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      What ‘The Bear’ Gets Right About Chicago

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      The show celebrates a kind of ambition — humane and independent — that’s often neglected by Hollywood. Maybe that’s why the setting is so important.FX’s “The Bear,” now in its second season, is about grief and family and food, but there’s something else there, too. Its protagonist, Carmen Berzatto, is an accomplished chef who has worked in the vaunted kitchens of restaurants like Noma, the French Laundry and Eleven Madison Park. When the show began, he had come home to Chicago after the death of his brother, who left him a struggling shop selling a local staple, Italian beef sandwiches. Carmy could have run the place like any of the hundreds of modest lunch counters in the city, or else he could have sold it and angled to return to the world of fine dining. Instead, we watched him attempt a third thing, turning the business into a new, forward-thinking restaurant. This is the other stuff the show is about: ambition, and Chicago, and the freedom the nation’s third-largest city can offer to follow your ambitions on your own terms.“The Bear” is among relatively few TV shows that truly lean into a Chicago setting: In addition to copious shots of elevated trains and city skylines, there are nods to local culture hallmarks ranging from the obvious (Scottie Pippen, Bill Murray, Vienna Beef hot dogs) to the deeper cuts (Harold Ramis, Pequod’s Pizza, Margie’s Candies). Some of network television’s most popular procedural shows are set here — “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago P.D.” — but like so many Chicago stories on TV, they use the city for its unmarked, adaptable qualities: It is a metropolis big enough to accommodate any type of person or story, big enough that viewers do not expect to be offered quaint local color, and yet not culturally defined in the American mind in the ways New York City and Los Angeles are. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation, happy to serve as a kind of median city. Insofar as it does have a national reputation, it is as an unpretentious workhorse of a place: the “City of the Big Shoulders,” the city Nelson Algren compared to loving a woman with a broken nose. (“You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”) The sort of place a restless, plucky Midwesterner like Carmy would leave in order to pursue his ambitions, hoping to prove something to everyone back home — and the sort of place he would return to, stoic and remote, to dole out unglamorous sandwiches from a broken-nosed kind of shop.Their ambitions revolve around the excellence of the work itself.Leave it to a Chicagoan like me to note that there are, in fact, more than 20 restaurants in the city with at least one Michelin star. But “The Bear” captures something real about the city’s dining culture — and, more broadly, what you might call the geography of ambition. In one scene in the second season, Sydney Adamu, the woman who is now chef de cuisine for the new restaurant Carmy hopes to start, is discussing the menu with him when she notices his old chef’s uniform from New York, embroidered with his initials. He sees her looking at it. “New York — lame, right?” he says. Sydney replies: “I want to hate it. Like, don’t get me wrong, I do. But it looks sick, and I bet it felt really good wearing it.” It did, Carmy acknowledges; nobody here is going to deny New York’s cultural domination. But he goes on to talk about having earned Michelin stars, saying that his brain raced right past the joy of it to dread — that it felt imperative to keep them at all costs. “New York,” here, signifies a heightened awareness of status and image, stress and precarity, ruthlessness dressed as sophistication.And Chicago, for “The Bear,” is depicted — accurately — as a place where the goal is not necessarily to win status or acclaim so much as to create something great and original, ambitious without pretense, committed to excellence for its own sake rather than prestige or fame. This is the kind of chef we see Carmy transforming into, and the kind of chef we’re shown surrounding him. When Sydney, planning for the new business, visits other restaurants seeking guidance, she finds people glad to assist; at the well-regarded eatery Avec, she gets crucial advice from the real-life restaurateur Donnie Madia, playing himself. The show casts the city’s restaurant culture as sophisticated but warm, human. It continually suggests that once you abandon the ladder-climbing it associates with the coasts, ambition can be more about playing the game on your own terms or not playing it at all — pursuing your ambition without the brutal expense or atomizing ultracompetitiveness of places closer to the cultural spotlight.Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation.In another second-season scene, Sydney has a video chat with the pastry chef Marcus, who has gone to Copenhagen to hone his skills. She has been reading “Leading With the Heart,” a book by the former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski — a gift from her father. Her offhand summary of its lessons is a little dismissive, but Marcus, a former athlete, gets it: The team “kept drilling,” he says, grinding slowly toward excellence. Marcus receives his own lesson about ambition when he asks Luca, the chef he’s studying under, how he got so good. Luca replies that after working with a superior cook, he realized he wasn’t the best and wasn’t ever going to be the best. He came to see this as a good thing: “I could take that pressure off myself. And the only logical thing to do was to try and keep up with him.” At some point, he says, doing great things is less about skill and more about being open “to the world, to yourself, to other people.”This kind of ambition — humane and independent — is often neglected in Hollywood portrayals of driven people, but “The Bear” nails it. It’s something you encounter in the real Chicago, too. This really is a city where people are able to do unique and forward-looking things with food; where comic actors are funny in person long before they are (or aren’t) pulled to the coasts to be funny on camera; where large and underrecognized shares of Black and Latino cultural and business leaders have done their work; where there are rich and idiosyncratic scenes in theater and music and art and literature that seem to thrive regardless of whether any national spotlight will ever tilt in their direction.In “The Bear,” even in the tense run-up to the restaurant’s opening, you don’t see Sydney or Marcus burnishing their egos or waiting for people to recognize how special they are. Their moments of triumph come not from critics or crowds but from the people around them: Marcus’s presenting a dish named in memory of Carmy’s brother, or Sydney’s lovingly preparing an omelet for Carmy’s beleaguered sister, Natalie, and then lingering, vulnerable, to see how it goes over. Their ambitions revolve around the work itself and the people with whom they do it. Carmy struggles his way toward the same sensibility, even when it scares him. Cooking, he admits by the season’s end, has, for him, been about routine and concentration, about single-mindedly pursuing a goal — an approach that helped him avoid the messiness of human connection, hiding his vulnerability behind the armor of his own accomplishments.Carmy went back to Chicago because he had to. He stays because he wants to. For him, and for Sydney, and for Marcus, the point is to do a great thing, for its own sake, alongside people you care about, without much concern for image or status. “The Bear” seems to see this as a very Chicago thing. Resilient but vulnerable, ambitious but sincere, sophisticated but real, somehow too subtly original to be easily defined in the American mind — that feels like my city to me, too.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Chuck Hodes/FXNicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about celebrity travel shows. More

