Unlike the decision makers on New York magazine’s Approval Matrix desk, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for stores to start playing Christmas music on November 1. The Christmas lights are hung at Pete’s Tavern. The Met and MoMA have absolutely outdone themselves on holiday cards this year. It’s a matter of hours before your Google Calendar becomes a collage of party invites…

Today’s newsletter includes: Why fitness studios are investing in caffeine, 2027 internships, on The Sports Equinox, Charlotte Klein’s profile of OpenAI’s celebrity whisperer Charles Porch, North Korea’s $6.3 billion crypto heist, an Upper East Side movie theater closed, and the likelihood of your friend’s Chanel bag being rented has officially gone up.

The Sports Equinox: “Like mainlining heroin while riding a rollercoaster on the moon.”

Jack Mankiewicz is a writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn. He also used to be my roommate. He contributes to Feed Me occasionally, writing about sports and gambling.

Monday, October 26, 6:22 PM: I am walking through Brooklyn Bridge Park as a gorgeous Mets Sunset (blue and orange) paints itself over New Jersey. I look at the leaves fluttering in the cool autumn breeze, and ponder some of life’s eternal questions. Why must beauty be so ephemeral? What is a tree without its leaves? Can the Wizards beat the Hornets on the road?

I ask myself these kinds of questions often, but right now they carry a special significance, for it is the greatest night of the holiday season – the Sports Equinox.

If you’re a sports fan (and gambler) like me, the Sports Equinox makes Christmas look like Arbor Day and Thanksgiving look like Pearl Harbor. If you’re not, you’ve probably never heard of it. Usually, each sport has its own season. But for one magical October night every year, the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB all overlap. Basketball and hockey are just starting, football is in its prime, and baseball is playing the World Series. This year is even more special because we also have Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. That’s five sports and five beautiful opportunities to have fun and lose money. What could be better?

6:37: Feeling lucky, I watch the sun drop behind the horizon, turning the sky from Mets Orange to a velvety Ravens Purple. I bet 10 bucks on the Wizards and head home for the festivities.

6:58: Football, baseball, WNBA, and hockey don’t start until after 8, so we have to begin our night with basketball before we get to the full smorgasbord. If the Sports Equinox is a decadent meal at the Cheesecake Factory, then the 7 PM Wizards-Hornets game is the Avocado Egg Rolls. A boring and weird matchup that shouldn’t be exciting but somehow works. Anthony Davis tips the ball to Trae Young and we are off.

7:38: I am sweating. Metaphorically because the Wizards are losing to the Hornets by 10, and literally due to the heavy machinery that I am moving. Nobody tells you about the manual labor involved in the Sports Equinox, but when you have to set up five screens, and bend into several Yogic positions in order to plug the power cords into the wall behind your TV, you realize that gambling and watching sports can also be like a sport. After several labored minutes, I get my first win of the night. The screens are set up (two computer monitors, one iPad, one laptop, and one TV) and I sit down to make the rest of my bets.

7:52 PM: The big games tonight are Eagles-Cowboys, Rays-Brewers in Game 3 of the World Series, and the Atlanta Dream vs. the Golden State Valkyries in Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. If you’re a Jack Mankiewicz completionist, like I am, then you’ll have read my gambling guide, and know that my #1 rule is to bet with your heart, not with your head.

I’m not going to lie – it’s slim pickings for my heart tonight. The Eagles are not the most lovable bunch. Their fans are boorish louts who almost killed Santa Claus and, a couple weeks ago, their coach almost killed their starting quarterback. But they are underdogs, and while they may not put much of a value on human life, at least they’re not the Cowboys. I’m taking Philadelphia +4.5 points.

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Good afternoon, everyone.

Last night, I ate red shrimp toast and steak frites in the back room of Bar Oliver to celebrate Lachlan Cartwright’s media newsletter, Breaker. Mark Guiducci sat to my right and Donie O’Sullivan was on my left. Across from me were and Bilt’s CEO Ankur Jain. Fabulous little room. The night ended with some tricks (Lachlan invited a mentalist), some treats (Breaker’s new merch made by Small Talk Studios), and some deep conversation about the newsletter business with Caper’s Dana Brown and Simon & Schuster’s Paul Choix.

Today’s newsletter includes: Another newspaper launched a movie club, how I built the Feed Me Job Board, a rare Expense Account Greenpoint restaurant review, an new column penned by an anonymous banker in London, Remove.bg is shutting down, and my favorite outdoor brand is hosting a pop-up in the Lower East Side.

Feed Me’s 4-year anniversary sale ends today. It’s your last chance to get an annual subscription for $80 $56.

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A brief history of the Feed Me Job Board. 💼

I got an email from a friend who works at a New York media company a few weeks ago: “I just went to happy hour with two of my new direct reports, and I found both of them on the Feed Me Job Board.” It made me happy. I also had a hunch that their table was having the most interesting conversation at whatever restaurant they were at.

While walking out of Cobble Hill Cinemas earlier this week, someone introduced themselves as a Feed Me reader. He also said that he recently moved from D.C. to the Upper East Side – he got a new job earlier this fall from the Feed Me Job Board.

The Feed Me Job Board launched in 2024 with a simple goal: connecting the internet’s most discerning readers with jobs worth showing up to an office for. Or at least worth getting on Zoom for. It started as a roundup in the newsletter, then moved over to a publicly shared Google Doc, and eventually reached its current form: a custom site built with Lovable. Here’s how that happened.

It started with an offer from my friend Austin. Last year, (who used to work at Substack and now runs a growth agency called Spur) texted me: “I can help build the job board. It would be easy to use Lovable to build an actual, good tool ourselves and connect it to Feed Me. Wanna jam on it next week?”

I wasn’t familiar with Lovable at the time. In fact, whenever Austin referenced Claude that summer, I thought he was talking about Claud, the East Village restaurant with the insane Devil’s Food Cake. Luckily, I learn fast. After jamming for a bit about how we wanted the job board to work, Austin set up a dashboard on Lovable and described the job board we wanted to build in plain English. In about an hour, we had a working site with listings, a submission form, and pricing built in. After fine-tuning it by uploading Feed Me logos, fonts, and language, it was just about ready to go live.

We said goodbye to the Google Doc. About a week after starting our Lovable project, I built an admin dashboard where I can approve, edit, or reject (reasons ranging from looking like spam to the form being filled out incorrectly) every listing before it goes live. Nothing gets posted on the board without being approved by me.

The Feed Me Job Board made money from day one. Before launching the site, we’d designed a section of the site where sponsors could slot in. I had faith that someone would be interested in sponsoring the launch of the board, and I was right – David Protein was the presenting sponsor of the job board when we launched it.

It basically runs itself now. Every new submission lands in my inbox with a button straight to the review queue, and listings expire on their own after 30 days.

And I can manage the site by submitting simple adjustments in Lovable. When a company needs a change, I type something like “adjust the salary to ‘starting at $100,000’,” or “add ‘based in New York City’” and it’s done without a developer or Austin (although he’s helped me with some troubleshooting along the way).

Since launching in summer 2025, the Feed Me Job Board has been used by hiring teams from American Express, The Atlantic, The New York Times, AFLALO, Kalshi, Apple, Semafor, Substack, Bloomberg, Puck, Sotheby’s and more.

I’m the only full-time employee at Feed Me. The speed at which I can review, approve, and edit listings wouldn’t be possible without Lovable. Whether it’s for an internal tool, a new product line, or an entire company, Lovable is where you build and operate the software that runs your business.

POST AND BROWSE ON THE FEED ME JOB BOARD

Don’t call 148 Noble Street a neighborhood bistro — it’s a restaurant that’s in a neighborhood. By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he wrote about a restaurant in Greenpoint (a neighborhood we rarely cover in Expense Account) that reminded him of London.

Lately I’ve felt suffocated by ROOMS, by grand design, by an excess of beautiful and incredibly expensive details. By murals, and chandeliers, “artworks,” and banquettes. Do you think it’s fair to say that with the opening of Humm we have reached peak interior design? It’s magnificent, truly, but where do we go from here? What are we paying for? Where do our priorities lie? It’s starting to feel like we’re paying for the multimillion-dollar fashion show (that the general public is not invited to), rather than paying for the clothes. We’re paying for logos and gilding rather than materials. As much as I love nice things, and shiny things, a magnificent room, I think it might be time for a vibe shift, it might be time for a little bit of quiet luxury in New York City dining. 148 Noble Street is the cultural reset that we need. This new restaurant in Greenpoint feels like a breath of fresh air, and I don’t say that lightly. I finally feel like I can breathe again.

Call it minimal, call it puritan, call it austere, call it what you want, 148 Noble Street is clean, it’s elegant, and as soon as you walk in, you know exactly what they’re about. Dark wood, white walls, white tablecloths, the only embellishment are shaker peg rails that wrap around the dining room. You can hang your hoodie on the rails, but they’re not really for that. The peg rails are a mission statement, they’re a gauntlet thrown, this restaurant believes in the elegance of function, an honesty in materials, a lack of the superfluous, and, most importantly, they believe that food should come first and foremost.

