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Eater launched longform features this year, but beyond our own productions, there's a lot of amazing stuff to read out there on the rest of the internet. These fifteen stories—including tales of dueling pizza billionaires, a poisoning grandmother, a Paula Deen celebrity cruise, Chicago's most notorious jazz club, being eaten alive, and twenty-four hours in the life of a New Orleans dive bar—are some of the best long reads of the year.
Paula Deen and the Martyrdom Industrial Complex
Taffy Brodesser-Akner / Matter
"Paula fast-tracks friendship, so that when you encounter her you feel that something special had happened there. So many of the guests identified Paula as a friend, and within this friendship's boundaries is paying for this cruise, $1,000 more than it costs to go on this same cruise minus Paula Deen."
"Paula fast-tracks friendship, so that when you encounter her you feel that something special had happened there."
Nobody writes profiles quite like Taffy Brodesser-Akner. A week of cruise-ship immersion with Paula die-hards—including four fleeting interactions with the woman herself—results in a meticulously constructed picture of the extraordinary work involved in building an empire out of disgrace.
Life and Death on the Avocado Trail
"'They told me right away, 'We are from Los Zetas,'' she recalled recently in her store. With those words, her husband, who had been cheerfully chatting with a cook, went silent. He leaned against a shelf and listened intently. 'They asked me, 'Are you scared? You're going to die.' I'm here, but in that moment you just believe you're going to die.'"
Every year Denisse Chavez drives nearly 5,000 miles from her home in the Bronx to Puebla and back, passing through some of Mexico's most dangerous areas to get the right chiles and herbs to stock her restaurant pantry. Then she got taken hostage by a drug cartel.
My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers
"When I get cold standing outside in winter, I imagine I'm in a stuffy attic on a hot summer afternoon, and think about how I would give anything to feel cool—a tactic that can make me feel better for up to a second. Now I try to imagine a situation in which I would feel happy and excited to receive these mozzarella sticks. The only thing that comes to mind is: wandering in desert after multiple foodless days."
Gawker's most balls-out writer (and one half of their magnificent restaurant-reviewing team) embarks on a Simpsonian plan to take down the unlimited-appetizer apparatus at a Brooklyn TGI Friday's. As with all great heroic tales, hubris results in undoing. But it also results in the most bravura instance of gonzo journalism this year—if not this millennium.
The End of Food
Lizzie Widdicombe / The New Yorker
"Rhinehart's background makes it easier to understand some of his guilelessness, as well as his devotion to evidence-based thinking. Organic-food nuts remind him of himself as a believer. "Everyone's like, 'The natural, organic way is the best.' And it sounded a lot like fundamentalist Christianity,' he told me. When I asked how his loss of faith had changed him, he said, 'I guess after that I've always been a skeptic.'"
When twenty-five-year-old Rob Rhinehart took food to its maximally efficient conclusion, he wound up with Soylent, a perfect-nutrition meal replacement that may or may not change the entire world. Either way, it apparently tastes sort of like a weird protein shake.
"When you cleaned behind the booths you'd find pint bottles and half-pint bottles of Bacardi rum that were empty, because people would sneak in their own liquor and drink in the booths, and then it would slide out and fall between the seats."
An Oral History of the Green Mill
Patrick Sisson / Chicago Reader
"We're trying to clean up the paintings, and inside the frames we found 90 syringes. 'Cause all the jabbers would jab in the booth and hide the needles in the frames. I was cleaning out syringes. When you cleaned behind the booths you'd find pint bottles and half-pint bottles of Bacardi rum that were empty, because people would sneak in their own liquor and drink in the booths, and then it would slide out and fall between the seats."
This venerable Chicago jazz bar is known almost as well for its seedy 107-year history as it is for the amazing acts to which it's played host. A sprawling cast—current and former bartenders, managers, performers, and owners—recounts the sort of tale best told through oral history: passionate, violent, speculative, richly boozy.
Gumbo Paradise
"During the five years I spent living in New Orleans, and the decade that has passed since, this is what I've come to love about gumbo: It is a dish in and of the state of Louisiana: its waters, its smokehouses, its rice mills, and its backyard gardens. It is everything to everybody."
A wide-ranging paean to Louisiana's most iconic food, this is equal parts culinary history lesson, evocative small-town travelogue, and disarmingly frank personal essay. (Disclosure: I was an editor at Saveur while this story was in production, but I had pretty much nothing to do with its development.)
Consumed
"The thought of flesh-eating had been trailing me around Manhattan for days, and now it alighted on this glass case like a beautiful morpho butterfly, utterly transformed."
"The thought of flesh-eating had been trailing me around Manhattan for days, and now it alighted on this glass case like a beautiful morpho butterfly, utterly transformed. I looked at the python skeleton and saw, with sudden clarity, that yes, there is something compelling about the idea of being consumed, something that skirts the divide between obscene and sublime."
