The Practicalities and Pleasures of Homemade Train Food
While on an Amtrak train ride from Chicago to California, I reflected on the sociology of train food and what's happening to us here, in this pivotal era, and our history.
A Tattoo Will Earn a Lifetime Supply of Crab Rangoons at an Avondale Chinese Restaurant
Through Friday, April 17, Friendship Chinese restaurant in Avondale is offering customers a chance to earn free egg rolls and crab rangoon for life. The catch could be considered another perk; you have to get tattooed with the restaurant’s logo.
The Hard Sell of Meghan’s Soft Life
A critical reading of Sussex's new lifestyle and cooking show
Brunch, Decolonized
Indigenous brunch is here in the Twin Cities, being served at community staple and James Beard Award-winning restaurant Owamni.
Inside Ayesha Curry’s journey from home kitchen to budding culinary mogul
An interview with food and lifestyle entrepreneur Ayesha Curry.
For 40 Years and Counting, This Halal Butcher Has Served as a Community Hub in Albany Park
In Albany Park, a hub of Arab and Middle Eastern grocers and restaurants, owner and head butcher Hasan Faraj runs Lebanese Meat Market, a cornerstone of the community here and across Chicago. Since 1984, Faraj has provided zabiha halal-certified lamb, goat, beef, and chicken.
Chicago’s Best Zero-Proof Drinks and Non-Alcoholic Cocktails
Chicago’s Best Butchers and Stores to Buy Meat
A list of the best butchers in Chicago, and places to buy uncommon meats like rabbit, duck, alligator, venison, pheasant, and goose.
In Pilsen, Sleep Walk Chocolateria Presents a Rich and Decadent Story Powered by Tradition
For Día de Muertos, there’s an ofrenda recounting the memories of the deceased loved ones of the employees at Pilsen’s Sleep Walk Chocolateria. “Día de los Muertos is mostly a journey for elder ones that are no longer with us; to keep their memories alive,” says Jorge Fierros, the chocolate program manager at Sleep Walk, a division of Dark Matter Coffee. “The fact that we remember them every year — that keeps their essence alive,” he says. “
A Dominican Legend Known for Her Fried Chicken Rises Once More
Morena’s Kitchen returns with a new location in Humboldt Park three years after the pandemic led to the restaurant’s closure.
Natasha Rothwell takes center stage in her new Hulu series
I interviewed Natasha Rothwell and we spoke about her new Hulu show "How to Die Alone."
Does Chicago’s Only Lebanese Tasting Menu Restaurant Match Michelin’s Hype?
Checking out Beity, a Fulton Market restaurant from chef Ryan Fakih, was meant to be the highlight of my week, for good reason. The Michelin Guide recently recognized the Lebanese gastronomic experience, which opened in early August after two years of anticipation in a food scene with few Middle Eastern fine dining options.
Molokhia Is Comfort to Palestinian Americans in a Time of Profound Grief
As the world grapples with the genocide in Gaza, more and more Arab Americans are finding solidarity around warming bowls of leafy green stew.
Crabber Tia Clark challenges what it means to fish, crab, and hunt as a Black woman
When I first met Tia Clark, she told me she had recently hunted an alligator with a crossbow in the swamps of South Carolina. I saw the Gullah Geechee woman as a role model, a Black woman using her passion and athleticism to pursue a goal I’d been chasing — food sovereignty. For Clark, owner of Casual Crabbing with Tia, it’s like a call from the sea. “I don’t feel I’m choosing this. I feel like this is what I have to do,” she told Andscape.
Black Women Healing Together: A Conversation With Gabrielle Union, Clarkisha Kent And Stephanie Yeboah - Sweet July
These powerhouse leaders unite to break down the experiences Black women uniquely face—including the intersections no one wants to talk about.
Food is no longer a main character on The Bear
When the food stopped being exciting, the show followed suit. Instead of being a show about how cooking and eating bring people together, it became like the same old New American tasting menu fare. It reminded me of the RS Benedict essay “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny,” about the stripping of authentic sexuality and sensuality from film. Except in The Bear, every dish is beautiful and no one is hungry (or horny, for that matter but that’s a different article).
How real is Shōgun?
Because of the fierceness of the warrior class and Japan’s distance from Europe, the Portuguese didn’t have the ability to conquer Japan through force, the way they did in places like Brazil and parts of India. Instead, they used religious conversion and trade to try to accomplish a cultural and economic conversion, exploiting the fractious nature of the warring lords to expand their trade routes. In fact, Japan still bears marks of Portuguese contact.
For Reem Assil, Food Is A Tool For Palestinian Liberation
Many across the world are seeing the horror of the occupation of Palestine for the first time. But for Palestinians like Assil, this reality is one they were born into—a reality shaping both their fondest memories and deepest pains.
“I went to Gaza once in 1994, and that was a pivotal moment in my understanding of my own identity,” Assil says. She was 11 years old, and Israeli forces were dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip after destroying all the infrastructure.
“I went to Gaza once in 1994, and that was a pivotal moment in my understanding of my own identity,” Assil says. She was 11 years old, and Israeli forces were dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip after destroying all the infrastructure.
The revolutionary spirit of Soul Train
Soul Train was an ensemble show, featuring musicians, dancers, comedians, and special guests who came together to put on a grand show. It was glittery and glamorous, but also intimate and personal, with celebrities like Patti LaBelle, Elton John, and Little Richard mingling with the dancers in the audience. Simply put, you couldn’t miss it.
The role of food in the movement for Palestine
For Reem Assil, a Palestinian-Syrian social justice activist, chef, and owner of Reem’s California, food is integral to resistance. She organized for ten years prior to becoming a chef. Community organizing is a key pillar of her culinary philosophy now, with many projects, including her worker-owned co-op restaurants, a groundbreaking commitment in the culinary world where private ownership abounds. “People always say that I was a former organizer turned chef, and I say, ‘No, food just happens to be the tool in my toolkit through which I’m organizing people now,’” Assil tells Mondoweiss.
The lasting impact of The Color Purple
This latest version of The Color Purple is a different work from the Broadway show before it, and the film before that and the book before that, because every adaptation is its own unique piece of art, fulfilling its own purpose and often even appealing to different communities.
The truth about Napoleon and Josephine’s marriage, divorce, and lasting legacy
In the film, the divorce ceremony is attended by luminaries and family, and stresses the couple’s love for each other even through the dissolution of their union.
What is life like in Palestine? These short films offer a glimpse.
That night, we see the residents of the house, a married couple, as they try to have sex. They draw toward each other, softly touching feet and thighs, but they are interrupted by the sound of bombs, which makes their infant cry. The husband then takes a condom, blows it up, and lets it float through the apartment wherever it may land — on the floor, on the bookcase, on their child. We realize this is his compulsion, a coping technique, a way of keeping score of what is taken from them.
To Find Myself, All I Needed Was A Hunting License
My maternal grandmother was a sharecropper—part of a system of indentured servitude for Black people in the South, with only marginally more freedom or wages than chattel slavery. Landowners monitored our behaviors, evicting us for whatever they deemed to be “misconduct.” Large groups of Black people were only permitted on the land for Sunday service, and every part of our existence had to be rented from white landowners, putting us in perpetual debt.
When we’d drive down to Alabama to visit de
When we’d drive down to Alabama to visit de
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