I’d hate to describe 148 Noble Street as a neighborhood bistro. I’m sick of everything being described as a neighborhood bistro. It’s a restaurant that is in a neighborhood, and the chef certainly knows his way around a pad of butter, but you won’t find a burger here. No pommes frites even, no stainless steel ramekins with ketchup and mayo. Not a single pasta. It doesn’t feel like a bistro, really, it feels more like one of those perfect little jewel-box restaurants that you find yourself drinking a glass of wine in after walking 20,000 steps in Paris. More than Paris even, 148 Noble Street feels like a London “cafe,” a Deco, a Cecilia, dare I say there’s a bit of St. John’s protestant DNA in there somewhere. (Someone who’s spent more time in London will surely have a better comp.) It’s an attitude, a style of cooking and dining, that’s casual but serious about craft, the craft of cooking, and the craft of dining. There’s Zimmi’s, there’s Bistrot Ha; 148 Noble Street feels next up in this lineage.

Free bread in a New York City restaurant can feel like the most thoughtful gift, and it is. 148 Noble Street’s free bread is half a baguette by Shewolf bakery, served with their “maître d’ butter,” punctuated by a little pool of herb infused oil. They could sell this for $12 easily, this could be a whole meal for someone on GLP-1s, but they give you bread for free because your meal should come with bread, because it’s the right thing to do, and you’ll need that bread to sop up their delicious saucework. We started with some oysters with dulse ($3 a piece), a pairing that is so delicious and so obvious that I’m shocked oysters aren’t served this way at every restaurant. That tiny bit of seaweed amps up the natural sweetness and salinity of the oysters, an oceanic take on “what grows together goes together.” I know I said that there are no french fries at 148 Noble Street, and there aren’t, but they do serve Pommes Paillasson. Shredded potato, in the shape of fish sticks, fried till golden, with a dollop of aioli. They’re basically a McDonald’s hash brown, and they more than scratch the itch for some fried potatoes.

I love a server who tells me what to do. It’s crazy that it’s so rare to find someone who will just give you a straight recommendation, rather than a “it depends on what you’re in the mood for” or a “they’re very different.” The servers all wear crisp white shirts, and clean white aprons, and our server, Mike, told us “verdejo is having a moment.” Whether or not that’s true, the verdejo he recommended was perfect. I told him that I wanted to choose two options between the haricots verts, the dandelion salad, and the zucchini. He told me that it’s the end of the season, and it would be fine to skip the zucchini. I love that. This is a no fuss restaurant. The dandelion salad, with onion jam, anchovies, and Brabander cheese is sweet, salty, funky, and complex. It’s a salad that exists not just for the sake of being a salad, it’s more than just some roughage and requisite greens, it’s a dish as exciting as anything on the menu. Poached haricot verts and potatoes, in a sauce vin blanc, are so much greater than the sum of their parts. The green beans and the potatoes are cooked so perfectly, and they’re served so simply, that you’re reminded of how good a good green bean and good potato can be. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this was one of my favorite dishes of the night. You’ll want to use some of that baguette to sop up that sauce vin blanc.

But it’s not all dark wood, boiled potatoes, and protestantism at 148 Noble Street. I swear it’s a restaurant that knows how to have a good time. Chef Gabriel Borges is from New Orleans, after all, and he brings with him some of that flair, and also some of that seafood. A crawfish bisque is not a New England bisque, there are no potatoes here. It’s minimal and elegant, which seems to be Chef Gabe’s style, but packed full of crawfish flavor, and of course lots of cream. Their coriander crusted duck is one of the best ducks I’ve had in a while. Cooked perfectly, and just spicy (spice spicy, not hot spicy) enough, it kind of reminds me of the duck at Le Veau d’Or, but with a little less polish, in the best way. But the dish at 148 Noble Street, the dish that, if it hasn’t already been, will soon be all over your Instagram feeds, is the crab claws in Cajun butter. Crab claws like this don’t exist elsewhere in New York, I’m pretty sure. Tiny, delicate, and sweet, these are shipped straight from New Orleans. They come shelled (such a nice gesture) and doused in Cajun butter that tastes like a celebration. This might be the most fun dish in New York City right now. I hope you saved some of that baguette.

Chef Gabe has worked at Golden Diner and Chez Ma Tante, two of the best pancake purveyors in the world, so of course there are pancakes (technically crepes) at 148 Noble Street, and of course they are phenomenal. Thin crispy egg crepes with calvados cooked apples and a big dollop of cream. The crepe, paired with the free glass of sherry they give to every guest (this might be the most generous restaurant in NYC), is one perfect way to end a meal at 148 Noble Street; their île flottante is another. A meringue floating in a passion fruit custard is a ray of sunshine. I wonder if this is a nod to the famous dessert at Le Veau d’Or. Whether or not it’s a nod, the people running 148 Noble Street have certainly been to Le Veau d’Or, and I can tell they love it, just like I do. I can tell they love Galatoire’s and The Grill, Ha’s, Septime, maybe 40 Maltby, all the restaurants that I love, special places, the classics. But 148 Noble Street isn’t trying to be any of those spots, they’re doing their own thing, something that feels familiar but genuinely new. If you spot me in Greenpoint, you know where I’m going.

The gilet (or what Americans call vest…) has gone from being popular at the shooting estate to being an essential part of the trading floor uniform. The FT begs readers that if they’re going to wear one, to please wear a good one. Some accompanying reading: this newsletter from last year where I asked my opinionated friends about Finance Guy Vests.

Speaking of the trading floor, Plum Sykes has a new anonymous finance columnist, “Mayfair Finance Girl.” In her first column she writes about wearing The Row shoes to the office, lawyers canceling on dates, and booking pedicures.

Exceptionally appropriate holiday collaboration: Susan Alexandra x Anthropologie. The collection includes a bagel menorah and a glistening olive tree topper. 🫒 I walked by Susan’s Upper East Side store this morning and it was buzzing.

Big Rock Candy Mountaineering is hosting a pop-up in New York from November 6th through the 9th. It will take place at Wythe. Peter Middleton, the founder of Wythe, is a co-founder of Big Rock Candy Mountaineering.

Remove.bg is shutting down. Remove was an admirably simple website that removed the background of a photo, used by many an overworked graphic designer who needed to clean up the headshots for the “TEAM” section of a startup site. Following their acquisition by Canva, Remove has announced its closure date for December 1st 2026. I love a website that does just one thing! RIP remove.bg - you always did what you said you would.

We’re getting a movie from cult favorite sketch group Simple Town. Simple Town has sold their debut film “Big Break” to distributor Greenwich Entertainment. As a fan of both the horror-thriller-comedy genre and a fan of Simple Town, I’m stoked. The four members of Simple Town (Will Niedmann, Caro Yost, Felipe Di Poi Tamargo, and Samuel Lanier) have been putting out banger sketches for years. For a look at their unique style before the movie drops next year, below is my syllabus of my 4 favorite Simple Town sketches:

• Get To Bathroom Without Engaging Boyfriend’s Roommates

• We went to Williamsburg to talk to Brooklynites about the holidays

• Breakaway Bottle

• Guy Trying to Riff from Too Far Away

Think Jerky is trying to capitalize on its brief publicity from “You Can See Everything.”

The Midcoast Villager announced their new Villager Movie Club. The Camden, Maine based newspaper is the latest media organization to invest in movie clubs as an events strategy — The New York Times recently screened a series of movies at Metrograph as part of their 175th anniversary celebrations; Vanity Fair recently announced a bi-coastal movie series at LACMA and Cherry Lane Theater; Feed Me hosted a month of scary movies at Cobble Hill Cinemas; and Chloe Malle has been hosting screenings and conversations to accompany Vogue’s Book Club. I like that Midcoast Villager’s screenings take place at the newspaper’s cafe, the Villager Cafe. Imagine eating a BLT while watching “The Searchers”….. in coastal Maine.

Today’s newsletter includes: Some bleak downtown media news, wants to convert you to horror movies, brand dinners are the only way to eat at impossible-to-book restaurants, Gagosian is selling Mr. Chow’s art collection, a new independent print publication in D.C., and why Vox is launching their new newsletters on beehiiv instead of Substack.

Coming around to horror films, in time for Halloween. By

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim. Today, he wrote about getting over his fear of horror movies, and a menu of scary movies for beginners.

For the longest time, I wanted nothing to do with horror movies. As a kid, I would have these night terrors that woke me up at 3 a.m. every night and I didn’t need anything else to feed my fears about what could be creeping around the house at that ungodly hour. Supernatural horror, especially, was a no-go for me. Thankfully, the terrors subsided as the years mounted, perhaps a reflection that as we get older it’s the more prosaic anxieties that loom large in our lives.

I finally came around to horror films when, in college, I confronted the fact that, in the course of trying to watch every great film, I was going to have to watch some from that genre. Since then, although I still avoid gore, I’ve come to appreciate some of the thrills and chills, the camaraderie of the dark theater, and the unnerving experience of watching a scary movie at night by yourself and wincing at every creak.

If you enjoyed our Monday Scaries series and are looking for more, or if you’re just trying to get into the mood for Halloween, here are a few movies that I’ve come to not loathe, but still fear.

🩸 = especially gory from what I remember

Classic must-watch

• The Shining (1980)

• The Exorcist (1973) - probably my favorite since I started watching horror 🩸

• Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

• Psycho (1960)

• The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

• The Sixth Sense (1999) - I will never forgive The Lonely Island for spoiling this movie for me

• Alien (1979)

Modern masterpieces

• The Terror S1 (2018) - not that scary but more of a psychological thriller

• Hereditary (2018) - very scary and upsetting but a hell of a movie

Recent pleasant surprises

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At the moment that I’m hitting send on this newsletter, it’s the exact same temperature in New York City as it is in London — a cool 14°C (58°F) ⛅. Readers in London (and beyond) are in for a treat today.

