#as usual there's a huge traffic jam getting out of my suburb

[andthebubbles]

Happy new year everyone :)

[bpellerin]

Where we are, where we need to go

Fantastic read about the New Green Deal. Critical one, too.

But the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography—where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places—is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else. The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

This is the foundation of everything, and not just in America. It’s true in your town as well, no matter how big it is.

Noting that more Americans live in suburbs than anywhere else, it adds this:

Sprawl is made possible by highways. This is expensive—in 2015, the Victoria Transport Policy Institute estimated that sprawl costs America more than $1 trillion a year in reduced business activity, environmental damage, consumer expenses, and other costs. Leaving aside the emissions from the 1.1 billion trips Americans take per day (87 percent of which are taken in personal vehicles), spreading everything out has eaten up an enormous amount of natural land.

What’s fascinating about this topic is that 100 years ago, no human being knew what a suburb was. And now we’re all there, driving around like maniacs to avoid traffic jams. And we think this is the only way to live just because we are personally used to it.

Urban sprawl is a 20th century invention made possible by huge investments (I use the word carefully; I think my dictionary is hating me right now) in public funds. Far from making people happy, it’s contributing to social isolation and the misery that accompanies it (ask Robert Putnam). And it may just kill the planet.

Or not. I mean, the planet’s pretty tough. But that’s no excuse for us to do stupid things to it, is it.

Our big problem, today in North America, is that there is too much distance between where people are and where they want to go. Starting with work: If you live far from work, think of how much this costs you personally. A car if you’re like most people (cost of car, interest on car loan, gas, maintenance, insurance, plates, space at home to park the thing, etc.), cost of parking at work, and time wasted in traffic. If you commute by public transit, you’re looking at your monthly bus pass, possibly car expenses as well if you need to get yourself from home to the Park N Ride, and huge gobs of time each way.

Usually the kids are close enough to school that they could walk or scooter over, but for some reason that doesn’t seem to stop parents from chauffeuring them, which I’ll never understand but since it’s not the topic of this post we’ll move swiftly along to: extracurricular activities. Which are usually a fair distance from either home or school and require transportation. Here I’m possibly more guilty than most, as I routinely drive my kids from central Ottawa to Kanata because that’s where the musical theatre or gymnastics program they wanted happened to be.

Then there’s all these other places we want to be: church, grocery stores, movie superplexes, golf course, ski hill, etc., etc., etc. These are not places we occasionally travel to, like Montreal for a weekend or Orlando for the kids’ Disney fix. These are places we regularly go to, in our daily lives.

We spend so much time in transit we don’t even realize how much time we spend in transit. And that, methinks, is the big piece of the puzzle. The one thing we need to change if we are to regain a bit of human happiness and environmental soundness in our lives. Basically we need to de-sprawl ourselves, and centre our daily lives around smaller geographical areas.

[easyfoodnetwork]

What If Nothing But Chain Restaurants Survive? 

Ruth just wanted to eat somewhere — anywhere — that wasn’t a chain

Their vibe had been great on the app, but for their first date, the girl suggested the Garden, and Ruth almost ghosted. It was the newest location, the one on York Boulevard that got spray-painted with anti-gentrification graffiti saying things like, “GO BACK 2 UR SUBURB” a couple weeks back; after cleaning it off, the Garden had made a big show of installing a community fridge. Honestly, Ruth wouldn’t have agreed to go if she couldn’t have walked there from her house. On a Saturday night, York was busy, the outdoor parklet tables overflowing at Torchy’s Tacos and Shake Shack and True Food Kitchen; people with laptops were still hunched in the Go Get ’Em Tiger, and tired-looking parents hauled growlers of beer from the Golden Road pub, maybe with a six-pack of Bud under their arm.

The Garden was the street’s newest addition, its glass exterior covered in long green vines, looking disconcertingly hip and inviting next to the local chain Thai Town, huddled in a former barbershop. The girl, Sierra, was waiting inside, perusing the menu projected on the wall in old-school Italian-joint cursive. She was shorter than Ruth had expected, and the ponytail peeking out from her trucker hat was bright pink. She greeted Ruth with a huge smile, and Ruth tried to act normal; meeting someone after messaging back and forth always felt so unbearable, even worse if they were actually cute. Sierra was cute. They bantered back and forth about whether the cauliflower parm would be good or a disaster, and agreed they could not not get mozzarella sticks. After ordering at the counter, they sat down and a runner immediately brought out a basket of warm breadsticks, the only reminder of the chain that had spawned the Garden.

The breadsticks were the best thing, soft and salty and comforting. Ruth’s cauliflower parm was soggy on the bottom, and Sierra’s vegan alfredo was like slurping nutritional yeast. Their messaging over the app had been playful and cheekily uninformative; now Sierra explained she was a storyboard artist on a kids cartoon about girl superheroes, airing on Prime. Ruth used to lead with her now-defunct Instagram ice cream business, or even her old restaurant in New York, the one that closed. But the endless grind of first dates had sanded down her pride, so she stuck to honesty: She was a corporate chef at Alexa’s.

