No-Cook Recipes and Other Life Upgrades 💡
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start upgrading your life with kinky cannibalism, expensive music, imperialist sandwiches, Peruvian classics and wartime pizza
Hi there!
I recently made a small but revelatory upgrade to my music setup—swapping AirPods for In-Ear Monitors and the standard Spotify streaming for FLAC files.
The parallel to food hit me immediately.
We live in an age where everything is instantly available: every cuisine delivered to your door, every song streamed in seconds. But convenience often masks compromise.
That first spoonful of proper bouillabaisse (★recipe) in Marseille, after years of seafood soups masquerading as the real thing, teaches you what you've been missing. The same shock comes when you hear a song you've known for years suddenly reveal details buried beneath compression algorithms.
Yes, there are trade-offs. Cables instead of wireless freedom. Higher costs. More intentional choices. But some upgrades liberate rather than burden.
Morning workouts instead of rushed coffee. Evening books instead of endless scrolling. Better wine, less frequently. Proper espresso over pod convenience. Music that demands—and rewards—your attention. Oh, even no-cook recipes when it's too hot to light the stove.
Life becomes a series of conscious edits: what deserves the premium version of your time, money, and focus? The question isn't whether you can afford the upgrade. It's whether you can afford to keep accepting the shadow when the real thing awaits.
What upgrade will you choose tomorrow?
Piero
PS: this week's upgrade is the "Omnivore's Dilemma" section comeback. I'm not lying, the new inspiration comes from a recurring set of odd questions asked during almost every episode of a smart podcast about football called La Riserva.
PPS: The Bear 4 is here. Where were we at? Well, just remember that, almost like the famous Schrödinger's cat, this week Jeremy Allen White is both Carmy Berzatto and Bruce Springsteen at the same time.
✹Navessa Allen, Caught Up: Into Darkness Trilogy. Ok, TikTok finally made a bestseller of a dark romance novel with elements of voyeurism, stalking and play club kink. There's also a hilarious food-fetish dialogue:
“Taylor swirled the dregs of her coffee. “Well, I did get a kind of weird PPV request from a sub and was hoping to get your perspectives on it.”
“Weird how?”[...].
“Weird like, they want a video of me naked, covered in olive oil and herbs, with vegetables spread out around me,” Taylor said. “They even requested that I put an apple in my mouth and baste myself.”
Ryan raised their brows. “Baste, like . . . baste?”
Sharing and caring
Laurie Woolever's memoir is a journey into finding one's place. It offers an honest look at her experiences, from navigating New York City to working with figures like Mario Batali (🐽) and Anthony Bourdain (😢). Laurie is a relevant voice as a journalist and cookbook author, who also chronicled Bourdain's life in Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. Her book shares lessons on workplace dynamics, addiction, and self-discovery. It's a read for anyone who has sought their path in a complex world. It could be the biography you bring with you this summer. Quick quote: "I am in control of almost nothing beyond how I choose to care for (and feed) myself and others".
Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever
→ Shortplot: 🍷 🦪 🥖 🍰
Welcome to the World's Best Restaurant
Among the signature dishes are the teppanyaki-style lomo saltado, which reinterprets a Peruvian classic with Japanese techniques. And the nikkei ceviche, where leche de tigre meets Japanese dashi broth. Other iconic plates include squid ramen with Amazonian chorizo and short rib braised for 48 hours, showcasing attention to raw ingredients and creativity in elevating rare components.
Lima's Maido restaurant is recognized as one of the world's best thanks to its nikkei cuisine, a fusion of Japanese precision and Peruvian flavors. Chef Mitsuharu "Micha" Tsumura, Japanese-born and Lima-raised, has combined culinary techniques learned in Japan and the United States with ingredients from the Andes, Amazon, and Peruvian coast.
This approach just led Maido to first place in The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025, transforming the venue into - get ready for the standard press release definition - a journey that tells the multicultural identity of contemporary Peru.
I like scraping the web after these awards. Here you have:
- a 2023 review with images and video
- a 55 seconds video with some impressive table-side service
- the podcast World of Mouth with chef Tsumura
- his first Japanese knivesThe
A few years ago, I wrote here that we should stop looking for the signs of the future in New York City: yes, the restaurant business is Major League level there, but the most interesting food bits are coming (at least) from Asia and South America. I've found an echo of that in one of Chef Tsumura's recent interviews, when he says: "Peru isn’t Latin America’s food capital because of just five haute cuisine restaurants. You can also eat well in the streets and marketplaces".
It's not the restaurant, it's the ecosystem.
💣How a Papa Johns pizza surge near the Pentagon tipped off social media before Trump’s decisive Iran strike ❄️Inside the World’s Most Remote Dining Restaurant (video) 😴The Viral “3–2–1 Method” Is An Expert-Approved Sleep Hack 🥘What do I do with all of this zucchini??? 🐳Free Moby music to empower your creative projects 👶🏼The age you peak at everything 🥵43 more no-cook ideas (★recipes) 🌮Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap Supreme Became an Unlikely Muse for Chefs 🇮🇷Iranian Food? It's Great (★recipe) 🧅Onion Sandwich? (★recipe)
The Princess and the Pambazo
Talia Lavin and David Swanson / The Sword and the Sandwich
The pambazo (★recipe), a beloved Mexican street food, is tied to a charming, though likely untrue, legend about its creation by Empress Carlota's Hungarian chef. This iconic dish, with its blend of flavors and colors, symbolizes the fusion of Old and New Worlds. Despite the dubious origin story, the pambazo remains a celebrated Mexican staple, intrinsically linked to Carlota's complex legacy. (BTW, this newsletter is gold!)
