Ponytail Picks #13 - Restaurants
What textures and flavours delighted our senses enough to make it onto our three-course menu this week? Read on, taste, and see.
LISTEN
Restaurant Songs for the 4 Seasons
Going out to eat in a restaurant isn’t just about the food, or else you could just get take-out to bring home. It’s about the sounds, the sights, the place—the entirety of the wholly unnecessary yet positively pleasurable experience of being “somewhere else” to fulfill one of our most basic human needs.
With this in mind, I came up with four songs to soundtrack four different restaurant experiences in each of the four seasons:
Summer
Gotta go back to my man Jamison here as he provides a sultry, slick electronic track perfect for a warm summer night out at a hip bar and grill. As the synths rise and fall the excitement builds—you’re looking amazing and you smell way better than you usually do. The bass line subtly builds as you meet up with your greatest friends and take the train into the heart of downtown. The place is alive. The guitar lick at the 2-and-a-half-minute mark tastes almost as good as the drink you just downed. The beat thumps in without hesitation as laughs and tears rain down upon the table now filled with empty glasses and souls poured out. You take a step back—holy shit, you love these people. Your buzz is perfect. You order a giant plate of nachos to go around and you fucking demolish it in 10 minutes.
Fall
The lights are low and you’re in love—with the person across from you but also this spread at a top notch Italian joint the city over from your hometown. Red wine aplenty and plates piled with pasta and bread and sauce. You chuckle with your lover over shared “kinky thoughts” and cheerily chat about your plans for later that night and later in your life. The drive home vibes are the perfect balance between contented companionship and butterfly-stomach romance. You’re already dreaming about the leftovers you’re gonna eat for lunch together tomorrow. There’s a hand on your leg and you think to yourself, “No one can be happier than me.”
Looking for a thirst-quenching newsletter to go along with this edition of Ponytail Picks? These past posts pair nicely with our foodie theme.
Winter
It’s a bitterly cold night. You had a stressful day at work and to make matters worse, the heat in your apartment is broken. This calls for a dinner out at the local family restaurant with your sympathetic partner. The place is nothing fancy but it’s familiar and warm and the comfort food on the menu hits the spot. You pour your heart out to your partner over a juicy burger and some yam fries and as the server brings your check to the table and asks you how your meal was, you realize that you feel both satisfyingly filled up and emptied at the same time. On the walk back to the car you cling to your companion. “Don’t you let me go, let me go tonight.”
Spring
Only master of chill Kurt Vile can get away with opening up an album with a casually massive nine-and-a-half-minute folk rock jam. It’s the perfect soundtrack for starting your day in a lazy way, sleeping in and going out for a leisurely brunch at 10AM with your best friend. It’s clouds and sun and you walk not run to the small and well-reviewed independent breakfast & lunch joint just a few blocks away. Your friend’s already there and they’ve managed to get the table right by the big window looking outside. Coffee, hashbrowns, eggs, sausages, you get the works. Soft rock is playing over the speakers and your friend is chatting about the latest book they read. You spare a glance out at the sunny street and think to yourself with a little smile, “Don't know why I ever go away.”
-JB
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WATCH
A Show About a Restaurant that Demonstrates the Value of Fiction
The Bear, Disney+
When it comes to this show, some of you won’t know what I’m talking about. Others will think that bringing up The Bear for this week’s “restaurants” theme is a little too on-the-nose. But there’s something about it that makes me think, who cares. It lets “Enthusiastic Andrew” drown out my inner critic.
The first thing I heard about this show was about the buzz about it online. They brought it up on a segment of q, and Tom Power said he’d heard about it from friends in the restaurant industry who referenced a shot of the lead character, Carmy, taking a smoke break in the back alley and drinking water from what they call a “deli” in the biz: a quart-sized plastic container. That’s a long sentence. How could I’ve organized my thoughts better? I don’t know. And I’m using the word “about” a lot. Basically, the noise about the show (there it is again) focused on how accurate it feels to real life in a kitchen.
This accuracy was not a happy accident. Canada’s jolly punk-chef Matty Mattheson plays a character in the show. Courtney Storer, a chef who worked at a swanky restaurant called John & Vinny’s in L.A., is the showrunner’s sister. Jeremy Allen White, who plays Carmy, spent a bunch of time lurking in the back of a place called Pasjolie (also in L.A.). They did their homework.
I don’t know much about this world (there’s that fucking word again! About, about, about) besides what you get from watching Chef’s Table or the Food Network, but when Mr. Power brought up the “deli” drinking vessel, it brought me right back to a recent experience I had in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia.
My wife, Erica, and I went to the Maritimes recently for a vacation and had some of the best food of our lives while over there. Mallard Cottage and Portage in St. John’s; Fork in Mobile; Blue Mussel Cafe in North Rustico; Bar Kismet, The Canteen, Dear Friend, and The Narrows Public House in and around Halifax; not to mention the wine at Benjamin Bridge, the beer at Bannerman and 2 Crows, and the cocktails wherever we could find them. These were all highly rated, Bourdain-approved, and/or run by Top Chef winners. We went into each of them with high expectations and none of them disappointed.