“So we both work for Amazon,” Ruth said. “What are the odds?”

“Honestly, this isn’t the first time this happened on a date,” Sierra said. “Though you’re the first chef I’ve gone out with. And I brought you to a competitor!”

The Garden was not a competitor; Alexa’s did full table service, with good wines and produce pulled from the Whole Foods pipeline. Every dish was made by a person, at some point, from scratch. Ruth didn’t like how tightly she clung to this. “I appreciate Olive Garden’s way with breadsticks.”

“I was so pumped when this place opened in the neighborhood.”

“It’s not really my style?”

“Then on the next date, take me somewhere with better breadsticks.” She laughed, and Ruth decided she liked her.

Sierra came back to Ruth’s fixer-upper bungalow she’d run out of money to fixer-up, and they made out for a while. It was pleasantly awkward; neither quite knew why they liked the other yet, but what they stumbled onto was promising. Sierra said she’d be back for breakfast the next morning, a move Ruth honestly kind of appreciated because she’d worked a surprise double shift Friday and needed sleep. The next morning, Sierra let herself in with a bag of glossy chocolate Dunkin Donuts and sweet, milky coffee. Ruth asked if this was technically a second date, and Sierra slid her hands up Ruth’s loose T-shirt. The ice melted in the coffee by the time they got to it, but Ruth was glad for the doughnuts, even if they were a little stale.

Both she and Sierra worked 70-hour weeks — animating an empowering kids show was a real nightmare, it turned out — so they stole time together when they could. Mostly, they spent Sundays together, since Ruth was working Saturday nights again, the exact thing selling out was supposed to fix, but Alexa’s kept expanding and taking her chefs to open in Venice and Inglewood and Glassell Park and then she was stuck expediting again. Alexa’s was technically a New American restaurant, built around exclusive deals with farmers and Whole Foods’ zero-waste pledge (if a bunch of bruised peaches went from Whole Foods to Alexa’s house jam, everybody except the cooks who had to scramble to make jam was happy). The menu was shaped by algorithms that analyzed purchases and searches, or that’s what corporate claimed; Ruth would never have put Huli Huli chicken and a brown butter pasta on the same menu, but she had dutifully developed the recipes and watched them sell out night after night.

They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering.

Ruth kept putting off taking Sierra out for old-school Italian all the way across town. Instead, on Sundays they’d spend most of the day in bed, ordering in Sweetgreen if they couldn’t remember the last time they had vegetables, or Domino’s if they didn’t need to feel virtuous (mostly, they didn’t). Occasionally, they’d walk down to York or head to Figueroa for brunch. At the Houston’s in a historic former hotel, they always split the spinach artichoke dip, and at the Taco Bell Cantina that opened in one of the many former Mexican restaurants that used to line the neighborhood, they drank shitty bright blue frozen cocktails under a local graffiti artist’s mural that was preserved alongside the Taco Bell logo. Ruth hadn’t gone out this much since moving to Los Angeles, and it felt gross, sometimes, eating nothing but chain food. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. But it’s not like there was very much else, not anymore.

Late one Sunday morning while Sierra was listing off the usual brunch and delivery options, Ruth tried to express this to her, but all that came out was, “The thing is all these places kind of suck?”

Sierra stared at her phone. “I will not let you slander Domino’s in bed.” One of the characters on her show was obsessed with greasy pizza, and she had personally designed the cheese pull.

“Don’t you miss eating at mom and pops?”

“Taco Bell and the Garden are mom and pops. They’re all franchises.”

“We should make actual memories together.”

“Sharing breadsticks at the Garden is a real memory!”

Ruth took out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. She found the image of pork belly drenched in a glossy red sauce she’d been thinking of and showed it to Sierra, saying they should try something authentic. So they put on pants and drove to Alhambra and went to this new Hunan restaurant every food person Ruth followed on Instagram was hyping up. When they opened their menus, Sierra let out a snort and pointed to the cute illustrated map of the restaurant’s 50 locations across China.

After that, Ruth’s thrashing about chain restaurants became a thing, mostly a cute joke. Sierra regaled her friends about her obsessive chef girlfriend dragging her to an old-school burger stand literally surrounded by a luxury apartment building (Shake Shack was taking over the lease) and a 7/11 secretly serving Sri Lankan food and a backyard barbacoa set-up, all of them requiring at least an hour in traffic, maybe more. Ironically, this kind of restaurant tourism wasn’t a thing Ruth had had time for when she had her own restaurant, but now that she had gone corporate, sometimes there was such a thing as a slow week, so she could check out other people’s restaurants. Actually, Sierra would continue, the barbacoa stand they’d spent all Sunday seeking out had been glorious, but it was also so sad — the city had raided it the next week. The cooks at Alexa’s told Ruth the city was raiding street vendors all over the city, not just on commercial strips, now that the big chains were lobbying the city to clean up “unsafe” competition.

