Summer Buns and Supermarket Bans 🟡🟦

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start complaining because I can’t believe I’ve been banned from my own supermarket (okay, I’m not the owner, but you get the point)

Hi there!

What is a newsletter if not a digital space to fill with one's own frustrations? So today, you'll have to hear this story.

A few days ago I walked into a supermarket where I spend hundreds of euros a month (sometimes, a week). I was carrying a shoulder bag with my work laptop inside. The security guard stopped me at the entrance and asked me to leave it in one of those transparent plastic lockers near the door.

I said no. I walked away.

The obvious reading: shrinkage is so bad that stores now treat every customer as a suspect. Cameras, gates, anti-theft tags. None of it works anymore, so now it's the bag's fault.

Maybe the real shift isn't about theft at all. Supermarkets that once served a predictable middle-class clientele now attract a much wider range of customers. Prices converged. Aisles mixed. Security couldn't keep up. So it defaulted to a single rule for everyone. No profiling. No judgment. Just: no bags. Or: no bags for me, in that very moment.

Equal treatment, sure. In the worst possible sense.

Which leaves the real question: when did retail hospitality flip? When did the customer become 80% the variable to be managed and 20% the asset to be kept?

Piero

PS: In short, I wrote to the customer service, and they replied that there was no need to prevent me from entering the supermarket.

PPS: The "Supermarket Karma" entered in my life so bad I'm completely in love with this manga, Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You.

✹Alberto San Juan, as Genaro in the super-fun comedy La Cena - The Dinner (Spain, 2025). Ok, maybe it's just normal-fun, and it contains fascists, and mustaches, and one hell of a naked soldier, but watching that made one bad day a little better.

Greasy fingers and tasty memories

A Madrid photographer has spent a decade collecting the printed paper napkins of Spain's old-school bars. Wafer-thin, useless at cleaning anything, they carry tiny logos, illustrations, boasts about roasted lamb. Felipe Hernandez turned 600 of them into a book, and somehow that's exactly the right thing to do with them.

Servilletas: Spanish Napkins by Felipe Hernández
→ Shortplot: 🇪🇸 🤧 🍽️ 🥘

The Contentious Issue of Food Photos in Menus

There's a podcast I follow where one of the hosts, totally hopeless in the kitchen, has been fighting a quiet battle in favor of photo menus at restaurants. His scale goes from the bare minimum (the flash-lit snapshots at Chinese takeouts) to the gold standard (the sampuru, those eerily perfect plastic food replicas displayed outside Japanese restaurants).

When he brought up this idea to a Masterchef judge, the chef almost assumed he was joking. Then he realized he wasn't.

But think about it. Years of Instagram, food reels, glossy recipe videos... haven't they already rewired us? We skip cookbooks with no photos. We distrust a written recipe that doesn't come with a well-lit step-by-step reel. The image hasn't just won. It's been running the game for a while.

In everyday dining, the host is right. Before we even book a table, we check the restaurant's Instagram hoping to preview the plates. The menu photo is already there, it's just not on the menu.

Fine dining is the last holdout. Photos on the tasting menu would be, to most chefs, an act of barbarism. The final taboo.

But taboos have a way of falling. Even the ones that feel untouchable.

☝️Which Kardashian family member are you? and the other 14 Controversial Dinner Party Questions That Are Actually Fun 🍑Summer Fruit Buns (★recipe)💡This one seems effective: the Dinner System That Eliminated The Mental Load of Meal Planning ⛽️They say your next great meal may be at a gas station (I hope not) 🍪1-2-3 is the perfect formula for baking cookies (★recipe) 🍜Time for some cold soy and chicken 50-30 noodles (★recipe) ☕️A frothy maple syrup loaded coffe for your summer (★recipe) 🌼If you don't like turmeric in cooking, you can use it for painting 🫖8 Teas to taste the world 🐻Everything you need to know about the final season of The Bear, on Friday

'Why Can't You Eat When You Have a Crush?'

Sharanya Deepak / Vittles

Ok, first: I can. Second, I have to stop linking this stuff, but Vittles' essays are so good lately (you could chip in, btw). Take this one: a personal essay about appetite and romantic restraint - how desire and hunger mirror each other, and what it means to finally eat when you decide to stop shrinking. Beautifully written. One of those pieces that stays.

John Early Thinks Internet Food Is Weird

Sam Stone, Elizabeth Renstrom / Bon Appétit

The comedian dissects what he calls the odd eroticism of online food content, on the occasion of his dark comedy Maddie's Secret (trailer). Worth reading for anyone who's ever felt vaguely uncomfortable watching a close-up of butter melting.