The big Hail Fellow Well Met guy is just unspeakable. I'd leave a room if he entered it.

It's fascinating to watch as a microcosm.

she has her own channel now called 'dessert person' and it's great

@Yogarfield. Whats was the whole BA explosion?

Right. He is so needlessly aggressive and inquisitorial.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kelseyweekman/brad-leone-bon- appetit-botulism-scandal

Whoa, he's got some unsafe hygience practices.

THAT'S the racist brownface picture? I would just assume it's two Guido douchebags.


Anyway, the hipster tag is much deserved. In my city, these goddamn hipster kitchens are taking over. They actually call themselves "food labs" and it's nothing but a rotating limited menu of overpriced EXPERIMENTAL vegan crap like BBQ chickpea pockets. $5 breakfast sandwich that's nothing more than half a pocket with one hardboiled egg and a slice of cheese (their breakfast sandwich is oddly their only non-vegan item).

They're denser than Starbucks in some parts of the city. I swear it's like they have a deal with the local government where they get to replace any food place that shuts down with a FOOD LAB. People I know at a local university are pissed when their kickass food court (with half a dozen made to order stations, and giant Grab-N-Go section) got replaced with one of these goddamn FOOD LABS and now their only choices are $5 hardboiled eggs or $8 chickpeas or $6 kids menu peanut butter sandwich.

Ordering itself is an ordeal. There is constantly a giant line because the one hipster kid taking orders (even during peak lunch hour) has a speech for you. Every single order, they force you to listen to an entire spiel about which Ecuadorian valley their free trade coffee is from, or a lengthy description of their supply chain supporting local farms. It's straight out of the Portlandia "Chicken" or "Around the World in 80 Plates" skits.

One time I was in a hurry and interrupted the pitch to just place my order and walk over to the pickup station. I had to do this THREE TIMES because he kept going back into the pitch for their new "rawism approach to vegan" falafel instead of putting my order in. For a moment it seemed like he was going to go to the manager to report someone refusing to sit through the mandatory timeshare pitch.

My lunch break walk time has quintupled in the past couple years because every decent nearby lunch place has been replaced by these FOOD LABS. I hate them with the raw fury of thousand suns.

and jesus, yes on Brad.

He's like a (food) lab fused together the worst parts of hipster and bro culture.

Brad keeps telling people to make recipes that are gonna give them botulism and I find it hilarious https://www.gawker.com/media/its-botulism-with-brad-leone-bon-appe tit-testing-health-standards

I'm not really going to begrudge food hipsterdom per se... Americans, historically, adopt food trends easily and have done so since the very beginning. The British are the ones who seem to really object to the passage of time.

It's actually one of the few good things about us. Pretty much every American is open to trying to new foods, experimenting with new processes and incorporating new things in this specific field. For some reason, it's offensive to have change on literally any other topic, but Americans just fucking collectively love and admire and cherish novel foods.

It's not a bad thing.

Unfortunately, that has also led the "chef" as the last macho job you can have while also adjacent to the arts, and so there's also a really heavy imperative to be aggressive and pushy in that role. It's the only sort of creative job you can have while also being perceived as a "real American" by the right. It's arbitrary.

Food lab, is that like a food library?

Hipster food can be fucking awesome. We have a little farm to table hipster place here that makes the best food I've encountered in North America; it's always changing, super tasty, and just *interesting*.

Oh no, I had to wait for a few seconds to learn something.

That said, I bet the intersection of food hipsters and New York assholes would be a pretty toxic place. I don't know what city Nominal is in, but my vague impression is east coast. Everything being so crushingly toxic and depressing sure would make the food terrible too.

Oh god that botulism article.

"Nitrates are for sheeple, maaaaayun! Cure your meat with all natural methods!"


I'm surprised they didn't COOK UP the term "Paleo preservatives".

Also fuuuuuck New Yorkers

Holy shit, didn't know that. I only saw a couple of his vids and thought he was a goofball at worst.

@nom Yeah but that photo doesn't look so hot when you literally don't pay staff that are minorities and tell the white employees to not discuss pay.

After watching it: Jesus, these people all hate each other. What a nightmare.

Any job where a boss tells you not to discuss pay, it's time to start sending out the resume.

"After watching it: Jesus, these people all hate each other. What a nightmare."

Not a food industry folk, but a ton of my friends are and I've spent a lot of time in high-end kitchens. There's a difference between the professional and necessary hate that happens in the kitchen, and whatever the fuck happens in a Conde Naste youtube channel kitchen.

You would figure with all the constant kuh-RAZY "food lab" experiments going on, that they would constantly be offering up new concoctions with a few hits out of the park.

But every time I look at the menu, it's the same bland three or four lunch offerings: some variation of a chichpea/beet sandwich.

For fuck's sake, their best item for the past 10 years has been the breakfast sandwich, and it's just a hardboiled egg, slice of cheese, slice of tomato, and salt.

Ope, this was meant as a reply to the thread above.

Nitrates are bad for you, artificiality added or through loopholes like using celery powder.

Not as bad as constantly getting botulism though.

Best bet is just to avoid cured/processed meat products as much as possible.