For Sierra’s birthday, Ruth surprised her with tickets to a secret pop-up supper club high up in Montecito Heights, hosted on a terraced patio overlooking the hazy towers of downtown. It was run by two white, queer chefs, an impossibly attractive tattooed couple, who were maybe 10 or 15 years younger than Ruth; in New York she would have known them, but out here she was so disconnected. There was a land acknowledgment and prompt to send money to a local mutual aid fund, and then 15 small courses of pepino melons over glass noodles, blistered purple okra with popped buckwheat, and hot-smoked salmon collars with a yuzu-miso glaze, broken up by two “palate cleanser” courses: a Spam sando and tiny Magnum ice cream bars. The food wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was seasonal and playful, and Ruth had only a few quibbles over technique: The house sourdough was overproofed, and the popped buckwheat did nothing for the okra.

“So what’d you think?” Ruth said on the ride home.

“Great view,” Sierra said. “That whole house was insane.”

“I really loved the corn pudding, but I’m not so sure about that buckwheat on okra.”

“There were a lot of really pretentious courses, and then, like, tiny ice cream? I wish there’d been more stuff like the bread and butter.”

“Oh, I thought it was overproofed,” Ruth said, but Sierra wasn’t even listening.

“Maybe you’d hate your job less if you did pop-ups like this, too,” Sierra said.

“Who says I hate my job?”

“Ruth, you work for the biggest corporation in the world and you hate chain food.”

“I hate chains because they swept in and took up everyone’s leases after COVID and now no one can open a restaurant.”

“I guess this means you don’t want to go to McDonald’s right now.”

“Why don’t we try to find a taco truck?” But even along Figueroa, which used to be lined with trucks, their bright signs scrolling BIRRIA MULITAS ASADA in the night, no one was out. The Garden was still open, though; Ruth sat in the car as Sierra ran in to get breadsticks.

That week at work, Ruth’s job was to find a use for this new buttermilk the company had sourced. It was genuinely fermented buttermilk, and good quality; it was perfect for biscuits, and if she could find a recipe that worked at scale, Alexa’s could change this dairy farmer’s life. By the end of the week, she had a biscuit she thought worked, and she gave it to the pastry cooks to test for the next night’s service. She even texted Sierra to tell her to swing by early for dinner, the first time she’d invited her to work. Ruth grifted some company time making a fresh batch of the biscuits herself to bring down for Sierra; when she got to the kitchen, she saw the cooks unwrapping a huge frozen pallet of premade biscuits to lob in the oven, next to the batch the pastry cooks had left to rise.

“What the hell is this?”

“We’re A/B testing, apparently,” Alonzo, the new chef, said with a roll of his eyes. “Kyle said these really taste homemade.”

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself.

Kyle was the efficiency officer sent down from Seattle to oversee what he called Alexa’s “workflow.” He’d already been asking a lot of questions about why there were pastry chefs working here when most desserts could be bought frozen, as if the whole point of Alexa’s hadn’t been to offer a premium restaurant experience.

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Sierra was sitting at the wine bar drinking ginger ale; Ruth tried not to watch her too intently as she munched on first the packaged biscuit, and then Ruth’s.

“Which do you like better?” Ruth said.

“Is this a test?”

“Either you can tell me or let the cameras assessing your expressions take a guess.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“The cameras are a staff rumor.” But they all wore fitness trackers that monitored the tone of their voices as they spoke to each other and to guests, and produced a rating on “harmony” and “service” at the end of shift. No one shouted in the kitchen. But the servers had learned that only the most obsequious tone of voice got them good customer interaction ratings.

Sierra broke off a piece of both biscuits and chewed thoughtfully. “To be honest, I wish you guys had breadsticks.” She said it with a little flirty smile, trying to deploy it as an inside joke.

“Clearly biscuits aren’t worth the trouble,” Ruth said, and took the basket back.

“So this was a test.”

“One of these is a recipe I’ve spent all week on, from a batch I made myself, for you. The other came frozen out of a box. If my own girlfriend can’t tell that my version is better, then there’s probably not much hope for me here.”

“Babe, I don’t even like biscuits that much —”

“When you get your check, be sure to leave your feedback about breadsticks.”

Sierra asked her to sit down; Ruth made excuses about having to work back in the kitchen, and then hid, taking up space and messing up people’s flow. Kyle would not have approved; the step tracker was probably wondering who was standing stock still during a busy service. At one point, she tried scrolling Instagram to distract herself, and there was a message from one of the pop-up chefs, asking if Ruth could get them a job at Alexa’s until they finished rounding up all their investors, you know? They were sure they’d find a space soon.

