Californios is The World's First 3 Michelin Star Mexican Restaurant

Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last week we covered World Cup tourists’ love affair with American cuisine.

Welcome back to Open Tab, my little screwworms. This week I indulged in the best of New York City’s late-night dining. First, Vaselka for pierogies and the largest omelet ever made followed by a gooey almond cake at Superiority Burger topped with labneh gelato and devilishly tart sour cherry jam. This week’s tiny recommendation: Go to a second location for dessert.

The Bear’s fifth and final season debuts this week, but the cooler story is the zine the culinary production team made as a wrap gift. It’s interesting to think back to how restaurant and dining culture has changed over the four years The Bear has been on the air. It’s the show that introduced us to the cult of the dirtbag chef, and that made some chefs confront their own kitchen trauma, though that conversation is still very much happening today.

We’ve lost another battle in the reservation culture war. Hard to book is a new website built by product designer Isaac Ng to track the hardest reservations to nab in New York. (Think Eleven Madison Park, Atomix, Ramen by Ra, and more.) The real secret to many of these spots is to simply walk in when they open, put your name down, and grab a drink nearby while you wait. Perhaps reservationmaxxing is enjoyable for some people?

Also this week: Michelin awards three stars to a Mexican restaurant for the first time ever, gay bars in San Francisco are scanning patrons’ faces, the latest on Sean Evans and Keke Palmer’s very public love story, and, ahead of Fourth of July, we’re diving deep on how food becomes American.

The First-Ever Mexican Restaurant with 3 Michelin Stars

This week, Michelin doled out stars to restaurants across California. It was an auspicious night for two of the state’s restaurants, Enclos in Sonoma and Californios in San Francisco, which were both awarded three stars, joining just seven other restaurants in the state with the same distinction.

But the stars have special significance for Californios, which is somehow the first Mexican restaurant ever in the world to receive a three-star rating. Michelin-recommended restaurants in Mexico top out at two stars, and it seems incredible that it’s taken more than a century for Mexican cooking to be recognized by the guide in this way.

Big Brother is Watching You

Several gay bars in San Francisco’s Castro District, including Mix and Toad Hall, are reportedly using a technology from a company called Patronscan called Guard+ to scan the faces of people entering the bar. The technology is purportedly meant to detect the use of fake IDs, but to do that, it collects personal data, including names, addresses, genders, and even how patrons behave. The news has inspired backlash online, and digital rights group Fight for the Future has started a petition to remove the tech from SF bars.

The scans and information are shared on “flag networks” or local databases, which, reportedly, include at least nine Castro venues—though Patronscan is used in more than 700 cities around the world. In a statement released Tuesday, Patronscan wrote that its machines “do not save or share your home address on our Flag Network.” But, as reporter Cydney Hayes of Gazetteer San Francisco points out, the company’s privacy policy states it may collect many of your identifying details, including your address.

Some patrons have expressed privacy concerns—it’s not a great feeling to have a scan of your face added to a list managed by a random third party. Others are less worried about the machines. “I’ve posted worse things on Instagram than whatever they take,” one bargoer told the Gazetteer.

Keke and Sean Sitting in a Tree

Keke Palmer and Sean Evans are living out their love story very publicly, and the public, for its part, can’t get enough. It all started when Sean Evans, who hosts Hot Ones, admitted on that other short-form chicken-based internet show, Chicken Shop Date, that he had a crush on meme factory Palmer. Then there was the rather chaste kiss on Evans’s show late last year. More recently, Evans was a guest on Palmer’s podcast, where, among other things, they played a game of Twister and later were spotted out to dinner together.

The rumors swirled and commentators demanded to know if the couple was legit or not. Palmer clarified during a panel discussion at Cannes that she and Evans were simply “tak[ing] it day by day, one wing at a time, so to speak.”

How Does a Food Become American?

Are hamburgers American? Are hot dogs? Conventional wisdom would suggest they are, but historian Ashley Rose Young, PhD, says otherwise. In her fascinating feature for Bon Appétit’s summer issue, Dr. Young lays out how the foods we know and love have seeped into American culture—even if they were born somewhere else. Read on for more of her analysis here.