Feed Me’s across-the-pond correspondent, Montague Ashley-Craig, reported on the following: A pink-painted lesbian pub in Camberwell, the most famous restaurant server in London (who has landed gigs with fashion brands since going viral), launched a podcast, a Conner Ives archive sale, Dishoom’s Diwali menu, a historic Miami hotel comes to town, Chicken Shop Date goes to the big screen, a Brooklyn bar is taking over Ellie’s, E Pellicci is heading to Selfridges, and is selling her clothes on Vinted.

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A world exclusive interview with Piers Quinn. By .

Over the summer, west London-based waiter Piers Quinn went triple platinum in London’s food and drink circles by posting short form videos on his Instagram about working front-of-house at an unnamed restaurant in Notting Hill. We’ve had plenty of back-of-house kitchen bros doing their best Carmy from “The Bear” online, but Quinn was making front-of-house the main character. Introducing himself as a “head waiter at a local bistro,” he posted cinematic shorts of working shifts and polishing glasses — but no one could really tell if he was real or not.

had been wondering about him in The Observer, and he’d even been meme’d by AllSyrupSuperSquishie, a niche international hospitality meme account. Between his posh delivery and his earnestness about doing the job, I had hoped it was a really intricate comedy. But it was impossible to say. I kept asking myself: Was he doing a bit?

When I called him up this week, Quinn was warm, laughed at my question, and told me this was his first interview. He currently works in a London restaurant and hosts supper clubs (for six people every Friday at a Notting Hill cafe) that will run until December. We talked about his time in fashion, making waiting tables look glamorous, and the pleasure of having dinner with strangers.

MRAC: How did you get into hospitality?

Piers Quinn: I worked in fashion before, which had been a dream of mine. I started a cowboy-boot line, but I was naïve and didn’t really know how to launch it. I put my life savings into it and it failed. I was working in bars to support myself and found I really liked hospitality. That was six or seven years ago. I worked my way around London restaurants and enjoyed it.

MRAC: Your videos make front of house the main character. What made you start filming, and who did you imagine would watch?

PQ: There was no strategy or plan. I think waiting is the most incredible job — wages aside. It’s so much fun. I thought that if I could make it look more glamorous, I could bring a bit of honour to the job. I hoped other waiters would watch.

I also wanted to do something for myself, rather than just clocking hours for somebody else’s project. We’re only on the planet for a short time.

MRAC: I’ll admit, when I first came across your videos I wasn’t entirely sure whether they were earnest or a very good bit. Do you enjoy keeping people guessing?

PQ: [Laughs] No, I’m not doing a bit! It’s all from the heart. Maybe the videos are drier than I realise and that goes over people’s heads. I’ve done my time on those floors. I don’t really think about it when I post. If people get it, they get it. If they don’t, they keep guessing. I’m sure that works in my favour.

MRAC: You’ve worked with brands including Paul Smith and Service Works. Could content become your main income, and would you want it to?

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Good afternoon, everyone,

Last night I hosted our final Monday Scaries screening at Cobble Hill Cinemas. The movie was Creep. When I checked my phone afterwards, the director, Patrick Brice, had DM’d me. Maybe we’ll screen Creep 2 with him for Feed Me’s holiday movie screening series.

Travis Hunter, the editor of , came to the screening and brought me a few copies of the printed Halloween edition of the newsletter. It has a beautiful full-color illustration inside but you’ll have to find a copy for yourself to see it. I told him that for Christmas, they should do a printed edition called The Christmas Carroll. Introductions like that are exactly what I hoped would transpire from that screening series.

Today’s newsletter includes: a Substack office party with , a historical guest moment on , some strong cases for going out to dinner for Thanksgiving, Jennifer Lawrence’s latest interview is a red flag for her hair care brand, I predict Sweetgreen will launch a burger 🔮, the moms transforming New York City closets into nurseries, and where I ate next to LeBron last week.

This week only: get an annual subscription to Feed Me for $80 $56.

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The owners of the Italian restaurant I Sodi bought their whole building. Rita Sodi and Jody Williams (the owners of I Sodi, Via Carota, Buvette, The Commerce Inn, and Bar Pisellino) purchased the retail condo at 312–314 Bleecker Street (the building I Sodi is in) for $6.5 million. This is part of an existing but increasingly popular trend of hospitality operators buying the buildings their restaurants are in. Caprice Holdings, part of Abu Dhabi-based DIAFA, bought the Meatpacking building that will house the soon-to-open Annabel’s members’ club (DIAFA also has a majority stake in Annabel’s). Last year, the team behind Rosemary’s bought the $9.3 million building that houses the Greenwich Village restaurant. Sol Forman, the owner of Peter Luger, bought the building that houses the Brooklyn steakhouse for $35,000 in 1950; his family still owns it. So why would Sodi and Williams invest in real estate? “The big benefit is that you create value for yourself, not others, so you can determine your future,” one restaurateur told me this morning. I Sodi, which serves $27 lasagna and $42 branzino, is packed most nights of the week. But even the most popular and successful restaurants in New York can be undone by an untimely rent hike. The Real Deal makes the case that the upside to restaurants owning their spaces – especially West Village ones that have so much capital – is obvious: “No worrying about bad landlords or lease negotiations or, in the worst case, getting booted from a space. But it’s only the large and well-capitalized restaurant groups able to take over their own space.”

Moves ➡️ :

• Former Poppi CMO Jenny Danzi is Liquid I.V.’s new CMO. Danzi spent 17 years at PepsiCo (which acquired Poppi for $2 billion in 2025) working in branding and marketing. Liquid I.V. was acquired by Unilever for $500 million in 2020. Last week, Poppi’s founder Allison Ellsworth announced a new hydration brand called Jetty. Responses to the launch have been rough.

• Amy Weisenbach, former CMO of The New York Times, joined global learning platform Coursera as CMO. Unlike MasterClass (where users learn about grief from Prince Harry and Italian cooking from Massimo Bottura), Coursera offers more technical courses like Google Data Analytics and Excel Skills for business. Weisenbach wrote on LinkedIn, “When I joined in 2017, The Times had about 2 million subscribers. Today it has more than 13 million.”

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On October 25, 2022, I sent out a newsletter to 1,400 subscribers while sitting on the floor of the same apartment I am writing from today. Those 1,400 people had been reading a 1.0 version of Feed Me that I started in May 2020 that was mostly short horror stories and personal essays that I’d publish every few weeks.

Over the last four years, I have sent out a newsletter almost every weekday. While the letter has contained plenty of promised “business gossip,” it has evolved (luckily for all of us) from that original concept.

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My King For the Day is Keith McNally, who kindly covered the bill for me and two friends at Balthazar this morning. First person on Emily Sundberg’s Nice List this year.

For our next Guest Lecture, we’re talking to Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, hosts of the Acquired podcast. You can ask them anything in the Feed Me Chat.

Today’s newsletter includes: a stellar example of what Substack TV could look like, a conversation with the Dewy Dudes co-hosts about their year-long hiatus, a DC restaurant serving foie gras Twinkies ahead of the city’s proposed foie gras ban, on perfect pasta in Williamsburg, The Strand is launching a podcast, and the restaurants that “didn’t know how bad of a juju there was” on private equity.

This is horny food. By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic, J. Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he writes about the gnocco fritto he would go to hell 🔥 for at I Cavallini.

One thing about me is that I don’t often eat Italian food, or rather, I don’t often eat fancy pasta. I’ve been blessed to have spent my fair share of time in Italy, and now I’m one of those annoying people who thinks pasta in New York is a rip-off. I don’t want truffles or globs of ricotta, I don’t even want nduja. I want it simple and cooked al dente, nice olive oil. I’m also the kind of delusional home chef that believes that the pasta that I cook at home is 75-80% as good as what I can get in a restaurant. I stand by this for the most part (especially with the help of Eataly).

I first went to I Cavallini, on Grand Street in Williamsburg, when it opened in the summer of 2025, and I’ll say that it wasn’t for me. Whatever Nick Curtola chose to do to follow up The Four Horsemen, his restaurant on Grand Street, was going to leave some very big shoes to fill, and I felt that those shoes hadn’t been filled, or they were the wrong style or something. If The Four Horsemen is a Paraboot (a well designed expensive shoe for connoisseurs, a classic), then I Cavallini was a Jack Purcell. Casual, not really my style, maybe a little basic, for people who live in Williamsburg, and eat sweetgreen and live in those glass towers where Glasslands used to be. There are so many restaurants in New York, it’s hard to keep up. I’ve got a long list of restaurants that I need to try, so if a restaurant doesn’t wow me on the first try, it’s hard to eat there again. And yet somehow, despite all these obstacles, I found my way back to I Cavallini last week, and I’m so happy I did.

I guess the first thing you need to know about I Cavallini is that it’s not The Four Horsemen. And if I have any advice, you’re much better off not looking around the restaurant, searching for The Four Horsemen, you won’t find them here. That’s what I did on my first visit to I Cavallini, and I left disappointed. Let’s pretend The Four Horsemen doesn’t exist. This will be the last time they are mentioned.

