510: Former Michelin Inspector Speaks! Plus, a Food Writing State of the Union with Mahira Rivers.

26:59So that's been really fun to cook with her in the kitchen. But yeah, I make dinner all the time. But it does skew very heavily Asian food. I mean, it all sounds very delicious. And I love the idea of her having nacho night as her domain. I think as a kid, I would make salad dressing. That was like the first thing that my parents had me do. And they sat through a lot of me thinking that ketchup was a good addition to salad dressing, which maybe as an adult, I could make that work. Yeah. I think like it's really interesting, especially in a city like New York or Hong Kong or a lot of these international cities where kids are exposed to so much different kinds of food, like how you cultivate that home cooking sense as well.

27:40And like how you bring that home, because something that I love about people who have grown up in New York is that everything is like in the domain of our food, like sushi is our food and Chinese food is our food. And going out for these things is just as ordinary as what you might think should be your food if you like have, you know, very specific, you know, background. But it was less so in Hong Kong, I will say, like, it is a predominantly Chinese city. I did go into an international school. So it was always curious, like, what is the home life like? Because it's very different for all of the my classmates.

28:19It was very different. But my parents are obviously Pakistani and they grew up there. And so there was a heavy, heavy British colonial influence in our eating at home as well. So like Christmas puddings and lamb with mint sauce and mulled wine. Christmas to me randomly is like a really big deal for that reason, I think. Yeah, that's so interesting. I want to play a little taste check game to close. Before we do that, I want to know where you go to eat in New York when you want to eat good Cantonese food. Ooh, good Cantonese food. Do you do dim sum? We do dim sum, definitely. And Dim Sum Garden, randomly, is a chain, but it's quite good.

29:04There's also a place near Madison Square Park called Dim Sum Sam, which we like. In Chinatown, Dim Sum Go-Go has kind of been the perennial favorite for a long, long time. But yeah, Dim Sum Garden. It's been like surprisingly good. I'll have to go there. I go to House of Joy as my like go-to dim sum, mostly because I have a friend from Hong Kong who kind of like holds court there on weekends. So I just go so that I don't have to order anything and someone can just whisk all the steamer baskets over to me. Is that in Brooklyn? No, it's in Chinatown. It's like kind of further south in the older part of Chinatown.

29:42Yeah. If you ever want to go on a Saturday, let me know. Yeah, I'm down. Okay, so now I'm going to play this taste check game with you. So I'll give you a category and you just tell me the first answer that pops into your head. Okay, favorite New York City restaurant? Yellow Rose. A restaurant from Hong Kong that you wish was here? Ooh, Yatlock. It's like a roast goose. Yum. Yeah. Your favorite New York City bakery? It has to be Lise. What do you like to get there? um so the milfoy it's the laminated pastry with cream it is the best i've ever had in the world hands down and it is um she's a really talented pastry chef and also the travel cakes for some reason they're just like really plain butter cakes but they're so good so yeah love it i really want to go there in the summer next time because i missed it this year but they do like a corn dessert that looks exactly like an ear of corn and there's something about that that i'm just now fixated on.

30:39Did you have that? I did. I've tried it. And I love like the meticulous sort of craft of it. And I think a lot of her really, really fancy desserts are beautiful and delicious, but she's also just great at the classics and like the simple things are amazing there too. Okay. Your favorite bakery in Hong Kong? So this is a place that doesn't exist as much anymore because like New York, Hong Kong is very transient. But it was a place called Hui Laoshan, which is a mango cafe. So everything mango, like in the drinks, in the dessert, ice cream, jelly, aloe, like all of it was mango themed. And randomly, it actually exists in New Jersey.

31:22They have an outlet there at the American Dream Mall, which I discovered. And I was so happy because it's closed a lot of its outlets in Hong Kong itself. So that was really cool. But if I were to go somewhere today, when I go home, There's a place called Happy Bakery, wonderful name. It's in Wan Chai on Queens Road East. And it's like your quintessential Cantonese bakery with like the egg tarts, the pineapple buns, the sponge cakes. And it's also good. My eyes got so big when you said mango everything. And the fact that it's in New Jersey at the American Dream Mall, like that is my American dream probably is eating mango everything.