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      Kristen Kish Chosen as Next ‘Top Chef’ Host

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      Kish, who will bring considerable TV experience to the role, succeeds Padma Lakshmi, who hosted the show for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kristen Kish, an acclaimed chef who won the 10th season of “Top Chef” more than a decade ago, will return as the next host of the long-running culinary competition, Bravo announced on Tuesday. She will succeed Padma Lakshmi, who said last month she would be departing the show, which she had hosted for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kish, who has hosted several other food-related series, will take the reins for Season 21, which the network has said will take place in Wisconsin. She will join the food writer Gail Simmons and the chef Tom Colicchio at the judges table.“‘Top Chef’ is where I started my journey — first as a competing chef, then a guest judge and now as host, I have the honor of helping to continue to build this brand,” Kish said in a statement. “It feels like coming home.”Kish, who was adopted from South Korea and grew up in Kentwood, Mich., attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. She then spent a decade working at restaurants in Boston, rising through the ranks to become the chef de cuisine at Barbara Lynch’s crown jewel restaurant, Menton.As The New York Times reported in 2014, Lynch had encouraged Kish and another young chef from her restaurant group to compete on “Top Chef.”Kish won Season 10, and has become a familiar face on the show in recent years as a guest judge. She has also opened her first restaurant, released a cookbook and has hosted or starred in several shows including “36 Hours,” a Travel Channel show that is a collaboration with The Times; “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend,” and “Restaurants at the End of the World.”Ryan Flynn, an NBCUniversal senior vice president, said in a statement that Kish was “the perfect host for the next chapter of ‘Top Chef’ as we take on a new region of the country we haven’t explored.”Both Colicchio and Simmons published posts on Instagram Tuesday afternoon applauding the choice of Kish.“She is an excellent chef, brings a world class perspective and most importantly, having been a past contestant and judge, she knows what it takes to win @bravotopchef,” Colicchio wrote.“Psyched beyond words to have her pull up that seat at Judges’ Table,” Simmons said.In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Kish added that she was already “overwhelmed by the amazing outpouring of support by the fans of ‘Top Chef’ embracing this new chapter.”“I am eager to get started!” she said.Maya Salam contributed reporting. More

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      Prue Leith’s 2,200-Mile Road Trip From California to Florida