Lunenberg was one of our last stops on the trip, and after the food experiences we’d already had, my inner critic worried that the small, touristy harbour town I knew very little about (fuck it) wouldn’t be able to keep up. That voice shut up pretty quick after we had a few drinks and appetizers at Bar Salvador and then hopped across the street to sit at The Beach Pea. I’m not going to bore you by listing these places from best to worst, mostly because I don’t think I could. All I will say is that The Beach Pea could stand confidently next to the establishments mentioned above, some of which you can find on the official “Canada’s 100 Best” list (and some of which should be on there, but that’s for another day).
It was at The Beach Pea, while eating some of the best gnocchi of my life, that my eyes wandered to the kitchen. Four men my age or younger, each working comfortably around each other in a tight space, looked content in their positions, the fast pace of a full restaurant seeming more like a sanctuary to them. From my point of view, it was difficult to land definitively on who ran the show. And in a small lull in the hustle of it all, one of them lifted this quart-sized plastic container full of water to his lips and took a sip.
This gets me to my point about (ABOUT) fiction. I watched Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Newfoundland. I watched Ross Larkin win Top Chef. I watched John Catucci hear Newfoundlanders tell him why Mallard Cottage is the place to be. None of this “reality” or documentary television represented life in the restaurant industry nearly as accurately as The Bear.
And it’s not just the restaurant or the kitchen or the difference between The French Laundry and a hole in the wall. The Bear, with its long takes and fast cuts, zooms in on moments that make it feel—while meticulously crafted—more true to life than any “real” or non-fiction story could ever dream of feeling.
On Disney+, where you can find the show in Canada, The Bear is listed as a comedy. After watching a few episodes, you might feel like that was a mistake. It’s definitely not funny the way, say, Seinfeld is funny. It’s not even funny in the way Little Miss Sunshine or Garden State is funny. But the show has its own sense of humour. It relies on a relatable irony that might not give you the LOLs, but will definitely stick with you long after you shut down the screen.
Episodes are currently being released on Wednesdays, and we’re ABOUT half way through the first season. But beware: the show originally aired on Hulu in the States, and all eight episodes are up there, so spoilers abound online. Like a lot of great content, it’s best to go into The Bear blind. Case in point: I still have no idea why it’s called The Bear.
-AK
READ
For this segment, I (Joel) recruited my partner Rachel Navarro to be a guest contributor. She’s a writer, a foodie, and a bookworm, with experience in the restaurant and hospitality industry to boot, so I figured she’d be a perfect fit. I’m biased of course, but I think I figured right.
Three books with restaurants at the heart of the story
Everyone has a restaurant story. Maybe it’s that favourite breakfast place your grandparents always took you to for pancakes, the hole-in-the-wall where you got your late-night study snacks in college, or the candle-lit dining room where you celebrated a romantic milestone. But step behind the counter, don a server’s apron or chef’s hat, and everything changes; suddenly you are a part of creating those moments for others. As someone who worked in the restaurant industry, these stories resonate deeply. However, even if you never worked as a hostess at Ricky’s All Day Grill, the well-rounded characters and compelling plot lines in these three novels are sure to captivate—and make you drool!
The Late Bloomers’ Club by Louise Miller
The Miss Guthrie, the only diner in the small Vermont town, doesn’t just serve up tasty eats. Its counter is also where town officials gather to unofficially make major decisions over stacks of pancakes and runny eggs—always overheard by the Miss Guthrie’s owner, Nora Huckleberry. It’s a comfortable routine for all, until the death of local baker Peggy the cake lady sets off a chain of events that could change her life and the way of life for everyone in this tightly-knit town.
With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
In the life of Emoni Santiago, high school senior and single mother, the restaurant kitchen is a place of potential like she’s never known. Cooking has always been a place of peace, creative energy, and magic—an escape from the reality of her circumstances. But in a new culinary arts class offered at school, the magic she feels in her home kitchen is amplified. The promise of a future in restaurants brings Emoni to life, so much so that she dares to dream again—dreams of more for her daughter and for herself.
Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala
Lila Macapagal moves home to suburban Chicago to help out her family’s struggling Filipino restaurant, Tita Rosie’s Kitchen. Then disaster strikes when her ex-boyfriend dies eating the dessert she serves him at the restaurant! As she investigates to clear her name, Lila smells something sinister in the stories of the other local ethnic restaurants—something that threatens her immigrant family’s ability to survive.
(A personal note: As someone raised on the stories of my great-grandma’s legendary restaurant in Pampanga, Philippines, and someone who watched her relatives hustle to make it in Canada despite the obstacles immigrants face, this one holds a special place for me. But Manansala does a great job of making it accessible for any reader with a glossary of terms and explanations of cultural customs you need to know for the story to make sense).
Pick one off the list and enjoy a tasty tale! Bonus marks if you try one of the recipes from these books: burnt sugar cake with maple icing, lemon verbena tembleque, or chicken/pork adobo!
-RN
Thanks for stopping by! We’d love to have you again. Next time, please come sharply dressed with your pencils sharpened and your Marx in hand as we get into all things
That Teen Daze song is fantastic!