32:00OK, your go to bodega snack. Oh, I don't know. It's the spicy bull deck carbonara. I just tried that for the first time. It is amazing. And it is so, I don't know why, but I love it. And every time I see someone eating it on TikTok or something, I'm like, I need to eat that right now. So my bodega has a stash. Hot tip. Yeah. Okay. Your go-to bagel order. I love a whole wheat, everything flat, toasted with cream cheese. And I feel like that's terrible and everyone's going to yell at me, but it's a good order. You're sticking to it. I'm sticking to it. It's good. A now closed restaurant anywhere in the world that you wish you could bring back from the dead?

32:41There's a place that, so Ma Pesh used to be around Midtown here. That was a Momofuku restaurant. But within Ma Pesh, there was a counter. And the chef, Paul Carmichael, he used to be at that counter. And he left and was cooking in Sydney for a minute. But I think he's finished in Sydney and is somehow, I don't know, somewhere back in the States. But anyway, he had this limited chef's counter before that was a thing. And he did a tasting menu there. And he's from Barbados. And so his whole menu was like heavily influenced by the Caribbean. And I just remember sitting at that counter and like we were like pounding out our own mofongo as part of this meal.

33:24And it was just unlike anything I had ever experienced by husband's half Puerto Rican. He was like, this is amazing. And like we were just and he's such a cool guy. Like Paul is such a cool chef. His vibe is so chill. And he brought that to the table. And it was just such an amazing experience. So the food was great. The vibe was great. And I miss that restaurant. Paul, bring it back. You know, he's like opening a new restaurant here in the city, right? When though? I've heard, but I don't know when. I just did like the quickest Google of my life. Hold on. Let me see if I can find it. Well, in June, they said that he's going to open a new Momofuku restaurant in the East Village location of the old Momofuku.

34:03Okay. They say this fall. I don't know what that actually means in restaurant time, but I'm really excited for you that at least he's going to be not in Australia and back in New York. A hundred percent. I mean, I've been scheming how to get to Australia to go to the restaurant, but that hasn't panned out for me. So this is better. If you wait long enough, everything comes back to New York. Always. Right. Center of gravity. Your favorite cookbook. I love Brave Tart by Stella Parks. The most underrated piece of kitchen equipment. I would have to say it is a tiny baby spatula. My daughter was gifted one years ago for Christmas, and I stole it.

34:41And now I use it for everything from making marinades to making eggs. Something that you will never make from scratch. I will never make a croissant. I love Clara Saffitz, but no, I'm going to go buy one every time. Yeah, you know where to go also. Okay, and finally, a fictional food scene from a book or a movie that you wish you could eat in real life. I love all Hayao Miyazaki films, and I grew up on them. And there's one scene out of many in the film La Puta, which was Castle of the Sky or Castle in the Sky here. And I don't know, there was just this banquet scene or this feast scene where this like pirate woman was feasting on ham and all kinds of things.

35:22And just the way that food looked, I loved it. I wish I could be there. Well, I love that example. And it's been so fun talking with you, Mahira. I'm very hungry, so I think it's time for us to go. Thank you for having me. This was so much fun.

35:43Jordan Michaelman, welcome back to This Is Taste. How are you, my friend? I'm so good, and I'm thrilled to be back on the show. Love the show, Matt. Frequent guest, but even more frequent listener in my personal life. So I'm excited to be back. Well, it's kind of you to say. And really, I love working with you on Taste. And we've worked on some memorable stories this year. And I wanted to go over a couple of them and have you back because you're a great, great, great convo. But first, I have to know. Yes. What have you been enjoying recently in Portland, your hometown, restaurant-wise? Oh, my God.

36:21Well, so, you know, right now here for my local, I do some work for, like, the Glossy Magazine here in the city, the Portland monthly magazine. And they've had me tromping around town, seeing a bunch of stuff the last month or two. I wrote about a really cool, very kind of chic, contemporary, interesting, I would almost say nationally notable new wine bar that just opened here called Fancy Baby, which is like pretty over the top in terms of what they have on their wine list and what they're pouring by the glass. And they've got kind of DJs and it feels really interesting and sometimes out here we'll say, like, doesn't feel like you're in Portland.