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      The “Great British Baking Show” judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of America. Is her 2,200-mile drive a showstopper or a technical challenge?​​Last fall, my husband and I set our hearts on renting an R.V. for a road trip from Los Angeles to Florida. We imagined picnicking on mountaintops in New Mexico, sleeping under the stars in Texas and barbecuing prawns (the R.V. would come with a grill, of course) on a Mississippi levee. In the end, our 2,200-mile American journey ended up being memorable, but for none of those reasons.“We can’t accept anyone over 70 with a British driver’s license,” insisted the woman on the phone. I’m 83, but in my head I’m a sprightly 60, and my husband, John, is 76. Nobody had warned us about this potential obstacle. If they had the same age cutoff for Americans, I thought, the R.V. business would collapse.We called another company. Their rep said he’d never heard of any age restriction. “No problem,” he said. “We’ve got the perfect R.V. for you.” Except it was 45 feet long. The thought of parking something the size of a London bus was too much, even for my gung-ho husband.Common sense prevailed, and we rented a Ford Explorer.New MexicoSalsa and sticker shockWe were overdue for a break. Aside from my usual job eating cake as a judge on “The Great British Baking Show,” I’d been doing trial runs of my one-woman stage show in Britain and the United States, and it had been exhausting.So, before we set off on our great adventure, we rented a mobility scooter for two and hit the boardwalk at Venice Beach, in Los Angeles. But our crawl through the deafeningly loud music, junk food and stands selling shorts emblazoned with vulgar words and messages like “Beat Me” did little to re-energize our spirits.On the day we left California, torrents of rain were falling. By the time we crossed into Arizona, the sun had exploded over the hills in a glorious display of opera lighting.We made it as far as Sante Fe, N.M., where our hotel, the Vanessie, a charming collection of wooden buildings around a courtyard was, like everywhere, suffering from a lack of staff. The single employee handed us a laminated notice: “Our restaurant, room service and bar are currently closed. A $30 service charge will be added to your bill.”Happily, Vara Vinoteca, across the street, was open. We ate tiny padrón peppers stuffed with cream cheese and cumin, tuna ceviche and pineapple salsa, and a small bowl of warm, slightly curried mussels in the shell, all served with a flight of four glasses of different California cabernet sauvignons.I’d have been happy to have all our meals in that simple little room. But Santa Fe brims with good restaurants, quirky architecture, art museums and shops stuffed with desirable things, so we set off to explore. John fell in love with a hatter’s shop, where he bought two authentic Stetsons. He also spent eye-watering amounts of money on two baseball caps for his grandsons. Is there a difference between a $41 and a $5 baseball cap? Apparently.John was equally dumbfounded at my lusting after an irresistible $150 necklace made from cut-up plastic water bottles and sprayed with red, black and gold paint. Vibrant, bouncy, light as a feather — it was a work of art. But apparently it was a piece that, at least for us, money couldn’t buy: The shop’s credit card system required a U.S. ZIP code, and cash was not accepted. We gave up.Prices constantly amazed us. The exchange rate has made the U.S. shockingly expensive for Brits, and taxes and tip on top of that? I’m already vaguely offended to be expected to tip when buying a coffee at a counter. And now with the touch screens suggesting tips of 15 percent and up, a latte feels like a major purchase. Only petrol seemed cheap, at half the U.K. price.Luis MazónTexasWhere astronauts dare to dine“Boring, flat, brown, goes on forever”: Everyone said we’d hate Texas. But we loved it. Maybe because I grew up in the wide-open spaces of South Africa, the little towns with not much more than a windmill and a church touched my heart.We stopped for lunch at Dirk’s, a Lubbock diner packed with locals eating chicken tenders, sticky ribs and burgers, all flooded with gloopy barbecue sauce and followed by doughnuts or pancakes in a lake of syrup.The waiter seemed puzzled when I asked, “Do you have any green vegetables?” Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yes, we have green beans.” They turned out to be canned beans in a cloying juice.We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with “Good choice,” “Excellent” or even “Awesome.” You want fries with that? “Awesome!”By the time we got to San Antonio, we were ready for a drink. A waterside cafe among the raised flower beds, paved walks and roving mariachi bands of the River Walk delivered first-class margaritas (freezing, salt on only one edge of the glass, not too sweet) and still-warm tortilla chips. Watching the young waiter make guacamole at a riverside table was a joy: knife razor-sharp, chile fresh, avocado and tomato perfectly ripe. And his judgment was fine — a smidge of chopped raw red onion, a decent squeeze of lime, and a generous grind of pepper and salt, all turned together gently rather than crudely mashed. I found myself eating very slowly, just to hold on to that flavor as long as possible.We had the worst meal of our whole trip not far away in the Texas Hill Country tourist town of Fredericksburg, which prides itself on its German heritage. We’d spent a happy morning touring the shops, museums and galleries of the town’s north end, and enjoyed a lunch of fried chicken sandwiches and banana walnut pancakes.So we had high hopes for the south side. But sadly its historic houses were full of tourist junk like plastic stein mugs and Barbie dolls squeezed into lederhosen. We retreated to a restaurant whose menu boasted of authentic German dishes. We were served pork chops ruined by oversweet gravy, tasteless sauerkraut, sweet and vinegary red cabbage, and potato mash obviously made with powdered mix that had not been brought to a boil. We abandoned our plates and went back to our motel to microwave emergency rations of Campbell’s tomato soup.The next day, on our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to “Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.” I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater.But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes.Luis MazónLouisianaHow to nurse a hangoverLouisiana is famous for gumbos and étouffées, so I was expecting gastronomy as we crossed the state line and drove toward Louisiana State University’s Rural Life Museum, a Cajun heritage village in Baton Rouge. I guess I was overly optimistic. The jambalaya and blackened fish in the cafe were tasteless and dried out. I’ve had better Cajun food in London.Plantation Alley, along the Great Mississippi Road, with its half a dozen “Gone With the Wind”-style estates, now open to the public, swept me away. The most beautiful of them was Oak Alley, with its avenue of 250-year-old Southern live oaks, their branches creating a vast green tunnel. But I couldn’t understand how the magnificent trees were obviously much older than the house. It turns out that these oaks are native to the area, and had once grown all over the estate. When the house was built in 1836, enslaved workers were made to dig up 28 of the huge 60- to 70-year-old trees, with root systems equal to the size of their canopies, and replant them in an avenue down to the Mississippi levee.The Great Mississippi Road eventually leads to New Orleans and the famous French Quarter, with its balconies of elaborate wrought iron — a daytime picture of Victorian good taste. We, ignorant Brits, had no idea that at night on Bourbon Street, that “good taste” became the flavor of daiquiris, pizza and hot dogs against a backdrop of bands belting out rock ’n’ roll, small children beating dustbins, grown-ups playing jazz, and the raucous din of drunken tourists until 3 a.m.But I liked the party atmosphere, and I’m mighty partial to a daiquiri, so we set off on a pub crawl. I now know that the secret to a good mango daiquiri is fresh mango, and not bottled mango syrup. And the next morning, after one too many mango delights and little sleep, I learned that shrimp and grits, with a good grating of cheese, is the perfect hangover cure.FloridaTurkey, sweet potatoes and slice of modern EdenOur road trip ended, as it had started, at a beach. Only this one was a mercifully far cry from the Venice boardwalk.We had rented a house for the week in the small Florida Panhandle community of Seacrest Beach, on the Emerald Coast along Highway 30A. This eight-mile strip — a kind of manufactured, perfectly designed modern Eden — consists of 16 neighborhoods on white-sand beaches between Pensacola and Panama City. Developments with names like Rosemary Beach, Seagrove Beach, Alys Beach, Grayton Beach and WaterColor share the perfect sands and the desired 30A address.Everyone rides around on bikes, and perfectly tanned mothers gossip over kombucha and wheatgrass at sidewalk cafes. Even the children look straight out of an upmarket catalog.Friends of friends, on holiday, invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner — turkey with all the trimmings, sweet potatoes, pecan pie and ice cream. In thanking them, I said something about the pleasure of such generosity, family closeness and their children’s politeness. Our host laughed. It’s because we’re from the South, she said.I’m glad we failed to rent my dream Winnebago back in Los Angeles. If we’d succeeded, we’d never have experienced a traditional American family Thanksgiving. We’d have been in a trailer park, eating takeout. Thank you, Lady Luck.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Padma Lakshmi Is Leaving ‘Top Chef’ After Its 20th Season

