Tomato-maniacs and Watermelon Rind Candies 🍉
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to see CEOs as noodle slurpers, racists as cello players, and Japanese as pizza makers
Hi there!
Who forgot today was publishing day?
Damn, I did.
Piero
✹Felicity Cloake, One More Croissant for the Road, but she's actually out with a new novel The Underdog. Main ingredients: food and dogs.
Tomayto, tomahto
One reason this book is here: tomatoes are largely the vegetable I use more. 70% of the times the ones I buy are not so great but they're like a passepartout in the Mediterranean cooking. What I did not know that this ordinary ingredient became a symbol of collective complaint everywhere, and in Egypt. But why complain, now? Let's try some tomato jam (★recipe), a Tasbikassoulet, as in French stew Egyptian technique (★recipe), a refreshing lentil soup (★recipe) or some Circassian Chicken with Walnut Sauce (★recipe).
Nile Nightshade. An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato by Anny Gaul
→ Shortplot: 💦 🍅 🇪🇬 🥫
When in Beijing, skip Trump, find your noodles
One of the lords of the earth right now, Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang, the man who runs NVIDIA, was caught on camera doing something quietly spectacular. While Donald Trump was visiting China for the kind of ceremonial pomp that no one really enjoys, Huang slipped away to eat a bowl of zhajiangmian (★recipe).
NVIDIA matters in the world of AI the way an oil company mattered in the 1970s. Its GPUs are the engines that train large language models: without them, there's no ChatGPT, no Claude, no image generators, no autonomous driving systems worth the name. Huang didn't build a chip company. He built the infrastructure on which modern intelligence runs.
The restaurant was packed. So Huang ended up outside, on the street, slurping his fermented bean paste noodles in front of cameras and smartphones pointed straight at him.
Now, do I believe this wasn't a PR move? Of course not. It was absolutely a PR move. But it was a good PR move, which is rarer than it sounds.
And there's a detail that I actually respect: the man handled his chopsticks. Anyone who's attacked a bowl of zhajiangmian knows the sauce has no mercy. I would have destroyed that leather jacket in the first 13 seconds.
🍕Surprise, the best pizza in NYC is at a new Japanese restaurant 🇮🇷A Spring-Inspired Tachin with Peas & Greens (★recipe) 🥯I tried to get a recipe from this article about my favorite London Bagel Shop (spoiler: bagel were very good, but zero resemblance to the original) 🎩When Ryan Gosling was proud of using ice in the blender and make his hummus creamier 🍣Sushi Muffins, love them or hate them (★recipe) 🍙Five ways to wrap onigiri (★recipe, sort of) 🍉Watermelon Rind Candies (★recipe) 🥓WTF, Anti-Muslim Scottish-Korean cellist Ryan Williams played with bacon on his shoulders
The feed is fake
Lane Brown / The New York Magazine (via MSN)
Most of what trends in food online follows the same logic described in this article. A clipping campaign costs one dollar per thousand views. The algorithm reads the spike as genuine interest. Real people start cooking the same dish. The kohakutou, the butter boards, the Dubai chocolate, the "authentic" grandma recipe with 40 million views... you have no way of knowing if anyone actually discovered them, or if someone manufactured the discovery. Your feed doesn't show you what people are eating. It shows you what someone paid to make look like what people are eating.
