We Can’t Escape Hot Bacteria Summer

Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last time we covered the James Beard Awards leaving Chicago.

I bake pies even on the hottest summer days, because I don’t mind getting kind of sweaty standing by a hot oven if it means I’ll get to eat pie later. This week I spent a couple hours lightly sweating as I baked a spectacularly tart key lime pie for dinner at a friend's house.

I’m feeling embarrassed to share that I used the store-bought graham cracker crust (I know, I know), because I had such machinations for this crust—I’d planned to swap out graham crackers for ginger snaps, or Nilla wafers, or Ritz crackers, like former editor Kendra Vaculin uses in her cherry lemonade beach pie. In the end, my cheat-code pie crust worked just fine and all was well.

One recommended read for you this week: Alinea’s Grant Achatz goes long on humor, food, and conceptual cooking. Grab a coffee and a sweet treat and settle in for a good, lengthy read.

In this week’s Open Tab: the latest food safety recalls, the quietly fabulous museum restaurants across America, the latest on the Ben & Jerry’s drama, and we get up close and personal with Dominic Sessa, the star of the new A24 Anthony Bourdain biopic.

Even the garlic powder isn’t safe

This week, there was a widespread garlic powder recall across Canada due to possible bacterial contamination in some garlic powders. Eggs? Yeah the FDA is recalling 1.5 million dozen due to possible salmonella risks. We are living in the midst of hot bacteria summer, my friends. If you’re feeling exhausted by food safety issues in the news, know that you’re not alone. We covered the cyclosporiasis outbreak, but it’s since gotten worse, and reporting suggests this outbreak is the worst in the United States’ history.

Why? It comes down to food safety protocol. Last year the CDC made it optional to track cyclospora. Plus thousands of layoffs at the FDA and CDC mean there are less people working to track these outbreaks and offer guidance to contain them as early as possible.

A night at the museum

This week I read some very old news that got very little attention when it surfaced last year: Jody Williams and Rita Sodi (the hit makers behind Manhattan’s I Sodi, Via Carota, and Buvette, to name a few) are working on a new restaurant inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Will there be Via Carota-like lines outside the new museum restaurant? Honestly, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Museum restaurants have gotten an upgrade in recent years, and now they’re some of the hottest tables around.

The newly opened Obama Center features Tafari’s Kitchen, an accessible homage to the foods of Chicago. The newly renovated New Museum recently debuted Oberon, a design-forward all-day spot. Zoli, chic and easy, is nestled inside the Amant in Brooklyn. Plus, not for nothing, they opened an Erewhon inside LACMA—possibly the most ingenious marketing move in the museum’s history.

The Ben & Jerry’s fight continues

I’ve covered the Ben & Jerry’s fight in Open Tab before, but if you’re not caught up here’s the TLDR: The original founders of the company have resigned in protest, claiming Ben & Jerry’s parent company, Magnum (itself owned by Unilever), is making it impossible for the company to do any of the socially conscious work it was built on.

When Ben & Jerry’s was sold to Magnum in 2000, part of the agreement was that Unilever would fund the former’s foundation every year. Last year they cut off that funding after an audit, and now, without any money to provide grants, the foundation says it will close by the end of the year.

A Magnum spokesperson suggested the work of Ben & Jerry’s Foundation would continue, but it’s unclear exactly what that would look like. “What are they going to fund? I have no idea. My guess is that they would not be looking to fund entities that are opposed to the status quo,” Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen told the Associated Press.

Dominic Sessa becomes Bourdain