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Today’s newsletter includes: The New York Times has a new show about New Yorkers (very New York Nico), the repercussions of “comment for link” behavior, a fist fight at one of New York’s most expensive members’ clubs, Cardi B shredded the beauty retail playbook, Puck is hiring, feels conflicted about AI writing on Substack, and one of America’s best tailors will be in Brooklyn this weekend.

FEED ME FALL PLAYLIST

It’s going to be 44° on Saturday night. Plan your movies wisely. By Teddy Kim.

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim. Today, he wrote about what you should watch this weekend.

New releases this weekend: After opening to $15.6 million on just 855 screens last weekend, You Can See Everything goes wide on more than 2,500 screens this weekend. With a reported combined production and marketing budget of under $20 million, the doc is well on its way to turning a nice profit for A24 and everyone involved, which does not include [redacted]. Clayface (I guess it’s now a Skydance movie?) opens as the third DCU movie since the James Gunn reboot, delivering a hard-R body horror film written by Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House). Possible Love, which I’ve been talking up for weeks, finally opens in limited release, so go watch it in theaters before it hits Netflix on November 6. Olivia Colman stars in the Sundance hit Wicker, in which her character handcrafts a husband made of… wicker, played by Alexander Skarsgård. There was a time from 2016-2022, when Taika Waititi seemed like one of the hottest directors working. Since then his star has faded some, but he’s back this year with an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun. Jenna Ortega stars as an AI friend keeping a sick girl company. Early reviews have not been great.

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This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Brenda Hashtag, Jeremy O. Harris, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Today, Feed Me readers interviewed , the CEO and one of the co-founders of Substack. I have had the pleasure of spending time with Chris over dinners in London, while walking along the water in San Francisco, and at various Substack events. I have a lot of respect for him, and don’t think his job is easy. Below, he discusses being “AI-pilled,” Substack’s algorithm, the publishers he thinks are using Substack well, and his relationship with New York City.

“How do you make Substack a place where more readers discover writing they like? As opposed to being a place where they read writing they’ve discovered elsewhere? I discover Substacks primarily on other sites (LinkedIn, etc), and I think that’s a common experience. Or do you not view reader discovery as a primary issue for Substack, i.e. using other networks for discovery is the strategy?” - Zach

This is the point of the Substack app. When all Substack had was email, writers were wholly dependent on other sites to reach new audiences and grow, but the app is really great for this. People use it to read stuff they are already subscribed to, of course, but they also discover a ton of writing and writers.

People discovered long-form posts in the Substack app over 100m times last month, which more than doubled year-over-year. And it’s not just one-off reading: the app drives over 40% of new subscriptions on the platform.

“You’ve said Substack’s model works because you only make money when writers do. Once brand sponsorships really get going, brands are paying you too. Does that change who the customer is?” - Brad

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His new book, Back to Green, is full of healthy, diverse, exciting meals to cook for your family and friends. Marcus is someone who inspires me, and after listening to him, I think you’ll be a little inspired too.

Over the weekend, I asked Feed Me readers to help me put together a fall playlist. The result is 3+ hours of music, and almost no artist repeats. I discovered a lot of new musicians through this. Hope this playlist gets you through the rest of your afternoon. Feel free to drop more Spotify links in the comments.

Today’s newsletter includes: is my favorite party reporter, Substack’s Midterm Election hub is powered by , a SCOOP on a new CPG-focused podcast (whose booked guests include and Loonen co-founder Clara Sieg), the Americans participating in “dark nutrition” diets, one of the highest-grossing newsletters on Substack poached a young Wall Street reporter, and a controversial take from The New York Times’s fashion critic.

Secondhand marketplace Vinted saw an influx of listings suspected to contain items looted during riots in France. Speedy! Luxury stores including Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and Celine were broken into over the weekend. I would’ve been interested to see what exactly was stolen, but Vinted took them down and said they’re acting “against the accounts involved, up to permanent bans.”

Sophie Haigney wrote about Americans who participate in “dark nutrition” – eating raw buffalo brains, raw-milk ice cream, and raw egg yolks – for The New York Times Magazine. Haigney first told me about this story over steak frites and champagne (light nutrition) at Balthazar earlier this summer, after which she journeyed to southeastern Pennsylvania and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to speak to Americans who identify as carnivores, biohackers, and Primal-dieters. Many of these people turned to this alternative nutrition lifestyle, particularly raw food, to “fix” a health issue – autoimmune diseases, skin conditions, chronic pain, digestive problems, fertility issues, eating disorders, and psychiatric illnesses. A top comment on the story reads: “There’s a reason humans learned to cook food. They’ll find out eventually.”

From the Feed Me Tip Line: “Greenpoint apparently has a throwback portrait artist?? I haven’t gone yet, but one of my friends did and it looks like a very fun photoshoot.” A few years ago, The New York Times reported on a popular photo studio in LA’s Koreatown called Tom’s One Hour Photo, which was made popular by locals and celebrities like Kacey Musgraves. Greenpoint Glam (the studio this tip is referring to) appears to be going for the same retro look. Not a bad idea for a brand scrambling to figure out a holiday marketing activation…

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Good morning, everyone.

I’m so glad we all got to convene under one roof (Cobble Hill Cinemas) last night for Feed Me’s horror movie screening series, Monday Scaries, and eat free popcorn and drink one small free drink. I woke up to this kind email:

My friend Ray, who chose and introduced the movie, Trick ‘r Treat, actually made the trailer that the above email references. “I wanted to set the tone of the movie and introduce Monday Scaries with a Nitehawk-style compilation,” he told me. “With limited time and editing skills, I ripped my favorite Halloween-y clips to set the tone for Trick ‘r Treat (and hint at some of its best moments to an unsuspecting audience).” You can all watch it here. There are still some tickets for next week’s screening, Creep (which I chose), here. I’m hoping to run this back for the holidays.

Today’s newsletter includes: JP Morgan is opening a members’ club, on her move back to LA, ultra-wealthy households are going NDA crazy with staff, J.Crew’s latest marketing campaign makes penis jokes (hell yeah), wagyu sliders and sky-high sundaes to Delta One, skincare for your ass, Ignacio Mattos’s new restaurant, “luxury banana bread,” and MLB fans are getting sick of all the Megan Fox erectile dysfunction pill commercials.

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Suite dreams. ✈️🍒

My favorite wedding gift I received last year was a set of multicolored Missoni beach towels. I know it’s summer when they come with me to the park and the beach, and it makes me happy to pull them warm out of the dryer. I’ve since given the same set to several friends as a wedding gift (some of you are reading this), in hopes that they, too, will wipe salty potato chip fingers on the zigzags while lying in the sun.

So you can imagine my delight when, at sunset last week, 72 floors above Madison Avenue, I slipped into one of Delta’s new Delta One suites and found myself surrounded by Missoni: textiles, plush bedding, and a familiar amenity kit. As for the salty fingers, Delta also has that covered. A new “sip and settle” ritual puts a hot towel, warm nuts, and drink on the console before dinner, so you can finish your laptop work without anyone hovering.

I wasn’t in an actual plane. Rather, I was in a luxurious mock-up of a plane, constructed by my new friends at Delta on the top floors of the skyscraper One Vanderbilt. The purpose of my visit was to preview everything new for Delta One customers coming later this year. As the sky turned pink across New York City (we were so high up that it almost felt like a window seat view), I spoke to uniformed Delta employees that help design Delta’s suites (the same person who designs the suites surprisingly also designs the uniforms), curate Delta One’s wine menu, and work as flight attendants.

The new Delta One suites have a dream set of new design features. On their own, each individual update seems small, but together they’re sky-high luxury.

In addition to the plush seat cushions and warm nuts, each cabin includes:

• A purse hook. (Liana Satenstein, your prayers have been answered.) A Delta representative told me that Delta One customers don’t love the idea of strangers having access to their bags in the overhead bin while they sleep. Personally, I think Delta One is a pretty safe neighborhood, but, nonetheless, the bag stays at your feet.

• A hook for your glasses. Welcome news to someone who left a pair of Thistles sunglasses on a flight home from London. Small hardware, sure, but it’s the kind of detail that makes you feel taken care of.

• Wireless charging. So nobody has to pull a muscle fishing behind the suite for an outlet. Or worse, assigning yourself to a flight of “jostling and jimmying duty” for a phone charger that keeps sliding out of an older outlet.

• An 24-inch TV screen. For you to watch Wine Games (which features Delta One’s Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson).

The city skyline lit up as golden hour went dark, and event attendees were called to sit for dinner. Delta rebuilt the Delta One menu with Simon Hulstone, chef of The Elephant, a restaurant with a two-decade Michelin legacy, around classics that passengers kept asking for. That means a wagyu burger, short rib with potato gratin, and mac and cheese with garlic breadcrumbs. There’s also a mushroom risotto engineered to hold its texture at altitude (we’re living in the future), which anyone who has eaten airplane risotto will recognize as an achievement. I’ve never eaten a burger in the sky, but the wagyu (shrunken down to a slider, for the purposes of this event) was very good. Licking a caramelized onion off my thumb, I started looking at flights from LAX, where the new menu debuts this fall.

Sauces now come on the side in little saucières, and pepper is cracked fresh at your suite. The dessert cart now has a dairy-free sorbet (that you can float Taittinger on) and Amarena cherries for the sundaes.