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      The host said she wanted to concentrate on her new show, “Taste the Nation,” her writing and “other creative pursuits.”Padma Lakshmi announced on Friday that she was leaving the Bravo reality-competition juggernaut “Top Chef,” which she has hosted for 19 of the show’s 20 seasons, calling it a “difficult decision” made “after much soul-searching.”“I am extremely proud to have been part of building such a successful show and of the impact it has had in the worlds of television and food,” Lakshmi, who also serves as an executive producer on the show, said in a statement posted on her social media accounts.“Many of the cast and crew are like family to me, and I will miss working alongside them dearly,” she continued. “I feel it’s time to move on and need to make space for ‘Taste the Nation,’ my books and other creative pursuits. I am deeply thankful to all of you for so many years of love and support.”Lakshmi did not immediately responded to a request for comment on Friday. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, she discussed why she had decided to go on the show in the early days of reality television. “I liked how serious they were about the food,” she said. “It wasn’t about the cat fights and lowest common denominator.”At the time, she said, she figured that if nothing else, “Top Chef” would at least expose her to an audience of potential book buyers who did not yet know her work. “We had no evidence that this would be a huge pop culture phenomenon,” she said.Since 2006, the original “Top Chef” — there have been numerous international adaptations and spinoffs since — has traveled across the United States, filming seasons in Boston, New Orleans, Kentucky and Colorado, among other places. Each season brings together up-and-coming chefs who compete against one another in the hopes of winning cash prizes (and acclaim in the food world) and avoiding elimination — and the dreaded order to “please pack your knives and go.”Next week, Bravo will air the finale of Season 20 of “Top Chef.” The season, titled “World All-Stars,” has been based in London, and brought together winners, finalists and memorable competitors from “Top Chef” adaptations from around the world.In a statement to The Times, the food writer Gail Simmons, Lakshmi’s co-star and fellow judge on “Top Chef” (along with the restaurateur Tom Colicchio), said she is “so grateful for all the knowledge she shared and for the friendship that saw us through countless milestones both on and off camera.”“I could not have asked for a better host and partner in the job,” Simmons went on. “I’ll always admire her work ethic and how she paved the way for so many women and people of color across the many industries she touches. She is an important person not just in my career, but in my personal life, and will remain so. There’s no denying her impact on our show and she will be missed in our future ‘Top Chef’ adventures.”Colicchio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Officials at NBCUniversal and Magical Elves, the production company for “Top Chef,” praised and thanked Lakshmi in statements which suggested that they planned to continue the program. “We will miss her on set at the judges’ table and as an executive producer, but we will remain forever grateful for her unwavering dedication to connecting with our cheftestants and Bravo’s viewers alike,” Casey Kriley and Jo Sharon, the co-chief executives of Magical Elves, said in a statement.Lakshmi, 52, an Indian-born model, author and activist, has been praised for imbuing the reality show with grace and humor, becoming the undeniable face of the franchise.Last month, Lakshmi’s other television show, “Taste the Nation,” aired its second season, on Hulu. On it, she travels the United States, exploring what it means to cook and eat in America.Also last month, she was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, posing in a gold-coin bikini. “This is me,” she wrote alongside a video of the photo shoot that she’d posted on Instagram. “I wouldn’t go back to my 20s if you paid me all the money in the world.”Her first cookbook, “Easy Exotic,” was published in 1999. Since then, she has released several other books, including “Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet”; a memoir, “Love, Loss and What We Ate”; a reference guide called “The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs”; and a children’s book, “Tomatoes for Neela.”Brett Anderson More

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      Mushrooms Aren’t Here to Destroy Us — Or to Save Us