This isn't exactly traditional food writing: In a beautifully constructed, fascinatingly digressive essay, Richardson writes not about eating, but being eaten, and humanity's simultaneous fascination with and terror of being devoured.
My Grandma the Poisoner
"Three or four times we rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night because I was having trouble breathing. But it wasn't until my 30s that I connected all this and it dawned on me that sleeping for three days is not normal or OK, and that the only times I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, I was at Grandma's."
Nothing says "food is love" quite like lacing cookies with Vitamin A and laxatives so your visiting family can't leave. But it gets a lot heavier than that in this strange, terrible, wonderful essay.
Roy Choi's Master Plan
Jay Caspian Kang / California Sunday
"Every Korean man I know who’s under 40 listens exclusively to rap and identifies, at least in part, with black and Mexican American culture. Roy Choi, then, is not unique—he is the ggangpae, the street kid, in all our families. The portrayal of him in the press as an anomaly, as someone who doesn’t fit the usual Asian American narrative, actually says less about Choi than it does about how narrow and sclerotic that narrative can be."
"Every Korean man I know who’s under 40 listens exclusively to rap and identifies, at least in part, with black and Mexican American culture. "
This isn't so much a profile of Roy Choi as it is a full excavation of his character, a fluid profile that locates him within contemporary American food culture, but also within other milieus: Los Angeles, Korean-American kids, and smart, angry, creative people in general.
Can Whole Foods Change the Way Poor People Eat?
"'Whole Foods is great, said Brown. 'It make you feel … it put you in a right perspective of yourself being healthy.' What she liked about Whole Foods, it turned out, were the same things that middle-class people liked."
When Whole Foods opened in Detroit, the grocery chain was hoping to prove the power of enlightened shopping and eating to fight both obesity and elitism. McMillan, one of the most fluent and engaging writers on class and poverty, presents her thorough and nuanced take on the plan's successes and failures.
Diary of a 24-Hour Dive Bar
"'Ah, turn that off! It's too early for that mess,' Jim, the morning bartender, hollers at J.L., who quickly swats the jukebox with his cane, silencing Patsy Cline's warble. 'If somebody comes in this early wanting to hear music, well, we'll just tell 'em it's broke.'"
"'Ah, turn that off! It's too early for that mess,' Jim, the morning bartender, hollers at J.L., who quickly swats the jukebox with his cane, silencing Patsy Cline's warble."
Brothers III is one of the great treasures of New Orleans: it's been open since the late 1960s, and it almost never closes. This impressionistic portrait of of a single day in its steady stream of oddballs, old-timers, partiers, and hard-drinkers reads like a Tom Waits song come to life.
Food and Loathing in Charleston
Nathan Thornburgh / Roads and Kingdoms
"I will say this about the era of the asshole chef: at least you knew immediately who the famous ones were. They were the assholes, hard to ignore. Now, it can be difficult to tell who the real heavies are."
All a journalist needs to do to get a good story out of Cook It Raw, the world's premier concentration of artisanal, free-range earnest culinary testosterone, is show up with an open notebook. What makes Thornburgh's account an exceptional one is his eye for emotional detail, and a relentless awareness of himself as simultaneously part of and separate from the spectacle.
Masala Dosa to Die For
Rollo Romig / The New York Times
"He regarded the room with mild amusement, bowed politely and walked behind his desk, where he faced a portrait of a popular guru and folded his hands for a moment of prayer. With him was Ganapathi Iyer, his oldest friend, and a personal assistant and a valet. We all sat but the valet, who stood ready with a glass of water the instant his boss coughed. Nobody relaxed."
The ultra-rich, ultra-influential founder of one of India's most successful restaurant chains probably hired a man to kill the husband of a woman he was interested in. He's also constructed a life for himself where his thousands of employees look upon him almost as a god. One of the most engaging, most unexpected profiles of the year.
A Toast Story
John Gravois / Pacific Standard
"She called the shop Trouble, she says, in honor of all the people who helped her when she was in trouble. She called her drip coffee 'guts' and her espresso 'honor.' She put coconuts on the menu because of the years she had spent relying on them for easy sustenance, and because they truly did help her strike up conversations with strangers. She put toast on the menu because it reminded her of home."
Gravois traces the artisanal toast craze to its probable origins: an itsy-bitsy coffee shop in an out-of-the-way neighborhood in San Francisco, whose proprietor uses it as the anchor for an idiosyncratic created community, which she then uses to anchor herself to the world.
Twilight of the Pizza Barons
Bryan Gruley / Bloomberg Businessweek
"It's a fluke that the chains emerged from the same corner of Michigan at roughly the same time more than 50 years ago. Yet, in different ways, Domino's and Little Caesars changed the way Americans eat pizza, helping to make it one of the country's most popular foods. The pizza barons were great at selling pies. Now one wants to save Detroit, and the other wants to save everything else."
The guy who founded Domino's and the guy who founded Little Caesars both got really, really rich on delivery dough. What they've done with their wealth—and their lives—couldn't have been more different.