The bar has also been advanced. Starting December 1, Delta will be the first and only airline pouring Blanton’s, a bourbon that’s famously hard to find here on the ground. The wine list was chosen by evaluating 1,600 bottles, which was narrowed down to 13 labels from 11 winery partners with Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson and a panel of SkyMiles members. Silver Oak (a Feed Me favorite) made the cut. Hugo Spritzes and Palomas, each with a non-alcoholic version, arrive next year.

The most thoughtful changes are for people who just want some sleep. You can now skip breakfast for a coffee and croissant before landing, and pre-order your entrée up to 18 hours before departure, closer to takeoff than any other U.S. carrier allows. There’s a new Missoni Mini pillow, which will be introduced in early 2027, alongside a winter amenity kit called, fittingly, Winter Elsewhere. More than 200 flight attendants spent 14 months and 36 trial flights testing each new addition, down to the tea service. You can read more about Delta One in Delta’s news hub.

The Angel’s Emily Wilson is moving back to Los Angeles. The food writer announced this via a bagel collaboration with Gertie. I reached out to her this morning to find out the reason behind the move. “I’m from New York, so I’ll always be a New Yorker, in a way, but this past year back in Brooklyn I’ve deeply missed the community I built in Los Angeles. The LA food world is a well of inspiration for me, and I can’t wait to get back to it. I already have so many ideas I want to move on and stories I want to tell. And if I learned anything from experimenting with in New York, it’s that it belongs in LA.”

J. Crew’s latest campaign focuses on their suits and stars Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy. I watched the campaign video in front of my Moccamaster this morning, and laughed out loud. The video shows Ben, John, and Martin as goofy J.Crew employees – there are penis jokes, there is coffee spilling on customers, and Ben does a Paul McCartney accent while pretending to be James Bond. Before my coffee finished brewing, I emailed J.Crew’s CMO Julia Collier for comment.

ES: Why are you choosing this moment to market suits? Is it a big time for them sales-wise?

JC: “We are seeing real momentum around our suiting, especially in younger men, who are wearing suits in so many ways: casually, formally, for work and beyond. This campaign was our way of embracing tailoring with a renewed spirit. Suits are becoming an expression of personal style rather than simply a uniform and J.Crew has a storied history in this category that we wanted to celebrate.

The Ludlow was one of the defining suits of the 2010s, and tailoring has always been core to the DNA of the men’s brand. The fact that we offer an approachable entry point, both in experience and price, while having incredible quality and fit really is something to feel very proud about.

This campaign is about reestablishing that authority and reminding customers that J.Crew is a destination for suiting. This is not a flash-in-the-pan moment for us; it is a long-term commitment to one of our most important categories.”

ES: This campaign feels a little edgy for J. Crew (penis joke, sales people slacking off). What was the math that went into working with these guys?

JC: “Suiting can feel intimidating or overly serious, and we wanted to loosen up the category and remove some of that barrier to entry. Please Don’t Destroy has such a specific comedic voice and a strong connection with the younger audience we want to reach, so it was important that we gave them the freedom to be themselves and push the idea.

We didn’t want to work with them and then water down their humor until it sounded like something written by J.Crew. The starting point was simply the guys working as suit experts in the store fitting men in their first J.Crew suits, and they took that premise and completely made it their own.

It also gave us a fun way to play with the very relatable experience of buying a suit: not knowing your measurements, trying on the completely wrong size or figuring out which fit is actually right for you. There was a great level of trust and collaboration throughout the process. The humor pushes the edge, but it makes the category feel more accessible, more memorable, and much more relevant to their audience.”

Gone Bananas Bread has opened a banana bread shop next to the Rockefeller Center skating rink. Their site says that they’ll also be opening a Bryant Park location soon. In a conversation with New York magazine earlier this year, Estee Stanley – interior designer and founder of Gone Bananas Bread – described her loaves as luxury banana bread. “It’s Gucci.” Where the site lists ingredients, the answer is: “Not telling you!” Where it lists calories, it says: “It’s better you don’t know.”

In a world where personal chefs become viral TikTok celebrities who land Netflix deals and write about the waste generated from yacht trips for independent literary magazines, the next logical step in wealthy households is to have more staff members sign NDAs. Guy Trebay reported on the uptick in landscapers, housekeepers, butlers, tutors, and private chefs being asked to sign lengthy NDAs by wealthy homes. This doesn’t surprise me – with group texts and Close Friends on Instagram, it feels like it’s easier than ever to share details about strangers’ homes. The NYT quotes Dara Yates, the founder of the Seaside Staffing Company, a California-based, national employment agency specializing in providing nannies and other domestic employees to the wealthy: “I’ve been in this space for 43 years. What was once a contractual agreement a paragraph long can now run 15 pages.” This reminds me of something an unnamed source said in Bridget Read’s New York magazine story about internet privacy earlier this year: “Everyone who is smart is paranoid right now.” There’s an uptick in people – even not famous people – buying their apartments with LLCs and shell companies, restaurants are banning Meta Glasses, brides are asking guests not to take photos, and I heard about some Hamptons homes who had a cell phone basket at the front door last summer. Last month, Derek Thompson wrote an excellent essay about the death of hosting in America – the share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70% since 1975. Although Thompson doesn’t emphasize the idea of paranoia, I wonder if this extreme focus on privacy makes it so socializing/hosting no longer feels worth it to some people. The top comment on Trebay’s Times story reads: “Billionaire tech bros are selling and buying our information to train their AIs while they want their workers to not even speak of their names. We should demand payment from billionaires for appropriating our information and humanity knowledge and history for their selfish profit.”

People are pissed about the incessant Megan Fox (prescription erectile dysfunction pills from Ro) and Sydney Sweeney (the new sports prediction-market platform Novig) ads playing during the MLB playoffs.

Alex Hartman, the creator of viral meme account Nolita Dirtbag, is starting a media company called Dead Horse in hopes of going “Rupert Murdoch mode.” Dead Horse has four initial launch projects: “A talk show in which Hartman mock-scientifically analyzes whether guests are more millennial or zoomer, a hyperlocal news show with a Claymation host, a subletting service and a members-only video chat he’s pitching as Raya meets Chat Roulette.” Hartman’s partner in Dead Horse is Jacob Price, who is also ’s consulting partner.

Andrew Carmellini (Locanda Verde, Café Carmellini) said the dish he eats when he’s sad is gelato with a splash of booze on top. Noted.

This morning on Fashion People, Lauren Sherman and designer Emily Dawn Long discussed the concept of butt cleavage (a sartorial suggestion in Long’s newest collection). As part of Long’s recent NYFW show, she also showed a short film called The Crack of Dawn. A few hours after listening to the pod, I read a story on SSENSE about butt cleavage. Bodycare brand Soft Services was onto this trend early — plenty of their original imagery featured instructions for using their products to clear and exfoliate your butt. You can get a $240 butt facial at Bespoke Surgery in Greenwich Village and Raquel New York offers a $660 back facial. I already said this yesterday, but my vision of 2026 Holiday Party Season is getting clearer and clearer each day.

Work for ⁠! Harper’s BAZAAR is hiring a “culturally fluent, style-obsessed” Fashion Writer.

Interior designer Christine Gachot (who has worked on restaurants from Jac’s on Bond to ACME) has teased some of her upcoming projects, including Igancio Mattos’s new spot and a new members’ club for JP Morgan Chase. God, I love being a Chase Sapphire customer, but I’m fine with drawing the line for JP Morgan members-only spaces at the airport lounge.

Coldhealing, a right-leaning anonymous Twitter account that provides commentary on topics around tech, dating, and how a certain slice of 20-somethings live, is publishing their first novel, First Kiss. Some people love them, some people hate them. Curious what kind of book they’d write.

On Friday night, I went to Gage & Tollner with some of my friends, and while spooning through the layers of Amarena cherry ice cream and toasted meringue in their Baked Alaska, we discussed other sinful foods that defy the laws of consistent temperature. One that came to mind was my beloved cold cheese slice from Little Vincent’s on Long Island — hot pizza, covered with cold shredded mozzarella. I’m sure there are more.

Today’s newsletter includes: On Running launched their own SSENSE-like editorial site; The New York Times cooking team poached an Infatuation editor; Glossier’s recent Chanel giveaway puts them in Cooked territory; a lucien Smith show in the Hamptons; , , and react to my feed full of Conner Ives dupes; two of the most Instagrammed avocado toasts come to Manhattan; and two of the largest tech companies in wedding planning have merged.

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Coat check. The best-dressed person at your Christmas party might be the one who doesn’t take their coat off. Last winter at W magazine’s Best Performances party, Sara Moonves, W’s editor in chief, wore a custom Conner Ives robe of silk and fur. It reminded me a bit of Miss Hannigan from Annie, had Miss Hannigan been an Upper East Side oligarch. I screenshotted the photo of Moonves. The internet had the same idea, promptly comparing it to the Balmain coat Mary-Kate Olsen wore to the 2013 Met Gala, and then the opera-coat moodboards followed shortly after.

Ives has since released several versions of the coat, priced between $6,000 and $8,000. Nearly all have sold out. The rest of the industry either had the same idea, or quickly caught Ives fever. At the beginning of fall, Free People launched a campaign across Instagram for their $400 crushed velvet and faux fur jacket, which sold out in days. Reformation’s $500 shearling and metallic jacquard Stella coat is sold out. Last week, DÔEN released an $800 brocade and faux fur coat, which sold out in hours. I am aware that the Penny Lane style of coat has always been popular, but theses are robe-ier, Madame Zeroni-er.

