Yoshijirō Urushibara: The Pines (1928)
Good evening, Kibitzers!
This (Tuesday) afternoon, we have some light snow here. Tonight, we have snow, rain, freezing rain, and sleet. Oh, plus patchy fog. Tomorrow, sunny and above freezing. Then it rains and sleets until Monday. This, I would actually consider normal weather for March, and with luck, maybe it will melt a lot of the really persistent snow piles and ice-encrusted sidewalks.
I do hope that everyone is having nicer weather than here, though. (I like this weather, but I know I’m strange, and other people like sunshine.)
The New York Times’ NYT Cooking channel on YouTube has tons of videos, including many different series that are not just people making recipes. One such series is called On the Job; in it, food journalist and cookbook author Priya Krishna connects with someone who works somewhere in or adjacent to the (mostly New York City) food/hospitality industry and follows them through a workday to learn more about both the job and the person.
There are quite a few of these videos, and they run long for our purposes, usually 15-25 minutes, so I’m picking out a few I liked. If you have time some day, and are interested, you can see the rest of the playlist at that link above.
This is the video I saw first, that attracted me to the series.
Fifty years or so ago, when I was a young person, everyone in New York knew that if you wanted good dim sum, you'd to go to Chinatown, to one of the places with a big hall full of 10-tops, be seated with a pot of tea, and eagerly await the people coming out of the kitchen pushing carts stacked high with little steamer baskets, from which you could make selections.
Nowadays, apparently that way of serving dim sum is fading away, like so much we remember from that time. But it's still on at Golden Palace in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Pik Chan and Cheong Yin Ho make it look easy. [24:31]
Street vendor Sonia Pérez has been the Tamale Queen of Bushwick, Brooklyn for more than 25 years. But, you'll be unsurprised to learn, the laws around street vending make it almost impossible to do legally, and most vendors, mostly immigrants, can never hope to get one of the artificially-scarce permits. And so, Sonia is also an activist for vendors' rights. I hope Mayor Mamdani can improve this situation. [15:16]
In Reno, we meet Kevin Ashton, chef for the Pi Beta Phi sorority house at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is also a TikTok celebrity with 5 million followers of his videos of the food he's preparing for the two dozen or so house residents. (I was struck by the sorority sisters' assertion that it is cheaper for them to live at the sorority house with a chef preparing two meals a day than it is to live in a university dorm with a meal plan.) [25:36]
Like many natives of the NYC area, I have strong opinions about bagels. (About a minute into this video, we see the face of the odious Murray Lender (RIP), brandishing one of his loathsome toroidal dinner rolls that have been palmed off as frozen "bagels" for decades now. For instance.)
Hand-rolled bagels, which are then boiled, not steamed, before baking (glares in direction of Lender's) are the ne plus ultra of the bagel art, but hand-rolling is a dying profession. Blessedly, Celestino García is still an expert, and as of the time of this video, was still working in three different locations around the city, rolling over 3,000 bagels a day. [15:11]
Attention, Chrislove! A number of these videos were shot soon after the Covid-caused restaurant shutdown. Most of the businesses involved suffered from that, but here we visit Lyana Blount, owner of a virtual restaurant that exists only because of the shutdown. That restaurant, Black Rican Vegan, based in the Bronx and Harlem, operates by taking orders once a week over Instagram only, and delivering across four boroughs (while Lyana also holds down a full-time job). [13:42]
Arrow Linen Supply Company on Long Island is one of New York City's largest restaurant laundry facilities. It was started by a Sicilian immigrant in 1947, and is still owned and operated by three generations of his family. The scale of the thing is pretty remarkable. [16:39]
Amy O’Rourke, ebullient assistant seafood manager at legendary northeast grocery store Stew Leonard’s, won't ask her employees to do any task she won't do herself. [20:05]
We visit the Smarties candy factory in Union, NJ, where 12,000 individual candies per minute are produced and gathered into those little rolls, adding up to over 2 billion rolls a year. (For the record, I find the appeal of this species of candy entirely mysterious, but obviously it has its fans.) Anyway, we're here to meet shift lead Isonia Serrano and her husband, mechanic Edwin Duarte, who together have been making the place run smoothly for 30 years. [15:00]
A few tunes about holding down a job — more are welcome in the comments!
Huey Lewis and the News: Workin' for a Livin' (official video, 1982). [2:37]
Donna Summer: She Works Hard for the Money (German TV show Musikladen, 1983). [4:15]
The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night (Palais Des Sports, Paris, 1965). [2:38]
