anthony bourdain can finally rip
bc i'm here to do some food writing
Last week of August and the reading is sporadic as I race against the clock to watch 15 films before the month is up, per my August challenges. I’m early days in Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars and only 6% in Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV.1 Prob won’t be able to finish the latter as the library hold is about to run out.
Early September I will be in Berlin and Oslo—pls share some recs. Would really appreciate it!!
At the onset of 2024, with the hope of adding some variety and novelty into my life, I challenged myself to try 52 new restaurants and visit 52 exhibitions.2 Just a few days shy of September, I’ve managed 55 restaurants and 25 visits to various museums and galleries. (I’m really slacking on the latter but whatever.)
For a few months now, I’ve been thinking about food and travel writing. This letter is another challenge because I think it’s about time I got into some food writing. Maybe I’ll even do some food criticism! In full transparency, I did try to read a few restaurant reviews but I wasn’t hooked. In fairness to me, you, and the authors of these reviews, I did not try hard enough or really at all. Hopefully the below is not as trying of an experience for you!
Taking a cue from Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another, I will not be focused on wonderful, delightful, yummy meals because it would be downright cruel of me to tantalize your taste buds like that! Instead, I’m going to focus my attention on some of the details around two of the meals that I have had over the year. Though I do realize that Gellhorn’s conceit with her travel memoir was that readers and friends were not fascinated by descriptions of the sublime or awe-inspiring; rather, they wanted tales of struggle and woe. They wanted to hear stories that would make them happy that they had spent the last few weeks holed up in their dingy apartment surrounded by creature comforts rather than traipsing across the world. Likewise, I’ll aim to share something that will entertain but most likely will miss the mark.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND:
It was a rainy day in Zurich when I had 13 hours to kill and was bereft of both an umbrella and a raincoat. All I had was a cropped jean jacket and let me assure you that is no protection from an onslaught of apocalyptic rains.
I decided to camp out at Babu’s Bakery & Coffeehouse, the Theaterstrasse location, while I got my bearings and acclimated to the city at 7am. Using the QR code to order (ghastly business), I decided on a cappuccino and the salmon bagel. Now, I know what you’re thinking, a bagel is the most boring thing to order and I would emphatically refute that accusation! Firstly, the most boring thing to order would be avocado toast and secondly, I panicked. I looked at this menu and felt overwhelmed because all I wanted was a sandwich from the lunch menu!
It took a long time before I got my order though it is possible, in my haze of jet lag and aloneness, I felt the time moving at a glacial pace.3 I tried to read Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto but was unable to focus. Instead, I eavesdropped on the conversation of the two young women sitting next to me and, in hindsight, I should have just focused on my book because their conversation was rather pedestrian and wholesome.
When my food arrived, I was pleasantly delighted though I must make it clear that this was neither a New York bagel nor a Montréal bagel. It definitely was not a Dunkin’ Donuts bagel but it was also not a Boston bagel. Clearly, it was a Zurich bagel where thin sheets of smoked salmon were married with horseradish, dill, and pickled onions for a meal that made the case that maybe polyamory is the move in a way that articles from The Cut never do. Maybe, more flavors and people is the answer…
But there was something, one thing in particular, that was rather outstanding about this bog-standard bagel: the fried capers. The tiny caper pearls had been crushed and fried in such a way that the already spectacular, salty fruit was enhanced. I found myself obsessed. I wanted to tell the girls next to me to forgo their order, an avocado toast which they were sharing, for the bagel’s fried capers. In the months since that meal, every time I have had a caper, which is often, I’ve yearned for fried capers.
If you’re curious to know how I spent the rest of the day… I went to a bookstore and looked at coffee table books on Lee Miller, Helmut Newton and witches in art before visiting Kunsthaus Zürich, the largest art museum in Switzerland. I then went to the oldest fondue spot in the city and was not impressed.
ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES:
On my layover in Abu Dhabi, I slipped out of the airport and went straight to the Louvre. I had 90 minutes to tour the museum before it closed and I felt stressed and overwhelmed and hungry!
I zipped through the museum. It was shameful behavior from a lifelong student of art history and it was only in the final gallery, where a collection of blue and white Cy Twombly panels were alongside ancient rock fragments adorned with figurative engravings from 2000 BCE, that I really paused and reflected on the important things on life: like, if I could move up my reservation at the Michelin stared restaurant, Erth.
Luckily, I could and I did!
My Uber dropped me off at the wrong spot. An error I wholeheartedly believe was my own but yielded some interesting observations as I found myself in a parking lot surrounded by tall, skinny apartment buildings that were giving just the right mix of Miami and Los Angeles. I was in the middle of a vast parking lot enclosed by Art Deco apartment complexes with jewel-toned panes of glass that shimmered under the orange orb that shined bright, unfettered by clouds. Fighting an urge to panic, worried I was miles away from the restaurant, I walked two long blocks and found myself at the Qasr Al Hosn cultural site where the restaurant was exactly diagonal from little old me.
I walked across the block, feeling quite cool and worldly, ecstatic that I had found the restaurant, but that feeling of coolness quickly evaporated once I reached the restaurant and realized I did not need a reservation. This place was empty. I feared I had made the wrong choice. My worries were ever so slightly abated when I saw that there was one other table occupied by two elegant women in black abayas whose speech was only occasionally punctuated with English. Alas, my two and a half years of Arabic were no use here—their conversation too fast, too smooth!
Nonetheless, I was charmed by the restaurant’s Earth tones, the mixture of concrete with gauzy curtains, and the modern majli style seating. Once seated, I looked at a menu via my phone (still ghastly), and decided on an unusual combination: mini tacos filled with Emirati shrimp and the Margooga ravioli.
