Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last week we covered the World Cup’s tourism bubble
The weather is warm in New York, and I had my first oysters of the season last night at Bar Susanne, the new spot from Jackie Carnesi, who also runs the historic Kellogg’s Diner. The oysters were perfect—briny and sweet—but the real coup was the giant, fish-shaped strawberry tart for dessert. This is all to say: Summer is here, folks! Get thee to a raw bar!
Now for the news. (Well, “news.”) One small item that tickled me this week: Los Angeles mayoral candidate, former reality TV star, and famously bad budgeter Spencer Pratt—you may remember him from The Hills—has not one but two dishes named after him at Don Antonio’s, a restaurant on the west side of LA. It’s where a few important moments from the show took place, and according to this excellent piece in Vanity Fair, Pratt is still a regular all these years later.
In other Los Angeles news: If you spend $15,000 a year at Erewhon, you can get your smoothie made before anyone else’s, Eater reported. That is just one of the perks of the reserve tier of the chain’s membership program. That’s, what, a single strawberry a month?
Also this week: There’s PFAS drama brewing in the pots-and-pans-iverse, AI is failing home cooks (and many others), we remember Slow Food pioneer Carlo Petrini, and Michelin quietly institutes some changes to its stars.
In 2020, the Michelin Guide introduced Green Stars as a way to honor chefs’ sustainability efforts. Previous winners include The Inn at Little Washington, Kaya in Orlando, and Dan Barbour’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns. But just six years later, the guide is retiring this designation—you won’t see a green star on any of those restaurant’s listings on the Michelin website. Sustainable chefs the world over are pretty pissed off, but as I reported a couple years ago, Michelin’s main priority these days seems to be expanding into new territories. Instead of a Green Star, Michelin will be introducing Mindful Voices, an editorial platform to “share the stories and pioneering practices of chefs, hoteliers, and wine producers.”
One interesting tidbit: Eliminating the Green Star must have been a very recent decision. I received an email from a PR person as recently as April announcing the awards in one US state, which specifically mentions Green Stars. Much to ponder!
Big Pan strikes again. Caraway, a cookware brand, is being sued by two other cookware companies—Groupe SEB USA and Meyer—because it advertises its pans as free from “toxic” chemicals (PFAS), as Wired reported. PFAS, colloquially known as “forever chemicals,” break down very slowly and are linked to health issues. The gist of the suit is that if Caraway calls its pans free of toxic chemicals, it’s implying that the chemicals other companies use are toxic—which isn’t strictly proven. Between us girls, I’d skip Caraway and go with GreenPan anyway.
It’s been a banner week for AI haters, e.g., yours truly. Starbucks has retired its AI inventory system after it screwed up tracking inventory, and Uber burned through its yearly AI budget in a few months—the company is saying AI spending is “harder to justify.”
