Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last time we covered the restaurants using AI Foodslop images. Welcome back to Open Tab. Can you smell fall in the air? I cannot, but I want to make an apple pie so badly that I’m pretending I do. I’ve spent the week finding creative ways to dress up a rotisserie chicken, but I’ve found that nothing takes the place of a great sauce.
My go-to is a zippy, spicy, creamy-cilantro-y green sauce that does not really have a recipe—if you shoot me an email I’ll give you my loose measurements. This week: a tale of two movies centered around beloved restaurant franchises. One, a sci-fi/thriller called The Waffle House Index, about a woman working at a Waffle House as a big storm approaches. The other, a based-on-a-true-story film about the Hooters origin story.
That last comes as the chain attempts a family-friendly rebrand. Earth-shatteringly, it was revealed that the AI-loving Gal Gadot did not receive one of the famed Tom Cruise coconut cakes. “He makes cakes?” she asked, confused, on a recent episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. It’s not a big deal for Gadot, who reportedly does not like cake (?!). I’m sure Gadot is actually not that worried, since her mac and cheese company, Goodles, valued at $88 million three years ago, just got acquired.
In this week’s Open Tab: The end
Also in this week’s Open Tab: The end of Chicken Shop Date, the USDA may be changing beef inspection policy, what’s next for Wonder, and why the customer isn’t always right. Breaking up with Chicken Shop Date
After twelve years of hosting her incredibly popular shortform talk show, Chicken Shop Date, Amelia Dimoldenberg announced that it would be ending. “I feel like it’s now time to move on from this adventure and onto a new one,” Dimoldenberg shared in a note posted to Instagram.
There will be a few more episodes before the series goes dark
The show, which premiered in 2014, originally focused on UK-based rap and grime artists. Shows like CSD changed the way celebrities run press tours, giving rise to a slew of new food-based talk shows like Sean Evans’ Hot Ones, Mythical Kitchen’s Last Meals, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me. Perhaps she’s tired of poultry, as Dimoldenberg expands her video empire with non-food content like red carpet reporting for Vanity Fair, and Passenger Princess, a series in which she learns to drive.
Beef: now less regulated
The US is facing two problems (among many): Very high beef prices, and a summer of worsening food safety regulations. One, solution to the problem? Changing regulations around processing beef, which is just what President Trump said he’d do in a post on Truth Social last week. “I am authorizing legal documents to be drawn in order to allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD,” he wrote in part.
Some advocacy groups expressed concern at the proposed
Some advocacy groups expressed concern at the proposed change. “Allowing uninspected meat to be sold to unwitting consumers is the wrong approach, and risks undermining this country’s reputation for producing the safest meat products in the world,” The Meat Institute, a trade organization representing beef and poultry processors, said in a statement. What does Wonder want?
The food-tech company Wonder focuses on delivery and takeout from restaurants cooked in its ghost kitchens. Its first location opened in 2023, but the company has raised $2.5 billion since 2021. Founder Marc Lore recently announced plans to create AI which would allow anyone to create a restaurant in the blink of an eye. “You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant — AI does — in under a minute,” he said in an interview with Fortune magazine.
The company recently acquired viral New York City restaurant Salt Hank’s, and, this week, the company laid off more than 100 staff members. What does Wonder want? To IPO some time next year, we suspect. And, with more than 150 locations in 10 states and a valuation of nearly $10 billion already, it will likely change the country’s food delivery landscape, and like many publicly traded companies that came before it, probably start to enshittify its product and services once it’s eliminated its competition (But who knows, this is just one beautiful genius’s opinion.)
Unreasonable Hospitality is unreasonable
Once, when I was working as a server in high-ish end restaurant, a guy asked me if he could substitute fries with some kind of plain greens.
I told him I could offer some spinach. “No, I mean greens,” he replied frustrated, with no additional context to what the hell he wanted exactly. This kind of exchange happened, like, six times per shift, and it’s how I came to understand that, actually, the customer is not always right. Sometimes, reader, the customer is annoying and wrong. In his essay for Bon Appétit, James Beard-winning author and writer Adam Reiner explores how restaurant workers tangle with boundaries while remaining hospitable.
Read the essay here.
Source: www.bonappetit.com