My feed didn’t care that those were all sold out — it still showed me photos of Lila Moss and Sienna Miller and Hailey Bieber and Laura Harrier in that beautiful damn Conner Ives coat. But a shift occurred over this past weekend. My TikTok and Instagram feeds suddenly turned into fashion school for people who wanted to DIY (Do Ives Yourself) The Coat. One creator called the Conner Ives coat “the most beautiful coat in the world,” and noted the uptick in vintage sellers recreating the look with vintage robes and furs. She rounded up 50 silk jackets for her Substack readers to buy, and encouraged them to pair them with a vintage fur from Etsy (or Amazon). Another combined a fox fur stole from eBay with a $50 silk jacket with the help of snap closures and safety pins. Some used sewing machines, some used needle and thread, but they were all trying their hardest to save a few thousand dollars and still participate in this trend.

Last night, I closed my eyes and imagined the incoming holiday season as a sea of colorful silk jackets fastened with at-home attempts at fur lining. Would vintage fur stoles fall to the floor, like small rodents in New York City brownstones? Would the eBay silk jackets get wrinkled on subway rides to private dining room buyouts for the company holiday parties? Or is this a much brighter scenario, a renaissance for the women of New York learning to tailor and design their own clothes? I emailed the experts – , , and – to get their thoughts on this trend.

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I went to Sam’s in Cobble Hill with my friends last night, and we got the corner booth by the door, which gave me a perfect fishbowl view of every person who walked in the front door. The clientele of the newly-reopened neighborhood Italian restaurant included a dozen parents who parked their strollers out front, Brooklyn cocktail historian , groups of guys ordering pizzas with 3+ toppings, individual guys walking out with takeout boxes of pizzas (good to know), happy first dates, and a very lively scene at the bar. It was an incredibly cozy room, somewhere between a red sauce joint (but my Long Island red sauce joint doesn’t throw Peruvian Drop Peppers in the house salad) and a social club. The sausage pasta was glossy and vanished within minutes of hitting the table, Diet Coke was served out of a crispy can, and our whole table was happy to see a Rob Roy at the top of the cocktail menu. Weirdly, the last time I had a Rob Roy was with the same group… at Twin Tails in Columbus Circle.

There are a few more seats left for Monday’s screening of Trick ‘r Treat at Cobble Hill Cinemas (which is across the street from Sam’s). Hope to see you there.

Today’s newsletter includes: Air Mail’s social editor of 5 years got a new job (from the Feed Me Job Board), a $370 sundae in Midtown that will only be available for a few more days, a menswear festival in Tokyo worth looking at Google Flights for, LA’s favorite toy store is expanding to Park Slope, renewed my faith in Bon Appétit, went to the Hudson Valley and came back with a report on what’s new Upstate, and Graza’s giant tub of hummus is too damn big.

An Eckhaus Latta robe, a chicken pot pie, and a farewell to Lil’ Deb’s Oasis. By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he took advantage of peak foliage in the Hudson Valley.

It’s that time of year. It’s Autumn in New York, it’s the Autumn of our (my) life, maybe it’s the Autumn of our society. It’s time to get Upstate. If you’re reading this, please stop what you’re doing, stand up, walk out your door, and head Upstate. The trains on Friday are pretty solidly booked, but go on Saturday, and stay till Monday. Or rent a car, run, walk, ride your bicycle, steal a boat, it’s worth it. It’s crazy to be so excited about leaves. Sometimes things are green, and sometimes things are red, but there aren’t many things in the world that go from green to red, a nightmare for people that are red-green colorblind. The leaves represent a fleeting moment, and we love to savor a fleeting moment, we love to milk it till it’s dry and dead, and then we love to do it again next year. The leaves really are just so beautiful, so special. Mt. Fuji is a great place to look at some leaves, if that’s the kind of thing you’d like to do with your weekend. Mt. Fuji is a gigantic hibachi complex, a Japanese castle, in Hillburn, NY, about an hour-and-a-half drive from my house in the East Village. It sits atop a private mountain, part of the Ramapo mountain range. The food is not good but it doesn’t matter. From your hibachi table, as they ignite your onion volcano, you get a 360˚ view of the most beautiful foliage you’ve ever seen. Heaven at Hibachi.

This weekend is the Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck (the site of the forthcoming Soho Farmhouse). It’s a festival to celebrate sheep and wool, and the people who love sheep and wool. Coincidentally it’s also a great place to eat some lamb. If you love funky hats, and angora rabbits, if you’ve never seen a vicuña, then this is the place for you. The Sheep and Wool Festival always falls on the weekend with the most perfect weather, the weekend when the leaves are at their absolute peak. It’s the weekend when you can finally take that new scarf for a test drive. You might just be inspired to make one. It’s one of my favorite weekends, I look forward to it all year.

Also this weekend, The Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs is hosting their annual Autumn Festival. I promise you it’s not creepy to go. If you’ve never been to a Waldorf school, it’s definitely something to see. It’s idyllic in a way that’s hard to even describe with words. The sun shines on this school, it lights up the unbleached wooden furniture. I literally saw a cow give birth, a little calf came out covered in goo. I witnessed the miracle of life, and saw children selling hand-harvested honey, and fresh-baked pizzas from the pizza oven they built. They’re all amazing artists, they draw, they sculpt, they weave, who knows if they can read or write or do math, but they make their own clothes. All the children are in their handmade sack dresses, you might mistake them for Amish, except that their parents all drive Teslas and wear Arc’teryx. It made me want to go back to school, or maybe join a cult.

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I spent last night eating fried rice and dumplings and staring at beautiful framed black-and-white photos of Chinese immigrants at the Lee association in Chinatown. My friend Macy Gilliam hosted a dinner there for an organization she’s involved in called The David Prize, which gives New Yorkers with the best pitches $200,000, no strings attached, to make the city a better place. We heard past winners including Dr. David Ores, who helps people who are having a hard time getting jobs because of bad tattoos. It was also fascinating to hear from the Lee family about the role their space plays in preserving the spirit of Chinatown, a rapidly changing neighborhood in New York City due to development and real estate prices. After hearing from some members of the association about the significance of selling whole chickens in Chinatown (it’s a clear sign that they’re fresh), and getting a surprise visit from Assemblywoman Grace Lee, I waited for my Uber on Mott Street and took in the lights and lanterns and happy groups of friends eating noodles behind big glass windows.

Today’s newsletter includes: How the Saie Beauty team brought back a discontinued Tom Ford eyeshadow before Tom Ford did, ’s official review of New York Film Festival, Bloomingdales’s CEO is inspired by Le Bon Marché, the Bridgehampton Target has Hamptons-themed Target wallpaper, Banana Republic launched a film studio, and heirloom apples are having a moment.

An official dispatch from NYFF (with light spoilers). By

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim. Today, he wrote about New York Film Festival, and the etymology of the word “artificial.”

If there’s a central theme that ties together all the films I saw at NYFF this year, it’s the anxiety of creation. You can take it a few different ways. Biological: you’ve become a parent and have these new responsibilities of raising up a new person that’s completely dependent on you. Technological: you’ve created something new, maybe an artificial intelligence that’s becoming worryingly independent of you. Authorial: you’re trying to start a company, or make a movie, but you’re worried that you’re faking it until you make it, coming up with it all on the fly, or that you’re not capturing the story in the right way. In all of these instances, at least part of the anxiety comes from the fact that, in trying to imbue what you’re making with something good and true, you have to take a look in the mirror and ask: Am I being honest with myself?

Take Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, for example, which examines the life of a Russian business leader and family man as he navigates the ethical quandaries of a wartime Russian society that refuses to use the word “war.” That big lie is mirrored in his domestic lie, his unwillingness to address the heart of his labyrinthine marriage. Whether the social ills start at home or vice versa is unclear. But when you watch the film, think about the advice the main character gives his son about how to deal with violence and whether he follows it himself.

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We have another West Coast edition of Feed Me today, including a conversation with the SF Standard team on their buzziest new hire and M&A deal, and then takes the wheel on the Water Cooler section.

In the Feed Me chat, we’re interviewing one of the most interesting people in San Francisco, Substack CEO .

Today in Feed Me: Bar Oliver is opening on the West Coast, the founder of Uber opened an LA members’ club, Erewhon’s bestselling beauty product is a brand I’ve never heard of, Nancy Silverton’s new project, why womenswear brand Oddli hosted a pop-up in SF, Michael Moritz’s chocolate investments, an AI company is opening a spa, is hiring an intern in Echo Park, gets a paint job, a new hotel in LA that one person described as a “yassified Souplantation,” the Port of Los Angeles had the busiest month in its existence, and The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has generated some very entertaining reviews.

“San Francisco is a city of hilarious contradictions and absurdities.”

I’ve admired The San Francisco Standard team for years, but my respect for them leveled up when seven people from their team (or around 7% of their company) came to Feed Me’s party at Bar Part Time in the Mission earlier this year. Last month, the paper (co-founded by Griffin Gaffney and billionaire / longtime Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz) acquired Patrick Heij’s mock news site, Marin Lately, and relaunched it as a new standalone satire publication run by Heij, San Francisco Currently.