The tacos were a delightful surprise: the shrimp were dressed in a mixture of curry paste and coconut milk and the flavors were accented with a squeeze of lime. It was refreshing but not life changing. My life was changed by the Margooga ravioli.
Margooga, a hearty stew, is one of the bedrocks of Emirati cuisine and Erth’s modern interpretation of it nestled the stew-like mixture into ravioli. The Parmesan emulsion added a creaminess to the dish and the asparagus was so fucking fresh and sumptuous, crispy and springy, I enjoyed hearing the snap as I bit into it and vowed to eat more asparagus—I didn’t, but whatever.
After my meal, I sat outside, commandeering a table from the adjacent coffee shop and read Reuven Fenton’s Goyhood—author interview here—while the sky turned black before hightailing it back to the airport for my next flight.
There are more meals I could discuss, like when I had an allergic reaction to ramen in Milan, my pasta mix-up in Toronto, or when I ordered poorly at Sur Mer in Paris. And let’s not forget devouring Miranda July’s All Fours alongside my cacio e pepe, also in Paris. Oh, and what about the food in Egypt?! Oh goodness! Maybe another time because this is getting long, and lunch calls.
RECENT READS:
Truthfully, and selfishly, I have this section of the newsletter for me. I open so many tabs. So many tabs! And I need to close some of them! So, this little endeavor helps me. Plus, I often find lines or quotes that I find interesting and I can’t be taking screenshots of every little thing that tickles my fancy.
Some business things that are on my mind: new Starbucks CEO, hailing from Chipotle, starts next month; Fed Chair Jerome Powell says its time for interest rate cuts; and the founder of Telegram was arrested!
Melissa Broder wrote an introduction to Elaine Kraf’s reissued The Princess of 72nd Street—an experimental little novel that explores themes of femininity and mania—and chatted with Nylon about it. I picked up a copy of the book and am contemplating a book club situation. Who is down?
Broder on creation: “Romantic obsession is the same creative energy that we can channel into art. I think that love is an act of creation, too. But it’s very easy, if you have an active imagination, to treat other human beings as a blank canvas and project whatever we want to see onto them. Or to turn that inwards.”
I’m on the hunt for books that are not Booktube darlings (lol) and found this article where Sophie Kemp shared some books that have informed her work. Lo and behold! She also spotlighted Kraf’s novel. Kemp’s one novel was spotlighted in
’s most recent newsletter where Queen Anna Dorn paired books with perfume.Either last year or earlier this year (time is a construct!), I picked up Maeve Brennan’s collection of non-fiction writing called The Long-Winded Lady. I forgot about the collection but then through my various Internet-meanderings stumbled across this article about the Irish writer’s life. She immigrated to the States at the age of 17 with her family. She did a lot of writing. Mostly non-fiction, the occasional fashion writing, and then some fiction, mainly short stories. She married, divorcing after five years and then, fueled by alcohol and paranoia, went mad. I also want to get my hands on Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker.
I briefly mentioned Theo Von in my Dune and Duner newsletter and he’s back on my mind back because he published interviews with both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the same week.
Early this year, Ramie Targoff published Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance and spoke about the discovery of these women’s writing here:
“I thought of this as a kind of Bloomsbury story for women’s networks in this period,” Targoff says. “I wanted to get at the sense that women were connected to one another, indirectly making one another’s careers possible.”
This Atlantic article is about the nature of meetings in corporate. It’s a rather short piece…
“The typical meeting is a leaky time suck, absorbing people’s attention in a way that cannot be fully measured by simply counting up the total number of hours blocked out for calls…Gloria Mark of UC Irvine has found that workers require an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task after an interruption. By this measure, a 30-minute meeting is, for the typical worker, best thought of as a one-hour detour.”
I figured out affiliate links! If you shop via the link, I get some pennies but I really do appreciate those pennies! <3
Just once in my life I would like to challenge myself to do something really useful!
I checked the time stamp on my photos and it took an hour before I got my bagel lol!
Special shout out to Owen for their edits. Any errors are mine and mine only.
PS - I’m not an audio freak so my bad for the background sounds while I was fidgeting and reading in the voice note.
This reminded me so much of a bagel I got in Bologna, Italy where immediately upon ordering I was so disgusted with myself for getting a BAGEL SANDWICH in ITALY but lo and behold it was quite possibly the best bagel I’d ever had if you could even call it a bagel. Anyways I love how you write and this was so fun to read!!
I was interested, Kiran, in what you had to say about fried capers. Does the frying enhance the flavour of the capers in the way that toasting spices beforehand does with Indian dishes? The reason I ask is because I once tried a recipe for beef stew from the south of France which called for capers, in addition to pearl onions and sliced black olives. The capers didn’t really add anything to the flavour that I could tell, which I figure is probably because (a) capers don’t have much flavour to begin with, and (b) whatever flavour the capers had was overwhelmed by the garlic and pearl onions in the stew, not to mention the dumping of Herbes de Provence I added to the mélange.
I haven’t made the recipe again, mainly because it was such a tedious, finicky job peeling all those rinky-dink little pearl onions, though I’ve since learned that blanching them first makes the peeling a lot easier. The little jar of capers is still sitting in my fridge, and I’d like to try that beef stew recipe again sometime, and I’m wondering if you thought frying the capers beforehand would develop their flavour more. The other option I thought I could try would be simply using more capers and giving them a spin in the food processor with some liquid from the stew before adding them to the pot. On the grounds that it never hurts to ask, I just thought I’d drop this comment. Thanks!