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      The fictional fungus in “The Last of Us” touched a collective nerve. When it comes to mushrooms, we just can’t keep our cool.It’s grim, but in every post-apocalyptic story line, I wait for the moment when the characters float their theories about how the world fell apart, hoping to glean something useful.In HBO’s series “The Last of Us,” survivors of a global pandemic live in harsh, government-controlled quarantine zones to evade a parasitic fungus that turns them into zombies. Joel, a smuggler in what remains of Boston, believes that the ophiocordyceps mutation was delivered through the food system — contaminated batches of globally shipped flour or sugar spread the disease too quickly and efficiently for any kind of recall. Over the course of a long weekend, humanity was wrecked.The setup sounds pretty conventional for the zombie-thriller genre, but since the series premiered in January, the response has been a bit sweaty — panicked, even. Mycologists, fungal biologists and other mushroom-world experts have been called on, over and over, to assure us that while cordyceps species that zombify insects are real, a cordyceps mutation that thrives in humans is pure fiction.What got us so rattled?The fictional cordyceps mutation in HBO’s zombie-thriller series “The Last of Us” takes fear of fungus to the extreme.Warner MediaPaul Stamets, one of the country’s best-known mycologists, enjoyed the first two episodes of the show, but posted afterward on Facebook to emphasize the fact that no, cordyceps really aren’t capable of all that. “It is natural for humans to fear that which is powerful, but mysterious and misunderstood,” he wrote, wondering if the show played on our deep-seated fear of mushrooms.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.There are around 1.5 million species of fungi, a kingdom that is neither plant nor animal, and they’re some of the strangest and most marvelous life-forms on the planet, both feared and revered. But our relationship with mushrooms, particularly in the West, can be fraught — and not just because misidentifying one might be dangerous.In nature, mushrooms happily appear under the grossest and most fractious circumstances, when little else will. They can signal death, thriving in damp, dark rot, blooming in decomposition and nimbly decaying organic matter. Nevermind that this process is vital and regenerative (and, witnessed in a time-lapse, weirdly beautiful), it really freaks us out.When the artist Jae Rhim Lee wondered if it was possible for us to make a collective cultural shift, to approach death and its rituals differently, and to make smaller environmental impacts when we die, she designed a burial suit seeded with mushrooms. Nothing could be more natural — or more horrifyingly taboo — than, instead of eating mushrooms, inviting the mushrooms to eat us.Bioluminescent mushrooms, seen here in Gangwon Province, South Korea, glow in the dark.Video by Imazins / Getty ImagesMushrooms have a way of making us consider the things we prefer to avoid. Though this hasn’t stopped us from eating them — mushrooms are an ancient food source.The “stoned ape theory,” which imagines fungus as central to our evolution, was animated in Louie Schwartzberg’s terrifically pro-mushroom documentary, “Fantastic Fungi.” One scene shows how early humans might have eaten mushrooms, including psychedelic ones, off animal dung as they tracked prey across the savanna, then collectively tripped their way toward language, weaponry, music and more.Small, round buttons are the most cozy, familiar and recognizable of our edible mushrooms now, but there are hundreds of varieties we can eat (without tripping). In the pockets of wilderness around my home in Los Angeles, you might find brownish-orange candy caps, wild, yellowish frills of chanterelles and clusters of long-gilled oyster mushrooms. After rain, in the shady nooks of my own backyard, I see shaggy parasols pop up from time to time, as if by magic.In “The Last of Us” a warming climate weaponizes mushrooms against humans — a global disaster of our own making. But in reality, if you scratch just below the surface of our fear, you’ll find quite the opposite: an almost unreasonable expectation that mushrooms will rescue us, clean up our messes, do our dirty work and reverse all of the damage we’re doing to the earth. It’s true that there are species capable of breaking down oils in saltwater, absorbing radiation and cleaning toxins from the soil, though it’s also true that they might have better things to do.A handful of shaggy parasols, a common mushroom with a tousled cap.Deagostini Picture Library / Getty ImagesMushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the mycelium, rootlike threads that connect underground in a vast mycorrhizal matrix so complex, intelligent and essential, Mr. Stamets has called it “the neurological network of nature.”That material, which also stores large amounts of carbon underground and can help plant life survive drought and other stress, is being used to develop alternatives to leathers, plastics, packaging and building materials. (Adidas made a concept shoe using a mycelium-based material last year, which led the company to discuss its “journey to create a more sustainable world.”)Lately, we expect mushrooms to save us, too. The zealous interest in adaptogenic mushrooms — fungi species used medicinally for centuries in China and other parts of Asia — has created an international market for lion’s mane, reishi, chaga and cordyceps. We turn to mushrooms to ease our anxiety, to help us focus, to make us happier and more open-minded, to make us horny, to make our skin glow, to enhance our memory, to get us to sleep.Mushrooms are magnificent. But maybe anxiety over a fictional fungus reflects a flickering awareness that we are, in fact, asking a bit too much of them.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      Julie Powell, Food Writer Known for ‘Julie & Julia,’ Dies at 49

