Food news antipasto

Boston-area chef and restaurateur Barbara Lynch, who came under fire last year after workers accused her of abuse, has closed several of her restaurants and is selling others to former employees, according to WBUR. Gone are Menton, Sportello and Drink in Fort Point, and two locations on the South End, The Butcher Shop and Stir, are in contracts to be sold. This leaves Lynch with three restaurants remaining: No. 9 Park on Beacon Hill,  B&G Oysters in the South End, and The Rudder in Gloucester. The three restaurants that are closing were three months behind in their rent, and the company’s COO said that negotiations with the landlord had broken down.

Toxic restaurant culture is not a new phenomenon, although it has been thrust into the spotlight due to high-profile instances like the Barbara Lynch example. Chef and cookbook author Ravneet Gill experienced bullying and mistreatment when she worked in professional kitchens, and she told The Independent that she quit the hospitality industry because of it. Pivoting away from professional kitchens, she turned to writing cookbooks, hosting Junior Bake-Off, and starting Countertalk, “a platform that aims to promote healthy working environments.”

I didn’t see this news when it was published late last year, but an EYB Member clued me in to it this week. Sally Darr, a self-taught cook whose tiny NYC restaurant La Tulipe attracted celebrities (including James Beard and Julia Child) in the 1980s, passed away in November at 100 years old. Darr’s career path is fascinating, including stints as a recipe tester for Gourmet and working with Jacques Pepin on the Time-Life Foods of the World series. One of her chefs, Arnold Rossman, said this about Darr:  “She was insufferable. Obstinate. Unrelentingly perfectionist. And she was brilliant.” Her niece noted that when Darr passed away, she had 10 pounds of butter in her freezer.

TikTok food trends range from the brilliant to the downright bizarre. If your enjoy watching the latter, head over to The Standard, where Joanna Taylor provides a rundown of 2023’s craziest TikTok food and drink trends. Since I’m not on TikTok, the only one I knew about was the “girl dinner” trend. Other trends included the cottage cheese and mustard diet, Watertok, and chopped sandwiches. None of the these trends captivated me in the same way that the Dalgona coffee trend of 2020 did, but that was quite a different time.

Several years ago we profiled an avid cook and cookbook collector, Dianne Ross, who had to adjust her cooking after she became blind literally overnight. While she adapted by having her husband read the recipes in her 1,000+ cookbook collection, there is a new resource available to visually-impaired cooks in the U.S. through the Library of Congress. Following the examples of counterparts in Canada and the UK, the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, began reproducing Braille books and magazines on-demand from its collection in June of 2022. Users of the service can receive up to five books per month and one of the most popular items since the service started has been – you guessed it – cookbooks.