37:01And people usually mean that as a compliment, you know, it's sort of like a provincial self-owned compliment kind of a thing. But this place really does have a little bit of a feel of like, you could be in London, you could be in Paris or New York or LA or one of these sort of bigger places. And I think that place is really cool, really a lot of fun. I've also been spending a bunch of time writing and hanging around at this new, kind of like a dive bar sports bar thing but with really good food called jerry's tavern the guy has a big following here for making like midwest style kind of tavern pizzas like cracker crust flat tavern pizzas he's from northwest illinois and his wife is from wisconsin and they're running this kind of like wisconsin illinois bar but it's cool it looks like it's been there for 75 years and it's been opened for like eight months wow jerry with the with the old school patina and i love to see that my beloved midwestern pie is touching shores it's not just new york it's on it's on the west coast too he's also making great wings and you know um uh cheese curds and some of this kind of stuff he does like the perfect like the fruit muddled old-fashioned the brandy old-fashioned and stuff and uh the best bloody mary that anybody has i think ever served in the city of portland they're making at jerry's so those are like those are like the wisconsin food groups like the brand new fashion the the bloody mary wings and taversau pizza yeah but he's doing a great job with it and it's really fun and packed busy really popular and successful which i think sometimes um it isn't as important as it should be for when we think about stuff to write about and i think it's fun to um have a place that's like interesting in all these ways but it's also like a hit yeah well i also i i peeked at your social i follow you and and you've got a really really fun feed of of travel you're always traveling um and just like you you have a really great sense of style with your social you gotta follow jordan on instagram just putting that plug in here but i peeked that you were at the chateau marmont in la spending some time there so please give me the scene check and did you go to the gq party there so i uh so i was there for a week working on the second draft of a novel that i have been working on in drips and drabs for a couple of years but really did a ton of work on this year in 2024 and um now into the second draft part of it which is very interesting and hard and fun and um i wanted to go hide out somewhere for a week and just kind of do nothing but work and the chateau is sort of famously a place where people go and do that and if you sort of look back through the history there's so much i mean everything from duke ellington to um you know i mean they did all the rehearsals for rebel without a cause there all this kind of amazing art has been made and created at that hotel but it's also a scene you know and it's like the kind of place where like this is not a hotel lobby where you can go down in your jammy it's like it's it's very fashion show like it's very just chic chic chic and they're sort of expected to keep up keep up the vibe a little bit so some of it made me feel a little bit like a hayseed at times but like in an interesting way you know it's like i'm northwestern guy my flannel in my head you know like it um but it's like cool it was very different than um even in la places that i've like spent a lot of time at or hung around or whatever and um very creative and interesting and like so haunted and just kind of vibrational with like all the art and culture that like happens there and of course all famously to kind of all the deals and so forth that go on.

40:41And yeah, it was a trip. It was really interesting. Definitely memorable and fruitful for me. What's the food like there? You know, I've heard that the restaurant is both good and terrible. So, and maybe there's an in-between. So did you have any food there? I did, yeah. I kind of didn't leave the building. Like I went out the last night with some friends and we went to Major Domo in LA, which I think is one of the best restaurants in the country. Absolutely. The Momofuku that they opened in LA. it's like uh that place is like you know like um colonists gone lost on mars right and they've kind of built their own culture like it's so it's whole own thing what they do at majordomo and for taste listeners like maybe if you haven't been in a little while or you've never been to to that oh it's so great it's one of my favorite restaurants in the country like i just had this killer killer awesome dinner there that was exciting like going to some bar felt you know 10 years ago 15 years ago like i just was i really had such a great time i fully agree i went last summer and i had the same experience so great yeah at the chateau you know i like there's cool drinks and there's some nice food like you know my room service burger was great like that kind of stuff was was awesome and i think it's doing a good job but it's also everyone there is sort of so impossibly chic like it's hard to want to eat like i don't know if it's a foodie place like i don't hashtag foodie like i don't know if it's got the same f and b thing as it does this like like, amazing arts and culture thing.

42:08Like, the food that you're eating is interesting. And I had good food and really good drinks. I think the bar program there is actually really smart and good. But the conversation you get to sort of overhear or, like, the people that are there, which, of course, you have to act like isn't a big deal because that's part of the sort of social code of those places. You can't act like you care or notice who's sitting there. But that's the really delicious thing that's going on at the restaurant at the Chattano is, like, all just the vibe of it and who's there and what the conversations you get to overhear are and who you're back in the little cigarette nook with if you go back to the little cigarette nook for a minute.

