Food news antipasto

When Danny Bowien started Mission Chinese Restaurant, he was looking to create a working environment free from the abuses he experienced as a young chef. From the outside, it seemed that Bowien was achieving his goal of having a restaurant geared toward healthy employee relations, but a Grub Street investigation uncovered a toxic work environment flourished instead. Recently, Bowien admitted to some of the problems and issued a public apology for allowing misconduct to occur.

The pandemic has drastically increased the number of meals people make at home, and many people have turned to meal kits delivered to their door as a way of supplementing their normal routine or even to help them learn how to cook. Enterprising restaurants have capitalized on the trend as a way to keep afloat during this trying time. Most meal kit costs run slightly higher than just buying the ingredients individually, but some restaurants have customers digging deep into their wallet, including NYC’s Eleven Madison Park. The restaurant, which regularly ranked at or near the top of world restaurant rankings, is offering a meal kit that costs $275 USD – and you still have to do the actual cooking.

You might not be celebrating Halloween with a large party, but that’s no excuse not to dress up and have fun. If you are planning to wear a costume but are having difficult deciding on an outfit, here is a new one to consider: going as a box of wine. Franzia, the maker of the world’s most popular boxed wine, has added foam costumes to its online store.

With the advent of high quality non-alcoholic drinks like Seedlip’s range of beverages, people who don’t drink alcohol (or who want to drink less) can now enjoy complex, delicious cocktails. The trend is growing and another beverage will soon be hitting stores in Britain and Ireland: alcohol-free Guinness. The product will be initially be available at Waitrose and Morrisons, but you’ll have to wait until next spring to try it on tap.

There is so much to learn in the world of cheese that it sometimes seems like you need a degree to understand it all. If you live in Australia, now you can now earn such a degree, as the world’s first privately-funded cheese school opened this week in central Victoria. The school is led by French cheesemaker Ivan Larcher, a man known as “The Cheese Whisperer”. The school itself was the brainchild of retired lawyer Alison Lansley and Australian cheesemakers Carla Meurs and Ann-Marie Monda. “We used to have many cheese factories across Australia. Those skills have been lost. We want to bring the skill, knowledge and artistry of cheesemaking to Australia and lift the entire industry to another level,” Meurs said in an interview.