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      She documented her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a popular blog that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.Julie Powell, the writer whose decision to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” led to the popular food blog, the Julie/Julia Project, a movie starring Meryl Streep and a new following for Mrs. Child in the final years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.Her husband, Eric Powell, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Ms. Powell narrated her struggles in the kitchen in a funny, lacerating voice that struck a nerve with a rising generation of disaffected contemporaries.The Julie/Julia Project became a popular model for other blogs, replicated by fans of the cooks Ina Garten, Thomas Keller and Dorie Greenspan, and helped build the vast modern audience for home cooking on social media.In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.Before the year was up, Salon reported that the blog had about 400,000 total page views, as well as several thousand regular readers who hung on the drama of whether Ms. Powell would actually finish in time.Blogging made it possible for Ms. Powell to reach readers on a relatively new platform and in a new kind of direct language. “We have a medium where we can type in the snarky comments we used to just say out loud to our friends,” she said in a 2009 interview.Those comments were posted just as popular interest in food, cooking and chefs was rising. Ms. Powell’s self-deprecating style became a bridge from the authority of food writers like Mrs. Child, James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher to the accessibility of Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson.Just weeks before Ms. Powell’s self-imposed deadline was up, Amanda Hesser, a founder of the website Food52 who was then a reporter for The Times, wrote about her project, and interest exploded.The Julie/Julia Project upended food writing, Ms. Hesser said in an email. “I’d never read anyone like her,” she wrote. “Her writing was so fresh, spirited — sometimes crude! — and so gloriously unmoored to any tradition.”Ms. Powell inspired other amateur food writers to begin cooking their way through cookbooks and made professional food writers realize “they’d been stuck in the mud of conformity,” Ms. Hesser said. “The internet democratized food writing, and Julie was the new school’s first distinctive voice.”The writer Deb Perelman, who started her food blog (now called Smitten Kitchen) in 2003, said: “She wrote about food in a really human voice that sounded like people I knew. She communicated that you could write about food even without going to culinary school, without much experience, and in a real-life kitchen.”Little, Brown & Company turned the blog into a book, “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” Although some critics wrote that it lacked literary heft, it went on to sell more than a million copies, mostly under the title given to the paperback: “Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.”Amy Adams as Ms. Powell in front of a photo of Meryl Streep as Mrs. Child in a scene from “Julie & Julia.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamySales spiked after the popular 2009 movie “Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron’s last work as a writer and director, which starred Ms. Streep as Mrs. Child; Stanley Tucci as her husband, Paul; and Amy Adams as Ms. Powell.Ms. Powell “was happy for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” said Mr. Powell, a deputy editor at Archaeology magazine. “It did kind of sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for. And she was OK with that.”The film’s success also lifted Mrs. Child’s book to the best-seller list for the first time.Mrs. Child never saw the film — she died in 2004 — but she was familiar with Ms. Powell’s project.Russ Parsons, a former Los Angeles Times food editor who was among the first to report on the blog, sent Mrs. Child, then in her 90s, some excerpts. She took the project as an affront, not the self-deprecating romp that Ms. Powell intended, and told Mr. Parsons that she and others had tested and retested the recipes so they would be accessible to cooks of all skill levels.“I don’t understand how she could have problems with them,” he recalled her telling him. “She just must not be much of a cook.”Ms. Powell in her apartment in 2005, chopping leeks to make Ms. Child’s recipe for potato leek soup.Henny Ray Abrams/Associated PressJulie Foster was born on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Texas, to John and Kay Foster. Her father was a lawyer. Her mother stayed home to care for her and her brother, Jordon, and then went back to college for a master’s degree in design from the University of Texas.Ms. Powell graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and fiction writing.As a child, her brother said, Ms. Powell was both bookish and dramatic.“She loved to be onstage, and loved just being over the top and having everyone watch her,” he said. And, he added, she was “the most experimental and sophisticated cook among us, and we were all people who cooked.”She met the man who would become her husband when they were playing the romantic leads in a high school production of the Arthur Miller play “All My Sons.” They married in 1998.Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not as well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”After years splitting time between Long Island City and a cozy house in the Catskill Mountains that she purchased in 2008, the couple moved upstate permanently in 2018. In addition to her husband and her brother, Ms. Powell is survived by her parents.Ms. Powell, who was politically candid and a staunch advocate for animals, maintained her lively voice on social media, a natural extension for the quirky and direct voice she honed as an early blogger. On Twitter, she posted pointed commentary, mixed in with mundane bits of daily life. As ever, she made her feelings public, whether she was depressed, frustrated or excited.Mr. Powell, her husband, once said to her: “You hate everyone and you love everyone. That is your gift!” She turned it into her Twitter bio. More