42:44That whole thing, that's the real knife and fork of it. I love that. I've been to the bungalow a couple of times, the bungalows, but I've never stayed the night. Were you in the tower or were you in the bungalows? I was in the tower. I had a little junior suite that opened out. I had a little balcony that opened out. Ooh, Jordan. It was extremely chill. Yeah, I pretty much didn't leave. And I think also for like going to a place where you're you're going to high key not leave. I mean, I didn't even run a car, which is crazy in L.A. I did not have a car. I didn't even run a car. I was just pretty much just there.

43:15And and it was great. I also say like the Chateau is famous for the staff being awesome for the staff kind of having this like crazy Venn diagram of like everybody is so cool and so chic, but they're also really warm and nice and like will take care of you. And like that feel of that being there for a couple of days was really special and really is a real thing. Very cool. Well, thanks for the scene check. Appreciate it, buddy. I wanted to have you on to talk about some recent stories that you've written for Taste. And one that really comes to mind is this profile you wrote about Jesse Appel, you know, of Jesse's Tea House.

43:52It's a really fun portrait for a guy who is really thirsty for quality tea. and also a little thirsty for social media amplification, which I think is a beautiful thing in our world of food. What did you learn from Jesse and really the way he's spreading the tea gospel around the world? Yeah, I think, you know, with Taste, we've done, you know, a half dozen of these kinds of stories now where it's like food influencers that we think are good. Like there's so much food content on social media and so much drinks content on social media. And I don't think all of it is good, but there's some people that are doing awesome work in that media and have really kind of built worlds around themselves in those mediums.

44:36And Jesse is really the guy for tea in the English language world for tea. um he is you know by any kind of reasonable add up a follower count the most followed most influential t t content creator communicator whatever you want to call it you know in in the world in the english-speaking world and um he's got a really big following a lot of what he's doing is very sort of basic education stuff i think he and a lot of people in t world will sort of have the same conversations about this is they're trying to bring education up a little bit from like a tea bag with a splash of milk, right? Like there's this baseline of how we think about tea in the quote unquote West that's really, really low.

45:19And then there's this whole other universe of tea culture and tea appreciation in China and Taiwan, Japan, that is this other galaxy of like how high that level goes and how culinary it is and how like intense it is and interesting it is and how it's dug into culture and all these kinds of ways. So he's really educating. And sometimes that's by talking. And a lot of times it's by showing. Like he takes his account to interesting places. And like sometimes he's brewing cool tea in his apartment. And then sometimes it'll be like him with this like amazing tea trader in Beijing. And they're like having the entire conversation in Chinese because he speaks fluent Chinese.

46:01And like there's just it's a lot of fun to follow. And I was a fan first for a while before I was like, OK, I want to dig into this guy a little deeper in a story and sort of learn his story and learn about his world a little bit, because I think it's really interesting. He's he's walking a really tight line with what he does. And he's also he's a comedian. He's really funny and interesting and just had a lot to kind of dig into and talk about. Yeah, I love the profile. I think you can really tap into his personality a bit in the in the short profile. And also, I checked out his YouTube and fully, fully want to start getting into my teabag, so to speak.

46:41I'm very novice. And let me ask you yourself, like you run Sprudge, you co-founded it. It's a very influential, if not the most influential coffee platform in the world. And it's terrific work. Was tea a natural progression for you to start being interested in? Sort of. You know, the first big tea story that we ever did on Sprudge was about this place called Song Tea in San Francisco. And this was back in maybe, I don't know, 2015 or 2016. And it was because we had started noticing them as being the tea that was getting served at all these great coffee shops we liked throughout California and then even up here in Oregon.

47:24And it had almost become this kind of like, I don't know. You know, once upon a time in coffee, if you walked into a cafe and they had certain types of gear, like if they had a certain espresso machine or they'd served certain styles of coffee, you could bet that that was going to be a great cafe. But as special third wave coffee, whatever you want to call it, got more and more popular in the 2010s, you started to kind of have to look for other tells that a cafe was like a really serious cafe. and this song tea company in San Francisco became one of those tells we just started noticing it at all these awesome coffee shops and we're like huh that's interesting what's the story you know let's dig into that a little bit and you know so we went and met the guy and like I sat down and had like a tea you know session with him and he did his like his gong fu cha like he brewed all of his tea you know using ceramics and this very kind of personal handmade style where you just sit across from somebody and they're brewing lots of things and doing multiple steeps and tasting.