The SF Standard team isn’t done with big news for 2026: This morning, the paper announced that 21-year-old New York Times bestseller Theo Baker is joining the Standard as their senior Silicon Valley reporter, covering AI and the people building it. I caught up with all the SF Standard boys – Griffin, Theo, Patrick, Mike – for this West Coast Edition of Feed Me.

Griffin, you acquired Marin Lately, which covers the greater Marin County area. What does it mean to expand the SF Standard’s coverage north of The Bay?

GG: While I’d love to say we’re opening a satellite office with a ferry commute, we’ve actually re-launched Marin Lately as San Francisco Currently. While it has San Francisco in its name, it’s taking on the tradition of many San Francisco-named publishers in using the entire Bay Area as its playground.

I’m quite impressed with the avid following Patrick built in Marin — and, frankly, Marin-like suburbs around the country where we also have paid subscribers — and they shouldn’t worry too much, as Patrick will certainly still be satirizing life across the bridge.

Griffin, it seems like SF Standard really appreciates humor. You’ve had job listings for comedians, you’re acquiring a satirical news startup, you’ve searched for cartoonists and gossip interns. What role does fun play in the SF Standard’s business?

GG: Many of the best publications use humor as a way of engaging their readers, and because San Francisco is a city of hilarious contradictions and absurdities, I couldn’t think of a better time and place for us to be experimenting with humor as a way of driving the business. Our resident comedian, Sophia Garrow, recently interviewed both of California’s gubernatorial candidates and got many millions of views on her work; San Francisco Currently is growing its paid subscriber base organically, and our cartoons are among the best performing content on our site. That’s all great for the brand and the business.

Theo, you had a big year — graduating Stanford, getting on the NYT bestseller list. What made you know this was the first full-time newsroom job you wanted to take postgrad? What was it about the SF Standard that was appealing to you? Did you ever consider going independent on Substack?

TB: I view my mission at The Standard as an extension of the work I did in reporting my book, How to Rule the World: chronicling the attitudes and pretensions of the people who shape our technology, and therefore all of our lives. It’s wonderful to be joining an ambitious startup news organization that sees the value in both hard-hitting accountability journalism and the cultural anthropology so desperately needed to make sense of these strange times. I considered a range of options including going independent but ultimately joining The Standard seemed like the clear choice: I strongly believe in the mission of local journalism with national impact—at a time when this has grown rarer and rarer—and am thrilled to work with such a top-notch team in developing this forthcoming news column into a must-read for the AI era. Very bullish on the future of The Standard and very excited to be a part of it.

Patrick, what advice do you have for other operators of newsletter startups and blogs? How did you know it was time to get acquired?

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My first movie, THE END, premiered four years ago (yesterday) at the Hamptons International Film Festival. It’s a short doc about Gardiner’s Island, America’s oldest privately-owned island that’s located off the coast of East Hampton. I made it with my own money, which started with a $2,500 creative grant from Adobe that I applied for when I was bored during COVID. I used that money to rent an Airbnb in Montauk during lockdowns, and I invited some of my friends who worked in film to come to Long Island for a few days, visit the libraries and historical centers, turn on our cameras, and see what would happen. We cooked spaghetti and drank wine while looking through our footage every night, and drove around the quiet off-season Hamptons neighborhoods, speaking to local historians during the day.

The whole project was extremely low budget, and we used our savings. I think making this doc cost $15k altogether — I did all the artwork (drew the poster with pen and paper) and credits, we did our own promotion, didn’t apply to many festivals, and our friends took paycuts to play around and make something during the depression of a pandemic. I finished it up while I was working at Meta, and my Meta colleague Maple edited the movie.

THE END did pretty well. It premiered at HIFF, and also made it into one of my favorite film festivals, DOC NYC. I haven’t made any movies since 2022 because I started Feed Me two weeks later, but I’m very proud of the whole experience and I encourage anyone who wants to make a movie to make one.

I share this because I didn’t start writing on Substack in hopes of making it my full-time job — I was running several experiments at once. My day job at Meta, making movies with my friends, writing short stories on Substack for an audience of a few hundred, and I wasn’t sure which one would take off. I’m glad Feed Me did, but sometimes I miss when I had more free time to play and make things with my friends.

Last night’s first Monday Scaries screening at Cobble Hill Cinemas was a blast. chose our first movie, The Vanishing, and the theater was 90% full on a Monday night. Teddy and our friends grabbed drinks across the street at Congress Bar afterwards. If you come to the next Monday Scaries, hang out with us afterwards.

Today’s newsletter includes: The CEO of a shuttered fashion brand started a powdered gelatin company, an interview with Chanel’s President of Arts, Culture & Heritage, Nina Park’s new beauty line, New York City grandmas on Ozempic are causing friction with their daughters, Hillary Clinton joins the Vox family, DealBook’s 2026 lineup, and ’s conversation with Christoffer Lundman.

Beauty Independent reported that Nina Park, the celebrity makeup artist who launched thousands of tutorials on TikTok, is creating her own beauty line. Excellent news for those of us who have been trying to recreate Zoë Kravitz’s blurred lip for the last two years. “Competition is steep, and Park’s brand could enter a beauty market where makeup sales have been relatively soft,” Beauty Independent reported. “In the first half of 2026, prestige makeup registered the slowest dollar sales growth of any prestige beauty category, at 3%, compared to 11% for haircare, 9% for skincare and 6% for fragrance, according to Circana.” The advantage Park has on competition – similar to Fara Homidi and Gucci Westman and Bobbi Brown – is that she’s a makeup artist with a strong personal aesthetic, as opposed to a pop star or fashion house creating a beauty brand. The trademarks that Park has filed include cosmetics, makeup brushes, and bags for carrying makeup and toiletries.

GIRLS IS RETURNING. you’re going to have no problem getting through the gates of heaven.

New York City grandmas are on GLP-1s and can’t stop talking about it. Izzy Grinspan wrote about the complicated dynamics arising between mothers and daughters because of GLP-1 usage. One New York therapist said that parents are offering to pay their children to get on the drugs, and some women don’t even want their mothers to know when they go on the meds because it feels like giving in to the pressure. “It feels like something that will please their moms,” Zoë Bisbing, founder of Body Positivity Therapy, said, “and they don’t want to please their moms.” I was sad reading about one woman who said her mom doesn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner or make the same desserts with her anymore.

The Upper West Side is getting spoiled with new openings. First Lucia, then Wu’s Dynasty, now “Eataly Caffe.”

Hillary Clinton is launching a podcast with Vox. Her co-host? Kara Swisher. Clinton and Swisher will kick off their special midterms-focused limited series, “High Stakes,” on October 14, which will run as a third weekly episode of Swisher’s show, On With Kara Swisher. “Think of this series as Pivot [the twice-weekly podcast she does with Scott Galloway], but with an actual expert as my co-host,” Swisher said in the press release. On With Kara Swisher is currently hiring a Video Producer.

For someone who makes his own beer, and seemingly likes beer, Mark Zuckerberg sure kept that Guinness in his mouth for a lonnnngg time on a recent episode of Cheeky Pint.

Over the summer, I noticed an uptick in – brace yourselves – bovine gelatin content on my TikTok feed. The recipes, which involved fruit, powdered gelatin, and seeds, seemed to scratch a similar itch for viewers as 2020’s viral slime videos. Squishy colorful JELL-O, filled with fruits and seeds, popping out of different shaped molds. On top of that, women often bite into the gelatin shapes, resulting in the ASMR effect of mukbang videos. This morning, I became aware of a new CPG brand called Wobble – a modern gelatin mix. The $18 boxes of powdered bovine gelatin are made without artificial dyes or sugars, and join brands like Oddball and Gelée in the modern (luxuriously marketed) gelatin trend.

Now, some of you may remember that before Hailey Bieber’s rhode there was a clothing brand called Rhode, which was carried in stores like Net-a-Porter and Bergdorf Goodman. It closed down in 2024, after a two-year-long legal battle with rhode skin-care line over its shared name, which the designers claimed was “hurting our company, our employees, our customers and our partners.” After a bit of clicking around LinkedIn this morning, I learned that Wobble was started by Purna Khatau, the co-founder and former CEO of Rhode Clothing. David Kitz (who has also worked with Ghia and Unwell Beverages) shot the photos.

J.Crew and American Girl launched a collection of winter clothes for girls and dolls. Tiny sequin barn jacket!

Andrew Ross Sorkin announced the official lineup for the 2026 DealBook conference this morning. It includes Hailey Bieber, Sam Altman, David Ellison, and Elon Musk. Stacked.

Auralee’s Ryota Iwai and Salon C. Lundman’s Christoffer Lundman are collaborating on a collection. , one of my favorite menswear writers, published a great conversation with Lundman about the collection’s origin story, and how he approaches clothes. “Of course I care about how I dress, but it’s not the most important part of my morning. It isn’t for most people. So the essence of what I want to do is create clothes that make you feel comfortable. And the only image I want to portray is one of tenderness, and observation.”

Volume 02 of Chanel’s Arts & Culture magazine is out next week. I first learned about this publication over lox and toast with Yana Peel, Chanel’s President of Arts, Culture & Heritage, a few months ago at Chez Nous. This was last spring, and I’ve found myself flipping through Volume 01 since she sent me home with a copy. The magazine is a beast, both in size (300 pages) and editorial lift. Volume 02 includes new artwork by Cindy Sherman, an exploration of the formative work of Linder Sterling, and a conversation mediated by Merve Emre. To better understand why Chanel has made such an investment in this project, I spoke with Yana this week.