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      in Television

      How ‘The Bear’ Captures the Panic of Modern Work

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      You don’t have to work in a kitchen to recognize the chaos and precarity the show depicts.The Original Beef of Chicagoland is the fitting name of the restaurant at the heart of the acclaimed FX series “The Bear,” which stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a world-class chef who returns home to run his family’s sandwich shop after his older brother’s suicide. Of all American cities, Chicago is the one whose mythos is most closely associated with a particular kind of work: honest, meaty, broad-shouldered labor that forges you into something bigger, nobler. Like the city it’s set in, the restaurant in “The Bear” is an unpretentious place, humbly catering to “the working man.” But “the working man,” we soon learn — as a young, Black, female sous-chef mocks an older, white, male manager’s use of the label — is a contested term, especially in an environment where nobody does anything but work, and pretty much nobody has anything to show for it. It’s unclear, at first, why Carmy, once named one of Food & Wine’s “Best New Chefs,” has come back to the sandwich shop, but we’re gradually made to understand that he is returning, compulsively, to a traumatic site. Food was the thread that connected him to his brother, but his brother wouldn’t let him in the kitchen, and so off to Sonoma and New York he went, to make something of himself. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is also Carmy’s original beef — the core wound that ignited his ambition, the site of his connection to his family as well as his estrangement from it.The story of the prodigal son returning from some summit of achievement to his salt-of-the-earth hometown is a beloved American narrative, most often seen in Christmas movies about frazzled executives returning to their roots. They are intended to reify the comforting notion that work isn’t everything — that the real America is slow, simple, cozy and (above all) fair, a place that rewards you for your efforts, full of wise, avuncular coots and simple, patient girls who’ve been waiting all along. But when Carmy returns to Chicago, he finds his elders are either absent or trying to exploit him, and the only girl who’s interested in his feelings is his sister. Just as success failed to save him, honest work won’t either; it won’t even generate enough money to get by. The Original Beef may signal noble, can-do labor, but it’s also a decompensating system on the verge of structural collapse. A few episodes in, the toilet explodes, unleashing a geyser in Carmy’s face. An industrial mixer blows a fuse, knocking out the power. The gas goes out, forcing the kitchen staff to build makeshift grills outside. They have no choice; one missed lunch service could take them out. A 1980s arcade game called Ball Breaker blares stupidly, violently from one corner, handily summarizing the experience. “Your balls have been broken!!” its screen announces. “Continue?”“The Bear” has been praised for its visceral depiction of the stress of a professional kitchen, but you don’t have to have done restaurant work to recognize the chaos, panic and precarity the show captures so convincingly. In “The Bear,” work is a dumb, sadistic game that has left Carmy with unchecked PTSD. Intrusive thoughts and flashbacks fracture his consciousness; he even cooks in his sleep, almost setting his house on fire. Richie, the restaurant’s manager, takes Xanax because he suffers from “anxiety and dread.” (“Who doesn’t?” Carmy snaps.) Sydney, the sous-chef, has a cabinet stuffed with medication for heartburn and ulcers, problems that may have been sparked by a failed attempt to run her own business. (“It was the first time I didn’t have a complete and utter psychopath behind me screaming,” she says. “And I thought I wanted that, you know? But look where that got me.”) The restaurant is drowning in bills. When the characters aren’t yelling at one another at top volume, they’re often shutting down to cope with all the yelling. Their customers are like kids stuck in a car with warring parents. The word you see most frequently in writing about the show is “stressful,” but it’s often accompanied by descriptions of the workplace as “soul-crushing,” “toxic” or “abusive.” All this is intended as praise — the idea is that, despite its occasional excesses, the show has captured something relatable and true.Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, which promises that nobly sacrificing yourself on the altar of endless work will pay off in the end. But it’s increasingly clear that for most people, it won’t. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glamorized the kitchen as a kind of foxhole, populated by wild, dysfunctional hard-asses yelling profanities at one another while managing to crank out hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure-cooker environment has come to feel familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The American economy soared over the past decade, but life for most became harder: “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars and child-care centers,” Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020. “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.‘The Bear’ is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.Carmy and Sydney work insane hours, rising at dawn and waiting for L trains on dark platforms, too exhausted to think about anything else. At times it seems as if work is how they escape from having to think about what is happening to them. Sydney tells someone her goal is simply to do her job and live her life, but it’s abundantly clear that, outside her job, she has little life to speak of. These conditions don’t spur creativity; on the contrary, they’re counterproductive. Carmy can’t spare time to listen to Sydney’s ideas about the dinner menu or encourage the pastry chef’s experiments with doughnuts. Exploring your talent, in this environment, might turn out to be another luxury the “working man” can’t afford, something that belongs exclusively to narcissists with financial backing. This inequality comes into focus early in the show: We see Carmy abused by an arrogant chef and, in Chicago, paid a visit by his mobster uncle, who talks down the restaurant — the place is unfixable, he says — before trying to buy it for himself. Carmy is furious to learn that Richie has been dealing cocaine in the alley behind the restaurant to keep it afloat, but Richie justifies his actions by co-opting the language of entrepreneurship, crediting this side hustle with getting the place through Covid. “That’s the kind of stick-to-it-iveness and ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking that we look for in employees,” he says. “But that ship has sailed, my friend.” This is the startling milieu and message of “The Bear,” the thing that has struck a chord. The notion that hustle will eventually pay off is an insidious pipe dream. Everyone is in survival mode all the time. The system has failed. The place is unfixable. Source photographs: Screen grabs and photographs from FX More