“You’ve never cooked for me before,” Sierra said on the car ride home. “Maybe if I’d had your cooking, I would have recognized it.”

“You don’t seem to care much about food, so I don’t see the point.”

“What the fuck, Ruth. I care about you.”

“I mean, the cooking doesn’t make me who I am, right? We used to have to remind each other of that all the time. That we’re more than a job.”

“I work for this huge company and make something I care about. Why can’t you try to too?”

They had the conversation they always had, about how Ruth should start a secret pop-up, and Sierra would do all the branding and promotion, and then she’d get rich investors and live her dream again. The next week, Ruth got her pay docked for rudeness, probably from when she’d snapped at Sierra about the biscuits. On Sunday, they went out to the Garden, and Ruth ate breadsticks until her mouth tasted of nothing but salt.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34UCH3U https://ift.tt/3bkKdpY

Ruth just wanted to eat somewhere — anywhere — that wasn’t a chain

Their vibe had been great on the app, but for their first date, the girl suggested the Garden, and Ruth almost ghosted. It was the newest location, the one on York Boulevard that got spray-painted with anti-gentrification graffiti saying things like, “GO BACK 2 UR SUBURB” a couple weeks back; after cleaning it off, the Garden had made a big show of installing a community fridge. Honestly, Ruth wouldn’t have agreed to go if she couldn’t have walked there from her house. On a Saturday night, York was busy, the outdoor parklet tables overflowing at Torchy’s Tacos and Shake Shack and True Food Kitchen; people with laptops were still hunched in the Go Get ’Em Tiger, and tired-looking parents hauled growlers of beer from the Golden Road pub, maybe with a six-pack of Bud under their arm.

The Garden was the street’s newest addition, its glass exterior covered in long green vines, looking disconcertingly hip and inviting next to the local chain Thai Town, huddled in a former barbershop. The girl, Sierra, was waiting inside, perusing the menu projected on the wall in old-school Italian-joint cursive. She was shorter than Ruth had expected, and the ponytail peeking out from her trucker hat was bright pink. She greeted Ruth with a huge smile, and Ruth tried to act normal; meeting someone after messaging back and forth always felt so unbearable, even worse if they were actually cute. Sierra was cute. They bantered back and forth about whether the cauliflower parm would be good or a disaster, and agreed they could not not get mozzarella sticks. After ordering at the counter, they sat down and a runner immediately brought out a basket of warm breadsticks, the only reminder of the chain that had spawned the Garden.

The breadsticks were the best thing, soft and salty and comforting. Ruth’s cauliflower parm was soggy on the bottom, and Sierra’s vegan alfredo was like slurping nutritional yeast. Their messaging over the app had been playful and cheekily uninformative; now Sierra explained she was a storyboard artist on a kids cartoon about girl superheroes, airing on Prime. Ruth used to lead with her now-defunct Instagram ice cream business, or even her old restaurant in New York, the one that closed. But the endless grind of first dates had sanded down her pride, so she stuck to honesty: She was a corporate chef at Alexa’s.

“So we both work for Amazon,” Ruth said. “What are the odds?”

“Honestly, this isn’t the first time this happened on a date,” Sierra said. “Though you’re the first chef I’ve gone out with. And I brought you to a competitor!”

The Garden was not a competitor; Alexa’s did full table service, with good wines and produce pulled from the Whole Foods pipeline. Every dish was made by a person, at some point, from scratch. Ruth didn’t like how tightly she clung to this. “I appreciate Olive Garden’s way with breadsticks.”

“I was so pumped when this place opened in the neighborhood.”

“It’s not really my style?”

“Then on the next date, take me somewhere with better breadsticks.” She laughed, and Ruth decided she liked her.

Sierra came back to Ruth’s fixer-upper bungalow she’d run out of money to fixer-up, and they made out for a while. It was pleasantly awkward; neither quite knew why they liked the other yet, but what they stumbled onto was promising. Sierra said she’d be back for breakfast the next morning, a move Ruth honestly kind of appreciated because she’d worked a surprise double shift Friday and needed sleep. The next morning, Sierra let herself in with a bag of glossy chocolate Dunkin Donuts and sweet, milky coffee. Ruth asked if this was technically a second date, and Sierra slid her hands up Ruth’s loose T-shirt. The ice melted in the coffee by the time they got to it, but Ruth was glad for the doughnuts, even if they were a little stale.

