborhoods like the Mission. The ones that crossed over were visitors from other worlds, folksy Tex-Mex (BurritoVille in Manhattan) or California exotic (Tortillas in Atlanta). Then Chipotle happened. The chain’s founder, Steve Ells, was a line cook in the 1980s at Stars, Jeremiah Tower’s flashy San Francisco brasserie. Like most local 20-somethings, he faced down many, many burritos; Ells would sometimes grab one before his shift at the restaurant. “I had grown up in Boulder,” he recalls. “A burrito looks totally different in Colorado—or did.” Ells was mostly influenced by the form of the burrito, its self-containedness. So he opened his first Chipotle in Denver in 1993; within a month that shop was selling more than a thousand Mission-style burritos a day. A second outpost opened, then a third, then eventually 2,000 more stores, spreading Ells’ generic version of this local specialty throughout the country.

  Here in its native habitat, though, the Mission burrito is still lithe, still expressive, each one different from the other. There are burritos for drywall men and tech bros, skate punks and tourists, for luxury condo dwellers and drunks. Some raise a fist for Chicano pride, others are coded for bougie bohemians. Some are the batons for the city’s current relay sprint toward gentrification; others live on as they have despite the pressures of a city in full-on boom. Most—and I say this as a man who has been eating burritos in San Francisco for more than 30 years—are delicious.

  But in a city where the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in 2016 spiked above $3,600, these burritos face an existential challenge. San Francisco is shedding blue-collar workers and Latinos at a rate that has affordable housing advocates freaking out. Last year the city released a report showing that the Mission’s Latino population fell from 60 percent in 2000 to about 48 percent. The same data projects Latinos could make up just 31 percent of the historically Latino district by 2025. Yet the Mission remains a place you cannot understand—or even enjoy—without the burrito, even as the streets where it was born become disturbingly high-end. So how does a cheap, working-class food endure in a place that’s suddenly neither?

  You take the BART train to 24th Street and make your way past the homeless and the loitering high school kids to get to El Farolito. There, you’ll eat a burrito that shows you what the ones in other cities are not.

  The carnitas in an El Farolito super burrito is savage and salty. It dominates the tubular form the way a 24-ounce T-bone commands a plate at Ruth’s Chris: without equivocating, apologizing, or making excuses to vegans. The sheer volume of pork makes the orange grains of Mexican rice they’re packed with recede. Avocado slices are necessary, just as crema, a cooling squiggle, seeps through the thick clump of ingredients. This i
s one of the defining burritos in the Mission style. This is one of the great burritos of San Francisco.

  A Mission burrito starts with a large flour tortilla, typically steamed on a press like a laundromat’s. Then it’s filled egg roll–style with Mexican rice, beans (black, pinto, sometimes refried), salsa, and some chopped or shredded meat (carnitas, grilled or stewed chicken, carne asada, or offally things like tongue, chitterlings, or brains). It is universally known that “a super,” which costs a buck or two more at each place, gets you a handful of cheese, sour cream or crema, either guacamole or sliced avocado, sometimes shredded iceberg.

  The twang of these ingredients is what sets the Mission’s burritos apart. Carnitas can be merely steamed pork in other places; beans can be canned or boiled lifeless; the guacamole scraped from a Sysco bucket. But there are hundreds of places selling burritos in the nearly 1.5 square miles of the Mission. To compete, owners must stand out, the way the roasted tomato salsa does at Papalote, or the al pastor does at Taqueria Cancún. Other places can have good burritos, but they don’t have a culture of good burritos, a community of strivers.

  The burrito maker—often a she—folds in the tortilla’s ends and compresses the fillings into a fat, even cylinder as she rolls. That roll is everything. El Metate is known for its tight game. (But once, at a tiny Oakland burrito shop, Taqueria Las Comadres, I watched a woman roll the excess flap of tortilla into a crisp, chewy spine then embed it to run the length of the filling. It was a move of staggering artistry.) An optional turn on the griddle to crisp the tortilla’s outer skin—what the menu calls dorado-style at La Taq—and then the burrito maker sheaths it in foil, pinches the ends, and drops it onto a plate or red plastic basket alongside a handful of chips.