48:20And it just absolutely, you know, just absolutely got my cookies off, man. It really blew my mind. And I was like, wow, this is, you know, holy shit. And, and, and, um, and that started me being like, wow, I got to do this all the time. Like I want this, you know, to drink it. And then I think from there, you know, you kind of write your life, right? Like you get into stuff and And then eventually you're going to write stories about it. And now at this point, I've written a lot of, you know, a good chunk of tea stories over the last like six, seven years. But it was really it came from us seeing it at these coffee shops and being like, we keep seeing this brand.

48:56What is up with this? And going from there. Love that. And, you know, I want to also ask you about in America, and this relates to your profile of Jesse. It seems like in America, no time has been better to drink quality tea and get it via either brick and mortar retail or, of course, online through subscription or just one-off buying. What is your assessment of the American tea drink right now? And do you see any slight echoes about specialty coffee in maybe the late 2000s and onward? Is this like a sleeping giant in our country? Or on the flip, is it always going to have a very particular audience?

49:33And is there always gonna be a great barrier because of that whole teabag with milk persona about tea? You know, I think that the answer is somewhere in between those things. That whatever zeitgeisty thing that happened with specialty coffee in the late aughts is in many ways a product of that period of time as much as it's related back to the actual what was being drunk. And it's a very different world now than it was 15 years ago in so, so, so, so, so many different ways. But I will say that tea, you know, sort of serious tea drinking, kind of Chinese-style tea drinking in America, it's definitely a subculture.

50:15Tea consumption in America, though, when you expand that out to things like bubble tea and the rest of it, is one of the fastest-growing drink categories in the country. and there's all different kinds of statistics that people have pulled about about like Gen Z especially being really turned on to tea drinking. And I do think some of that is through kind of generations of like bubble tea culture in America now and the really high-end culinary world of bubble tea in America as sort of a driver for that stuff. But there's also places that are doing it a little bit more seriously, this like approach of saying, look, how do we make this more accessible for people of high-end tea in America?

50:50But it's a subculture too and insular as a subculture. And I've been to some of the big tea conventions and things and stuff. And those are definitely, I mean, it is a world into itself and kind of cloistered in a way. So I think both things are true and neither of the things are true. Tea's really got its own track in America. I see what Jesse's doing and stuff like what Jesse's doing as being really, really important for exposing more people to it. But I will say I think that more people get turned on to it. They're like, oh, I got to have this in my life. Like I drink a shit ton of tea. I probably drink as much tea as I drink coffee.

51:29And I'm the guy from Sprudge. So like tea just has a way of taking over your brain or at least it did for me. And it's something that I really care about a lot. And I hope that you are able to have experiences with it that freak you out. There's some great tea houses in New York that you can go to. I mean, you should go to that Tay company first and foremost, if you haven't been recently and just go geek out with them on their like oolong trip. Like there's it's it makes your life better. It makes your brain better. It's really good for your brain. There's just like so much to recommend about it.

51:59I love that, Jordan. Thank you for the wreck. And I definitely haven't been to Tay in a while. And I I want to I want to make that a 2025 resolution to dig into tea a little bit more and maybe have some tea folks on the show. All right. Yeah, that's cool. I want to segue. I want to segue. Eliza and I have been going over some of our favorite stories of the year. And one that popped up was your essay about mineral water. And really, Jordan, you've written a number of stories about mineral water. You wrote a great piece for Punch. You won a James Beard Award for it. It is a terrific piece. And you kind of you followed it up with this piece on taste about this incredible world of water that you've been following.

52:40But you you kind of come to the conclusion that nobody really cares to some extent. Tell us a little bit about about mineral water in America right now and and really why people actually should care. Well, people should care because it's delicious. And that's the biggest thing. I mean, you know, you can talk about all the different kinds of stuff of health benefits. It's like God's Gatorade, you know, the electrolytes and minerals and all this different kinds of stuff. But it's really this this culinary thing, right? It's like how delicious the different sort of site specific mineral waters are and how beautifully they pair with food.