Both she and Sierra worked 70-hour weeks — animating an empowering kids show was a real nightmare, it turned out — so they stole time together when they could. Mostly, they spent Sundays together, since Ruth was working Saturday nights again, the exact thing selling out was supposed to fix, but Alexa’s kept expanding and taking her chefs to open in Venice and Inglewood and Glassell Park and then she was stuck expediting again. Alexa’s was technically a New American restaurant, built around exclusive deals with farmers and Whole Foods’ zero-waste pledge (if a bunch of bruised peaches went from Whole Foods to Alexa’s house jam, everybody except the cooks who had to scramble to make jam was happy). The menu was shaped by algorithms that analyzed purchases and searches, or that’s what corporate claimed; Ruth would never have put Huli Huli chicken and a brown butter pasta on the same menu, but she had dutifully developed the recipes and watched them sell out night after night.

They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering.

Ruth kept putting off taking Sierra out for old-school Italian all the way across town. Instead, on Sundays they’d spend most of the day in bed, ordering in Sweetgreen if they couldn’t remember the last time they had vegetables, or Domino’s if they didn’t need to feel virtuous (mostly, they didn’t). Occasionally, they’d walk down to York or head to Figueroa for brunch. At the Houston’s in a historic former hotel, they always split the spinach artichoke dip, and at the Taco Bell Cantina that opened in one of the many former Mexican restaurants that used to line the neighborhood, they drank shitty bright blue frozen cocktails under a local graffiti artist’s mural that was preserved alongside the Taco Bell logo. Ruth hadn’t gone out this much since moving to Los Angeles, and it felt gross, sometimes, eating nothing but chain food. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. But it’s not like there was very much else, not anymore.

Late one Sunday morning while Sierra was listing off the usual brunch and delivery options, Ruth tried to express this to her, but all that came out was, “The thing is all these places kind of suck?”

Sierra stared at her phone. “I will not let you slander Domino’s in bed.” One of the characters on her show was obsessed with greasy pizza, and she had personally designed the cheese pull.

“Don’t you miss eating at mom and pops?”

“Taco Bell and the Garden are mom and pops. They’re all franchises.”

“We should make actual memories together.”

“Sharing breadsticks at the Garden is a real memory!”

Ruth took out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. She found the image of pork belly drenched in a glossy red sauce she’d been thinking of and showed it to Sierra, saying they should try something authentic. So they put on pants and drove to Alhambra and went to this new Hunan restaurant every food person Ruth followed on Instagram was hyping up. When they opened their menus, Sierra let out a snort and pointed to the cute illustrated map of the restaurant’s 50 locations across China.

After that, Ruth’s thrashing about chain restaurants became a thing, mostly a cute joke. Sierra regaled her friends about her obsessive chef girlfriend dragging her to an old-school burger stand literally surrounded by a luxury apartment building (Shake Shack was taking over the lease) and a 7/11 secretly serving Sri Lankan food and a backyard barbacoa set-up, all of them requiring at least an hour in traffic, maybe more. Ironically, this kind of restaurant tourism wasn’t a thing Ruth had had time for when she had her own restaurant, but now that she had gone corporate, sometimes there was such a thing as a slow week, so she could check out other people’s restaurants. Actually, Sierra would continue, the barbacoa stand they’d spent all Sunday seeking out had been glorious, but it was also so sad — the city had raided it the next week. The cooks at Alexa’s told Ruth the city was raiding street vendors all over the city, not just on commercial strips, now that the big chains were lobbying the city to clean up “unsafe” competition.

For Sierra’s birthday, Ruth surprised her with tickets to a secret pop-up supper club high up in Montecito Heights, hosted on a terraced patio overlooking the hazy towers of downtown. It was run by two white, queer chefs, an impossibly attractive tattooed couple, who were maybe 10 or 15 years younger than Ruth; in New York she would have known them, but out here she was so disconnected. There was a land acknowledgment and prompt to send money to a local mutual aid fund, and then 15 small courses of pepino melons over glass noodles, blistered purple okra with popped buckwheat, and hot-smoked salmon collars with a yuzu-miso glaze, broken up by two “palate cleanser” courses: a Spam sando and tiny Magnum ice cream bars. The food wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was seasonal and playful, and Ruth had only a few quibbles over technique: The house sourdough was overproofed, and the popped buckwheat did nothing for the okra.

“So what’d you think?” Ruth said on the ride home.

“Great view,” Sierra said. “That whole house was insane.”

“I really loved the corn pudding, but I’m not so sure about that buckwheat on okra.”

“There were a lot of really pretentious courses, and then, like, tiny ice cream? I wish there’d been more stuff like the bread and butter.”

“Oh, I thought it was overproofed,” Ruth said, but Sierra wasn’t even listening.

“Maybe you’d hate your job less if you did pop-ups like this, too,” Sierra said.

“Who says I hate my job?”

“Ruth, you work for the biggest corporation in the world and you hate chain food.”

“I hate chains because they swept in and took up everyone’s leases after COVID and now no one can open a restaurant.”

“I guess this means you don’t want to go to McDonald’s right now.”

