Green Lasagna and Cheese Crackers 🧀
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The right place to ask why Oktoberfest starts in September, and how Lo-Fi music snuck into your cooking
Hi there!
On September 19th, Oktoberfest began in Germany, which literally means "October festival." So, naturally, it starts in September.
It reminds me of Russia's October Revolution, year 1917, which by our calendar actually happened in November, because the tsars were still running on a different one.
Two perfectly mismatched facts to sum up the disorientation some of us, me included, are feeling in this high-intensity September.
Have a good week, whatever month you feel like you're in.
Piero
✹Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King, Booker Prize longlisted. "Two characters – a woman using replica food scenes to conjure spirits in her home and a young attendant to a dying King – came to me separately, and I was writing them in two short stories. At a certain point I realised their world, in a way, was the same one and I embarked on the novel".
Closed for Pandemic
I totally forgot about this one. What can I tell you? If you need one Spanish cooking book, you can get this one. José Andrés brings his roots in Spain into this collection, tracing his path from Asturias and Catalunya to elBulli and, eventually, Washington, D.C. Spain My Way gathers the recipes he loves most, from classics like tortilla Española and paella to lesser-known regional dishes like gazpacho caliente (★recipe) and pato con peras. The book is as much about the people and places behind Spanish cuisine as it is about the food itself. At its core, it's an invitation to sit at the table the way Andrés does: with wine, good company, and no rush to leave.
Spain My Way. Eat, Drink, and Cook Like a Spaniard by José Andrés and Sam Chapple-Sokol
→ Shortplot: 🍷 🥩 🥔 🌿
Lo-Fi cooking leaves you nowhere to hide
I started using cliamp almost a year ago, a geeky-style music player that lives in your terminal. By default it has a radio button that pulls from over 30,000 online stations, and the lo-fi channel is the #1 pick for almost any user.
That's what pulled me into thinking about why lo-fi works at all. The genre started as a limitation, tape hiss nobody could afford to strip out, and turned into a choice once people realized they preferred the imperfection to the polish.
The same shift happened at the table. Chefs who trained under nose-to-tail kitchens started plating a single vegetable in the center of an empty plate, dropping the foams and tuiles that once signaled skill. Neither the music nor the food is doing less work. Max Rocha put it plainly: minimal plating leaves nowhere to hide, and a beat built from filtered drums and jazz chords takes more ear than a clean pop mix. What both are rejecting is the performance of effort, the over-produced, over-plated version of trying hard.
What we're actually chasing is a room that doesn't demand anything from us. Music that never competes, food that doesn't ask to be admired before it's eaten. Both trace back to the same fatigue, with hyper-saturated feeds, tasting menus built for photographs, a decade of content engineered to be noticed. What we want now is the opposite of noticed. Something that just holds the room steady while we get on with our lives.
🍽Eater's Best Restaurants in New York City 🧑🍳Food & Wine's Best New Chefs 2026 🫖Tea Is Hot Right Now 🍝You have to tru this Rolos green lasagna (★recipe) 🥐Twisted cinnamon rolls (★recipe)... 🍇Or better, this Figs breakfast bake (★recipe) ☕Many hot water rituals are good for you 🍪Time for some Gluten Free Blueberry Cheesecake Cookies (★recipe) 🧈Smoke your butter 🥩Marinated and frozen meat meals 🪡Tomatoes and berries as boutonnière
We Asked Chefs What They Think of You. Here’s What They Said
Luke Fortney / The New York Times
Restaurant owners on dining in 2026. GLP-1s mean smaller orders and less drinking, one owner quit alcohol entirely after trying Ozempic. Reservations crept earlier, 5 p.m. is the new rush. The tableside spiel is dying, chefs are done explaining menus nobody asked about. AI splits them: back-office yes, guest-facing no. And the protein race is on: Ibérico pork chasing Wagyu's fame, one holdout just wants tofu to win.
In poor taste: how ‘cucina povera’ has become haute cuisine
Madeleine Woon / Russh
Offal, once the poor's leftovers, is now the centerpiece at St. John, Café Cecilia, Fallow. Fergus Henderson built a philosophy on it: use the whole animal. The pattern isn't new, lobster and caviar made the same climb from prison rations to luxury. Massimo Bottura traces it to his grandmother's kitchen, stale bread turned into passatelli, nothing wasted because nothing was spare. But food writer Rachel Roddy pushes back on the romance: "cucina povera" often means famine, not charm, and she prefers calling it what it is, people's cooking, still evolving. Everyone agrees on one thing: badly cooked offal is genuinely disgusting, it takes real skill to make it sing.