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      in Movies

      ‘Alice’s Wonderland Bakery’: Recipes for Real Life, if Not Real Kitchens

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      A new Disney show teaches children useful lessons in the guise of a cooking show. The recipes are less practical (unless you stock dancing dodo eggs).Everyone eats.That simple truth, which has persuaded even quarreling heads of state to sit down together, has now inspired a new television series that aims to teach another frequently fractious group — children ages 2 to 7 — cooperation, compassion and cultural literacy. Disney has taken on this challenge in “Alice’s Wonderland Bakery,” a novel blend of sweetness and spice that uses globally inspired food to help little viewers master resilience and adaptability.Debuting on Wednesday on the Disney Channel, Disney Junior and the streaming service Disney+, the show takes its brightly colored universe and rapid-fire surprises from “Alice in Wonderland,” the company’s fantastical — and fantastically food-filled — 1951 animated feature film of the classic Lewis Carroll story.“We had been looking at doing something with ‘Alice’ for a while,” Joe D’Ambrosia, the senior vice president for original programming and general manager at Disney Junior, said in a telephone interview. “And we also had really been trying to find a cooking show for preschoolers.”This half-hour animated series is not, however, a traditional cooking show with recipes to follow. Although D’Ambrosia said he hoped it would inspire families to bake together, you won’t find ingredients like dancing dodo eggs and shrinking powder in your pantry. Instead, the dishes the series features — some entirely fanciful, like dwindling dewdrop cake, and others based on the real world, like gingerbread — become vehicles for creativity and problem-solving. The show’s Alice may concoct something delectable so she can make a new friend, comfort an old one or show how a situation, just like a recipe, can be approached in more than one way.Alice, who relies on the magical talking cookbook of her great-grandmother, the original movie’s heroine, “uses food as essentially her superpower,” said Chelsea Beyl, the series’s executive producer and showrunner. “This is, you know, how she connects with all these curious and peculiar characters.”Some of those characters have hardly changed since the 1951 film’s premiere. The series’s Cheshire Cat, with his indelible grin and magenta stripes, and Alice’s feline companion, Dinah, could have leapt right out of one of the old movie’s frames. Others have transformed or become diverse versions of the figures that inspired them. (This is a multicultural Wonderland.) Alice herself is not the film’s preadolescent English schoolgirl but a very American-seeming 7- or 8-year-old, running her own bakery inside a giant teacup. (In Wonderland, all things are possible.)“In the movie, you know she’s thinking,” said Frank Montagna, the co-executive producer and art director for the show, which uses computer-generated animation to create a heightened version of the film’s world. “And so we wanted to really home in on that part of our Alice — that, you know, she’s always trying to figure things out.”That entails trial and error for her, including at least one spectacular failure: In the pilot, the birthday cake Alice has baked for Princess Rosa, a new character who is the daughter of the formidable Queen of Hearts, has magic sprinkles that unexpectedly fly onto all the royal guests, causing the disgusted queen to end the palace festivities. (Pandemic-weary children will probably identify with the disappointment of a canceled birthday party.)To redeem herself and cheer up Rosa the next day, Alice hosts an intimate unbirthday celebration, a concept found in both the 1951 film and Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” This cake isn’t ordinary, either.Alice “is very, very curious,” said Libby Rue, 13, who is making her TV debut as the heroine’s voice. “Her curiosity sometimes gets the best of her, but she is very kind, and she loves making her friends happy by baking.”Other series characters get into trouble, too, like Alice’s best friend, Fergie, a descendant of the White Rabbit who appears in the book and the film. In one episode, Fergie struggles by himself to help Alice bake a huge order of pies and then lies, as a small child might, about what he did wrong. When the truth comes out, Alice reassures him that it’s always all right to ask for help.Alice’s friends on the show include her best friend, Fergie, who is descended from the White Rabbit in the original book and the film, and Hattie, whose habits reflect Japanese traditions.DisneyIn creating Fergie and the other Wonderland characters, the concern was “to really be reflective of today’s young audiences,” D’Ambrosia said, which also meant giving them origins that Carroll might never have dreamed of.Rosa and the Queen of Hearts, for instance, look and sound Hispanic, practicing customs inspired by Cuba’s. (Because the characters come from Wonderland, their habits are sometimes inspired by the real world but are not, technically, of it.) Dad Hatter, patterned after the host of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and his dapper son, Alice’s friend Hattie, reflect Japanese traditions — a nod, Beyl said, to the importance of tea in that country’s culture.Later in the 25-episode first season, the show will introduce a caterpillar family whose influences are Persian. (Parents will be relieved that the lead caterpillar, familiar to Wonderland fans, is blowing bubbles instead of smoking a hookah.) The show’s creators have also made some formerly male characters female, and the queen herself is now merely a diva instead of a homicidal tyrant.Bringing diversity to Carroll’s work “means a lot,” said Eden Espinosa, who voices the queen and is herself the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, “because I feel like it is acknowledging that these classics — although there might not have been representation in them when they were, you know, brand-new — they transcend culture lines.”The food also reflects the ethnicities the series embraces. In an episode in which Alice and Princess Rosa bake apple crumble pastelitos, this Cuban pastry functions as a preschooler’s version of Proust’s madeleine, reminding the King of Hearts (Rosa’s grandfather, voiced by the Cuban American singer Jon Secada) of the wife he misses so much. Another episode highlights mochi, Japanese rice cakes.But at a time of national concern over childhood obesity, the executive producers have taken special care not to build the entire series around desserts.“We have a lot of episodes that are about, you know, Fergie growing veggies in his garden, which I think is really fun for kids to see and maybe want to do,” Beyl said. Even in references to sweet recipes, she added, “we rarely say ‘sugar.’”Young viewers will also watch Alice make dishes that include vegetables or fruits, like a carrot calzone, grape gazpacho, huevos habaneros and kuku sibzamini (Persian potato patties).“It was really cool to not only bring the cultural elements into the food, but the music, the costumes, the casting and the set as well,” Beyl said.For example, “The Baking Song,” written and composed by the show’s music director, John Kavanaugh, recurs throughout the series in different ways: The queen sings a salsa version, while the caterpillar episode has a version featuring Persian instruments. The series also incorporates tunes from the 1951 movie, like “The Unbirthday Song,” and other work by Kavanaugh, such as “Food for Thought,” which conveys series themes like flexibility. (Alice believes there’s a recipe for anything or, as she puts it, “Where there’s a whisk, there’s a way.”)The musical emphasis — this month, Walt Disney Records will release a digital soundtrack album from the show — also called for singing talent, so in addition to Espinosa, who has starred in “Wicked,” the voice cast includes Broadway veterans like James Monroe Iglehart (“Aladdin”) and Mandy Gonzalez (“Hamilton”). Several comics are featured, too, like Donald Faison, Craig Ferguson and the “Saturday Night Live” alumni Ana Gasteyer, Bobby Moynihan and Vanessa Bayer.According to Montagna, “We really tried to push the comedic performances,” while also “pushing the boundaries of what preschool entertainment can be.”“We didn’t want people to compare this with any storybook environment or other Disney shows,” he added. “We wanted it to stand out as Wonderland.” More