“Why don’t we try to find a taco truck?” But even along Figueroa, which used to be lined with trucks, their bright signs scrolling BIRRIA MULITAS ASADA in the night, no one was out. The Garden was still open, though; Ruth sat in the car as Sierra ran in to get breadsticks.

That week at work, Ruth’s job was to find a use for this new buttermilk the company had sourced. It was genuinely fermented buttermilk, and good quality; it was perfect for biscuits, and if she could find a recipe that worked at scale, Alexa’s could change this dairy farmer’s life. By the end of the week, she had a biscuit she thought worked, and she gave it to the pastry cooks to test for the next night’s service. She even texted Sierra to tell her to swing by early for dinner, the first time she’d invited her to work. Ruth grifted some company time making a fresh batch of the biscuits herself to bring down for Sierra; when she got to the kitchen, she saw the cooks unwrapping a huge frozen pallet of premade biscuits to lob in the oven, next to the batch the pastry cooks had left to rise.

“What the hell is this?”

“We’re A/B testing, apparently,” Alonzo, the new chef, said with a roll of his eyes. “Kyle said these really taste homemade.”

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself.

Kyle was the efficiency officer sent down from Seattle to oversee what he called Alexa’s “workflow.” He’d already been asking a lot of questions about why there were pastry chefs working here when most desserts could be bought frozen, as if the whole point of Alexa’s hadn’t been to offer a premium restaurant experience.

Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Sierra was sitting at the wine bar drinking ginger ale; Ruth tried not to watch her too intently as she munched on first the packaged biscuit, and then Ruth’s.

“Which do you like better?” Ruth said.

“Is this a test?”

“Either you can tell me or let the cameras assessing your expressions take a guess.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“The cameras are a staff rumor.” But they all wore fitness trackers that monitored the tone of their voices as they spoke to each other and to guests, and produced a rating on “harmony” and “service” at the end of shift. No one shouted in the kitchen. But the servers had learned that only the most obsequious tone of voice got them good customer interaction ratings.

Sierra broke off a piece of both biscuits and chewed thoughtfully. “To be honest, I wish you guys had breadsticks.” She said it with a little flirty smile, trying to deploy it as an inside joke.

“Clearly biscuits aren’t worth the trouble,” Ruth said, and took the basket back.

“So this was a test.”

“One of these is a recipe I’ve spent all week on, from a batch I made myself, for you. The other came frozen out of a box. If my own girlfriend can’t tell that my version is better, then there’s probably not much hope for me here.”

“Babe, I don’t even like biscuits that much —”

“When you get your check, be sure to leave your feedback about breadsticks.”

Sierra asked her to sit down; Ruth made excuses about having to work back in the kitchen, and then hid, taking up space and messing up people’s flow. Kyle would not have approved; the step tracker was probably wondering who was standing stock still during a busy service. At one point, she tried scrolling Instagram to distract herself, and there was a message from one of the pop-up chefs, asking if Ruth could get them a job at Alexa’s until they finished rounding up all their investors, you know? They were sure they’d find a space soon.

“You’ve never cooked for me before,” Sierra said on the car ride home. “Maybe if I’d had your cooking, I would have recognized it.”

“You don’t seem to care much about food, so I don’t see the point.”

“What the fuck, Ruth. I care about you.”

“I mean, the cooking doesn’t make me who I am, right? We used to have to remind each other of that all the time. That we’re more than a job.”

“I work for this huge company and make something I care about. Why can’t you try to too?”

They had the conversation they always had, about how Ruth should start a secret pop-up, and Sierra would do all the branding and promotion, and then she’d get rich investors and live her dream again. The next week, Ruth got her pay docked for rudeness, probably from when she’d snapped at Sierra about the biscuits. On Sunday, they went out to the Garden, and Ruth ate breadsticks until her mouth tasted of nothing but salt.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34UCH3U via Blogger https://ift.tt/3gPS2os

[its-lifestyle]

If you’re a road user in the Klang Valley, chances are very, very high that you would have spotted a food delivery rider at some point during your journey, so ubiquitous is their presence these days.

And if you’ve ever wondered just what they’ve got tucked in their bags, fried chicken is a very good bet. Because according to local food delivery services Foodpanda and GrabFood, fried chicken and its twin counterpart – nasi ayam goreng are Malaysians’ No.1 choices for food delivery.

In fact during the month of Ramadan, GrabFood actually received 100,000 orders for fried chicken! Coming in at a close second is the hugely popular bubble tea at 80,000 orders.

But in many ways, the fact that Malaysians are even placing such mammoth orders with food delivery services is indicative of just how quickly local consumption patterns have changed.

Local food delivery service Foodpanda has been around for seven years and is probably the oldest player in the market, but the brand’s managing director Sayantan Das says they have noticed a significant uptick in demand over the past two years.