Emily Sundberg: Why does a luxury fashion house publish an art magazine?

Yana Peel: “The magazine grew out of our own love of magazines—and their wonderful ability to bring unexpected voices and ideas together in the same pages. We wanted to create a space for discovery and conversations that cross disciplines and generations. The magazine is an ode to the artists, leaders, and innovators we encounter in our work at CHANEL Culture Fund. It’s also an invitation to those who share our curiosity. We work with artists and cultural institutions around the world, and the magazine is a way to share some of those extraordinary ideas with a wider audience and advance our mission—to be the best partner in the arts. It is a platform for what artists are thinking about, questioning, and imagining next. And it’s free. Great ideas should travel!”

ES: The newest issue includes everyone from Cindy Sherman (on the cover), to Patti Smith, to Merve Emre (so excited about this one). Can you talk a little bit about how you assemble these features and conversations, and who made sense for this issue?

YP: “I’m a great believer in creative collisions—bringing together people who might never otherwise find themselves in the same room, let alone the same magazine. These junctions are where possibilities arise.

We don’t begin with a rigid theme, though our contributions intentionally connect back to the Culture Fund’s work. After an encounter at 12 Chairs on MacDougal Street in New York, Patti agreed to be our guest at the Venice Biennale dinner celebrating our Next Prize winners (ten artists redefining their field who each receive 100,000 euros). Her tribute to the artists on the night was an awe-inspiring bonus, and sharing her handwritten lyrics in the magazine was a natural extension. Similarly, we invited Merve to write for the magazine after she chaired our writers’ retreat at Gabrielle Chanel’s Riviera home, La Pausa, last year.

When someone becomes involved in our world, we weave these experiences back into the fabric of our work through the magazine. We love finding artists and thinkers who are challenging conventions. Cindy is a perfect example. We approached her to create a series of photographs using items from CHANEL’s archive, giving her complete freedom on the outcome. I love that she shares the pages with Patti Smith and Merve Emre—three fiercely original minds who see the world quite differently.”

ES: It’s been really exciting to see the resurgence of printed material in the fashion world. There were Ralph Lauren newspapers at the US Open, and Kallmeyer had magazines at their NYFW show. What do you hope people feel when flipping through this issue?

YP: “Curiosity! Surprise! The urge to put down their phones for an hour. In a world of increasingly fleeting images and shrinking attention spans, print offers something wonderfully countercultural: the invitation to slow down, look closely, and spend time with an idea. The print magazine is a place where we can give an artist 10 pages instead of 10 seconds. Time spent reading is such a gift—time to inhabit someone else’s mind, and time to expand or change your own.

I love the physicality of a magazine, too. The weight of the paper, images from different photographers, the act of flipping through the pages to discover something you didn’t know you were interested in. There’s a special thrill in boarding an airplane and pulling out my stack of magazines. When Hans Ulrich Obrist and I were partners at the Serpentine, we would have a mad ritual of tearing and exchanging articles that came from the magazines we packed into our overflowing carry-ons—on art, architecture, tech, philosophy, geopolitics, music, and more. To this day, our exchange continues. I’ll be on a flight to Seoul or a Eurostar to Paris and drop him a picture of my outrageous stack.

What do I hope? I hope people pick it up for Cindy Sherman and find themselves completely absorbed by someone they’ve never heard of. “What do you wish you knew more about?” is a prompt we ask throughout the issue. And I hope readers find discovery and delight.”

ES: How have your past jobs made you a better editor?

YP: “I’ve spent my career moving between worlds—finance, media, contemporary art, and now culture and heritage both—and, again, I’ve learned that some of the most interesting ideas emerge when worlds collide.

My time in finance taught me how to turn ambitious ideas into reality (on deadline), and my time leading arts institutions taught me when to create space for imagination to flourish. Success across industries (IMHO) is based on the people you invite into the room—creatives, thinkers, and colleagues. I work with the greatest team with the best instincts and the best taste!”

ES: I’m curious what magazines or books are currently on your nightstand.

My nightstand is heaving! Magazines: Neptune Papers, 032C, W Youth (giving me Sassy flashbacks in the best way), Alphabet (Donatien Grau is The Don!) Next up on my reading list are Stay True by Hua Hsu and Ari Emanuel’s Roll the Calls...it feels like those should balance one another!

ES: Favorite bookstore in New York and London? And can you give one more rec in an unexpected city?

YP: In London, I love Hatchards for books (the bookstore that Gabrielle Chanel returned to over and over to assemble her own library), and all of Gabe Chipperfield’s newsstands—especially my local, Foreign Exchange News in Bayswater. In New York, my neighborhood bookstore is McNally Jackson (where Vol. 2 of ARTS & CULTURE will be available for free starting October 23, along with the iconic Guggenheim Museum bookstore).

On the West Coast, Arcana in Culver City is a favourite for its out-of-print and rare titles. If you’re in Shanghai, you must stop by Bananafish, and of course, Espace Gabrielle Chanel at Power Station of Art—the first public contemporary art library in China.

Today’s newsletter includes: An independent publisher opening a book store in the East Village, a downtown soup tour, a scoop on Cosmo’s new in-house socialite/social editor, why some Kenyon College grads keep copies of Dune in their freezer, and Ruby Tandoh wrote intros for re-issued M.F.K. Fisher books, the results of a tastemaker influencer trip to Charleston, a 5 million euro wine heist, and Big Media continues to invest in Substack game plans.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani compared ICE’s recent shooting of a man in Manhattan last week (who was in the car with his five-year-old) to a mass shooting scene. “What you can see in that video and the videos that have been released since, people, bystanders outside [are] unsure as to what they were even seeing because in that imagery – it feels like you’re looking at a mass shooter as opposed to seeing someone who is reportedly representing a federal agency,” Mamdani said.

UK-based podcast production and distribution company Goalhanger has started to experiment with building creator-led brands on Substack. Today, they launched a new publication on Substack called by the journalist and commentator . Marina was a columnist at The Guardian for 25 years, until a few weeks ago. This venture is the first launch from Goalhanger X, “a new model for building complete media ecosystems around creators… Rather than starting with a single format or platform, each venture is built around the creator and their audience, with the potential to grow across publishing, social, audio, video, membership, live experiences, and new intellectual property.” Always On will span Marina’s new YouTube show and regular written columns on Substack, before expanding into further audio, video, and digital formats.

And The Ringer’s investment in Substack continues. Zach Lowe launched his NBA newsletter, , this morning. It’s all happening on Substack.

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My weekend plans include putting a dent in the Unwelcome Guests collection on Criterion, finishing Heavy Cream by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, and going to Jericho Cider Mill. I look forward to seeing some of you at the movies on Monday night in Cobble Hill.

Today’s newsletter includes: A statement from Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit expert on his absence, Anna Wintour’s former assistant is going to Polymarket, a dispatch from the new Teenage Engineering department store on Lafayette, returns from the Grand Central Oyster Bar with some oyster confessions, a job listing at one of the highest-grossing newsletters on Substack, and an interview with a New York City schoolteacher (and now author) about why children should learn about civics.

SHOP THE FEED ME MERCH STORE

Did You Know That There’s a Secret Menu at Grand Central Oyster Bar* By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he took a trip to the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

I have something to admit, I know I’ll lose some credibility, but I have to come clean. I like oysters but I don’t love them. I’m fine with two or three oysters, that’s enough for me. I’d rather have a shrimp cocktail. Oysters to me aren’t a food, they’re a ritual. No one has ever gotten full off of oysters, it’s impossible. Oysters are about how well they pair with wine, or a martini. Oysters are about getting the party started. Every meal should be a party. Not all parties need to be loud. There are very good oysters and then there’s everything else. Of course I love a good oyster, but most oysters are just ok. I love an oyster by the salty sea, no mignonette, maybe a squeeze of lemon. An oyster is always good on vacation, and an oyster is always good at sunset. I love the dressed oysters at Ha’s and at Neng’s. I love a little oyster that looks like a boxer’s fucked up ear. I like an oyster with a side of Guinness at Dean’s or Banshee or if you’re very lucky at Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Galway, Ireland. I recently had an impressively delicious oyster at The Lost Kitchen up in Maine. That said, I don’t need to eat an oyster at 169 Bar. I don’t need to eat an oyster to eat an oyster. I eat oysters to celebrate life.

There is no better place to eat an oyster in New York City than at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. Yes, there are better oysters, but there is no better oyster bar. The CGOB is topline essential. The GCOB is for the people. It’s for workers. It’s for commuters. It’s for locals and tourists alike. It’s been open since 1913. It seems like these days, I love saying that every dining room is the most impressive dining room in New York City. I said it about Marcel, and I said it about The Grill. I’m easily impressed, I love to love (I also love to hate). But the GCOB might actually be the most impressive dining room. It’s massive, domed, tiled, and subterranean. It’s in a fucking train station! There’s something so cool about eating in the train station. It’s a liminal space that’s neither here nor there. You’re either coming or going, and you’re on the clock. The GCOB is a stone in a fast flowing river. It’s an unmoving object in a field of perpetual motion. It’s an unblinking eye. The calories you consume at the GCOB don’t count, the martinis certainly don’t, they’re duty-free. (Makes you wonder why airport restaurants can’t be this good.)

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