53:17And just this idea that having the stuff in the rotation of your life makes your life better and more delicious. So people have access to, you know, pretty good tap water in America. But then there's this whole other category of bottled water. And when you travel, maybe you get exposed to it. You know, in Europe, maybe, you know, like if you go to Italy, it's like cool restaurants are all sort of in like a battle somewhere like Italy over like who's pouring really cool Italian, you know, sparkling water, you know, who's pouring really cool bottled water. It's like that in England, too. All this amazing bottled water that they have in England.

53:48And there's a little bit of a culture for it. We don't have that same culture here in America. And there's reasons for that. Some of it is the access to tap water. Some of it is the telescoping and the kind of control, the like hegemony that like some of the very large, you know, Nestle owned brands have over bottled water at even the best restaurants in America. and um it's something that like i guess i've started looking into it and i've kind of fallen down you know my own world of being obsessed with it and drinking it all the time um and i want other people to get into it and be excited about it but it is a little bit of an uphill battle um and maybe i thought i would have grown more over the last five years but you know the last five years have also been extremely fucked with the pandemic and all the rest of it and stuff so it's hard to judge it, you know, just all things being equal.

54:39Yeah. The grip of that big green bottle, which will remain unnamed on American Fine Dining, and they, of course, do the big awards as well, is clear and unfortunate because if you do travel to Greece or Italy or Spain or England, you're going to get localized water. You're going to get water that has a lot of, I would say, minerality. It's going to have different levels of carbonation. And that leads to my question, how do you taste mineral water? What are you looking for in good mineral water, both flat and bubbly? And also, what should we be drinking? Well, I think the biggest thing is letting yourself not think about it as one type of thing.

55:21It's letting yourself think about it as every single one of these waters having their own sort of typicity and perfect moment. Same way you think about wine. You know, it's like asking, well, what do you think about drinking a wine? It's like, well, do you mean a red wine or a white wine or a sparkly wine? Or what's the season and what's the moment for it? And what are you pairing it with? You know, water has so much differentiation across the different styles of it. And really what you're talking about with that is like TDS, right? The amount of minerality, total dissolved solids in a given bottle of water.

55:54So some have a ton of minerality in them and are really salty and are almost kind of oily and thick. And there's like the right kind of moments for drinking those. And some are like super light and clean and taste like it's raining outside and you went out and like stuck your tongue out and drank rainwater and everything in between, all of that kind of stuff. So it's really about being able to try different things and, you know, learn what the moments are for them. You know, for me, I think one of the biggest light switch moments you can kind of have is buy a bottle of Vichy Catalan mineral water, which is a naturally sparkling water.

56:29It means it comes out of the earth with carbon dioxide in it bubbling. Natural sparkling mineral water from Spain. And have it with a steak. Pour that. You could even have it in a wine glass. Have it like you would a glass of wine next to a really nice piece of steak. And the saltiness and the creaminess and the sort of textural thickness of that water, how it tastes with steak is profound. And then if you really want to trip yourself out, keep like, you know, a cup or two of it at the end and freeze it and then use those ice cubes and make martinis with it. Like use that in your build for a cocktail and have that be the dilution.

57:07You know, ice dilution is this major component in almost every cocktail drink. But we never think about what the water is that you're making the ice out of. And using something like Vichy Catalan to make ice cubes is just such a multiplier for complexity and texture. If you're making something like a martini, it's just like it's unbelievably good. Like that to me is like drink that water, try that water with food. It's the bomb. And once that hooks your brain, there's a whole other world of stuff to go and try and get turned on to. I like what you're saying. The idea that a bottle of$4.99 bottle of water isn't just necessarily for the time you're opening it, but to use it in a cocktail setting or even just to use it for later use for cubes with other water.

57:52It could be an interesting way to use that bottle up. Is there a country that is like a sleeper when it comes to this mineral water culture? I think England. I think that so little of what gets produced in England for waters leaves. It's almost all domestic production. And so when I go and spend time there, I'm just like, gimme, gimme, gimme. Like I want to drink all the mineral water that I possibly can. It's what I'm hunting out for at the cool grocery stores. It's what I'm looking at at every cool restaurant and bar list. It's England for me because it doesn't travel. I mean, but you were just in Greece and you had a ton of mineral waters that I've never seen before.