“I think recently food delivery has become more and more popular because food delivery services have expanded rapidly. So back in the day, we would probably cover only two or three key cities, but right now we are looking at covering each and every city that exists in Malaysia,” he says.

Food delivery has made eating restaurant-quality food easy and convenient for busy Malaysians. — Foodpanda

Much of food delivery’s soaring popularity also has to do with higher Internet penetration rates in Malaysia (2018 data from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission shows that it is now 87.4%) and mobile phone purchases – both integral to the success of food delivery services where food must be ordered through mobile phones or computers.

But some of this popularity also has to do with changing consumer behaviour.

“If we look at economic statistics, there is a huge proportion of younger employees entering the workforce, so typically these employees would spend less time in the kitchen and more time in the office and they would be more digitally savvy.

“So these are easier options or alternatives for them rather than cooking,” affirms Sayantan.

GrabFood Malaysia’s head of merchant Shaun Yap says that worsening traffic jams in major cities have also become a major reason for people to dine at home or at work.

Meals in tiffin carriers used to define what food delivery was in Malaysia. — Filepic

“People in the past used to take away their food or drive through but it’s becoming more and more difficult because of the congestion and parking difficulties, so we’re seeing a shift from having to go out, wait for the food and then come back home to just having that convenience of ordering it in,” he says. Many consumers agree that the convenience offered by food delivery services is unparalleled.

Freelance designer Emily Yeoh, 28, for instance, says she uses food delivery services a few times a month.

“I like ordering from food delivery sites because I don’t have a car and hate getting stuck in traffic. And I love bubble tea and the queues at the bubble tea outlets are insane, but when I order from GrabFood or Foodpanda, I don’t have to queue up and it arrives at my house in 15 to 20 minutes,” she says.

Manager Cecilia Wong, 35, also sings the praises of food delivery services. “I usually order food like noodles, rice, bubble tea and even snacks like keropok at least three times a week because it is so convenient and I don’t have to leave my office to eat.

“As there are not many restaurant options where I work, this has been great for me,” she says.

According to Sayantan, most of the people who order from Foodpanda are those – like Yeoh and Wong – who are aged between 18 to 35 and fall under categories like students, young working adults, young couples and young families.

Yap adds that the GrabFood data shows different consumption patterns at different times of the day.

“It’s a very broad mix, we see a lot of students and office workers ordering during the day. In the night, demand is quite equal, but it shifts to the suburbs, and we believe it tends to be families and a lot of busy professionals as well,” he says.

Yeoh uses food delivery services all the time as she hates queueing up for her favourite bubble tea. — Emily Yeoh

Because of the increase in demand, many of the restaurants partnering with food delivery services have seen sales soar, with some restaurants even seeing 30% to 40% of their overall sales coming from food delivery orders, according to Sayantan.

Sayantan’s views are echoed by Renyi Chin, co-founder of popular burger outlet MyBurgerLab. “For our stores that are not in malls, we have definitely seen an increase and uptick in delivery orders.

“So most people would ask, when that happens, does that mean fewer customers come in to the physical store? And the answer is ‘no’, because we realise that people who order food have already made up their minds to not get out of their house whereas people who come to our restaurants are socialising and meeting friends or family,” he explains.

This ease of ordering, the sheer volume of what’s on offer and the fact that consumers are increasingly embracing this vicarious style of eating restaurant food without actually having to physically go out, means that food delivery businesses are expanding at supersonic speed on the local front.

At the moment, Foodpanda has signed up more than 18,000 restaurants and 8,000 riders and has a presence in the Klang Valley as well as Johor Baru, Melaka, Penang, Perak, Pahang, Terengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, Sabah and Sarawak. Sayantan’s aim is to dramatically increase their presence all over the country.

“We are looking to acquire every single restaurant that exists in Malaysia, so that number may range from 100,000 to 200,000 if you count the stalls. But in terms of the selection process, we look at what kind of cuisines are more popular and what kinds of trends exist in certain areas,” he says.

Yap, meanwhile, says that in less than two years, GrabFood now has a whopping 5,000 restaurants and 10,000 riders.

“We’re in six cities today – Klang Valley, Johor Baru, Penang, Kota Kinabalu, Kuching and Melaka.

“And in each of these cities, we start with the core areas and then expand. Our goal is ultimately that everyone that we serve has a large selection of restaurants to choose from,” he says.

from Food – Star2.com https://ift.tt/302gFeb

[christophervanhorn]

Victory Liner bus trip from Manila

There are two kinds of people in the Philippines: those who take “Local” transportation, and those who go “First Class,” as they’ll call them. I’ve found that Local transport usually entails a jeepney (the converted U.S. army jeeps with dozens of passengers crammed in the back that litter the streets by the tens of thousands), shared vans, no-frills ferry rides, trikes (the converted motorcycles with sidecars) and buses. First Class, however, is reserved for those people who can take a metered taxi, a Grab (their version of Uber or Lyft), or are lucky enough to have a car.