58:33And I was, Turkey, I guess, is like that too. I guess Turkey is also supposed to be, there's so much cool mineral water there and almost none of it leaves. It doesn't leave. The bottles I was drinking in Greece were only available there. I tried buying them online. I sought it out and I couldn't find a couple of particular bottles. And yeah, it's a cool part about travel and leads to my question. Where are you going to be traveling next year? You always have a great itinerary and you're a travel writer and food writer and your coffee work takes you around the world. What's up? Well, I'm trying to finish this book, man.

59:07And that's kind of the biggest thing for me is I'm going to finish this book and then I got to go do the book shuffle, right? And try to see if anybody would like to purchase it from me. And so I'm actually going to be spending a lot of time in New York and coming out to New York and doing that thing because this is where such transactions take place even in this day and age. and so that's really the topper most of the list for me. I'm sure I'll go down and do stuff in LA again but that for us here, you know, from Portland to LA is only about two hours. It's the same time zone. It's really easy and so I do that stuff pretty regularly.

59:40For bigger picture kind of stuff, maybe this next year I'll finally get to go to Japan. I've never been to Japan before and everybody I talk to is like, you gotta go. Why haven't you gone? You really seem like a person who would enjoy it. You should go. So maybe I'll get to do that this coming year. But the big priority for me is I've been trying to write this book for years. And then I really spent this year really doing nothing but working on this big novel. And so anything else after that feels like I almost don't have space in my brain to think about it yet. Well, I want to close and ask you about a piece you're reporting now.

1:00:16We're going to publish it in January about protein. And no spoilers, but you're uncovering a bit about protein culture, our protein-pilled culture in America. What are you learning? And give us a little tease about what we will be reading in January. Well, it's been interesting to talk to people. Everybody that you talk to about it's got 20 opinions. And I think that health information in general in America, everything from how many reps of what you should be doing of some lift at the gym to like what your macros should be to all this kind of stuff is just a morass of conflicting opinions and stuff that you should be doing.

1:00:58But the rise of health tracking apps in America and particularly food tracking apps in America, things like MyFitnessPal and some of these sort of applications have caused people in America to pay more attention than ever before to not just what they're eating but like exactly how many grams of protein they're eating and how much fiber they're eating and all these other kinds of things. And that has created tons of growth in these product categories that are focused on macros like protein. And what was once sort of the domain of like gym rats has kind of crossed over into being like mass access consumer.

1:01:41And even people trying to say like, well, we want to give you your protein and have it taste good. And I think that that is a really interesting overlap of like should it? Like is that actually what we want? Like the functional protein bar that's like keeps your calories under X and gives you protein Y. Should it also be delicious? Can it be delicious? Is that what we're supposed to care about? You know, should your lunch at the Chateau actually be delicious or are you doing it for other reasons? Should the protein bar that you're eating actually be delicious or are you doing it for other reasons?

1:02:19And so I'm trying to talk to a lot of people who really kind of make their lives in this niche of the world and asking them those questions and understanding it and trying to process through some of my own shit I've been thinking about with this, with these apps and with all the rest of it and stuff and reporting it out. I don't know where it's all going to go yet, but it's going to be a fun story and it's been fun to do the work on it. I can't wait to publish it and work on it with you. And, you know, this this idea of like, does it matter? Does taste matter? I actually I think a little bit about cannabis because like this idea of cannabis, you know, having that like Michelada flavored edible, like, sure.

1:02:55Does it matter? I mean, I don't know. That's where my mind tracks right away. Yeah, I think it matters in the sense that you can charge$18.99 for the gummy instead of$4.99 for the gummy. So that matters to someone. But I mean like to consumers, does it matter? Should it matter, right? Like what does that really mean? And I think that with the protein bars and things like that, unless you are a fitness influencer, you're in fitness world, it's probably the one kind of food that people that are pretty online about the food they consume might not post pictures of, might not really do that same kind of meatspace, cyberspace, IRL online performance.

1:03:39thing of, you know, it's there's something sort of more private about it or almost sort of furtive about it. Like I'm eating this to hit this macro for the day, but I'll show you the cool dish I had at the restaurant that night, you know, and I actually think that's really interesting. I think in the increasingly all online sort of hyper digital lives we lead the things we still do in private. That's an interesting story to me. I want to talk to people about that stuff. I love that. Well, this has been fascinating, Jordan. Thank you so much for joining This Is Taste. Thanks. I love being on the show and really great to talk, Matt.

1:04:13And thanks, everybody out there for listening.

1:04:20This is Taste is hosted by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things happening.