The number of people who go “Local” versus “First Class” aren’t always easily segregated by homegrown Filipinos versus foreigners, either. Although there may be a correlation, a lot of foreign travelers are broke backpackers who are brave enough to sweat and push it out like a native son or daughter. Conversely, while most travelers do opt for planes rides whenever possible and hire car services or take Grab cars, etc. for long trips, a surprising number of middle-class Filipinos have cars.

For me, I’ve been a complete travel snob whenever possible, because the comfort, safety, and convenience is worth it. Plus, in a country where plane tickets routinely cost $40-$50 to some beautiful island, why bother with the ferry that takes 12 hours just to save $30?

However, I’m living in Manila now, which I’m finding is NOT a cheap city. In fact, my relatively-humble budget made me a baller in Dumaguete where I lived the last year, but barely allows me to get by in Manila, where a whole lot of locals have the means comparable with the average person in the U.S.

That being said, I can’t spend frivolously anymore, so I’ll save a buck whenever it REALLY makes sense. Such is the case this weekend when I had to get from my McKinley Hill neighborhood in Manila up to Angeles City, the Las Vegas-like smaller city in the province of Pampanga. This was also a necessity because I left several suitcases with friends up there while I was in the States, so I needed to finally pick them up.

It’s only 80km or so north, but transportation is limited to just three viable options for most foreigners: 1) Take the bus 2) Hire a car to drive you 3) Get the Fly The Bus van from the Swagman Hotel

Hiring a car costs about $60, but of course, it’s the fastest and most comfortable method. The Fly The Bus option isn’t bad if you don’t mind being crammed in a van, but it is safe and has AC, etc. That only runs about $10 if I remember right – huge savings, but you have to pick it up at the Swagman Hotel in Malate, which is way too far from my neighborhood to make sense.

And then the bus, which I opted for.

View this post on Instagram

The Victory Liner bus in the Philippines – could be a lot worse!

A post shared by AllWorld.com (@allworldonline) on Jan 8, 2019 at 10:01am PST

My mini adventure started with a lot of Googling and asking friends where to go and how to do it, because it’s not as simple as you may think. First, I had to take a taxi to the Pasay area to the Victory Liner bus terminal there. That taxi ride ran me 170 Pesos ($3) and took 20 minutes, although that could easily be an hour Monday through Friday because I departed on a Sunday (by plan). From there, I found the outdoor queue for tickets and was told by one lady to stand in a certain line. After a fifteen minute wait, I got to the front, only to be told that I was in the wrong line, so I had to get wayyyy in the back of the line next door. It’s more confusing in the Philippines!

But no worries, because just when I settled in for a 20 or 30-minute wait in line, one of the bus driver’s assistants called over to me and asked where I was going. When I told him that I was heading to Dau (the small town/bus station adjacent to Angeles City), he ushered me on and told me that I could easily pay on the bus without a ticket – which ran 163 Pesos – less than the taxi to get there!

I did double check that we were heading towards Angeles City because you never know if my pronunciation of “Dau” is off and I actually end up in the far end of “Mau” twelve hours away! Haha.

I found my way to the back and found an empty pair of seats, putting my backpack on one to try to discourage someone sitting next to me. Trust me when I tell you that this is important, because the seats are not quite U.S. sizes, and I’m pretty wide in the shoulders and hate being jammed in next to someone.

Usually, on a REAL local bus in the province (or countryside, meaning anywhere outside of Manila!) they will not only pack people in 2 or 3 to a 2-person row of seats, but fill up the aisles with people standing, until you’re so jammed against the window and other people that you literally feel claustrophobic and like you can’t breathe! Those buses also stop just about every fifty feet, as anyone along the side of the road can flag them down and get on, bringing their chickens/dogs/puking babies/fish or anything else with them.

Luckily, the Victory Liner is much more of a first-rate option, and there were still some seats to spare, so I did have a seat next to me empty. The air conditioning was fine and my seat also had sufficient leg room, which makes it comfortable.

It took us about an hour just to get to the outskirts of Manila and on the open highway, but that can easily be 3-4 hours, believe it or not, in traffic. So MAKE SURE you go to the bathroom before you depart and don’t drink anything along the way! There is a rest stop about half way to Dau, but the bus didn’t stop because we were making such good time, although they may if the trip takes hours and hours.

In all, it only took us about 2 hours from the Victory Liner station in Pasay to the station in Dau, which is just a flyspeck of a suburb. While the trip was simple, comfy, and enjoyable, I would recommend you check for another thing when boarding – calculate which side of the bus will get direct sunlight and sit on the OTHER side. The sun is no joke beaming through the windows for hours, and even with the window curtains drawn, it really heats it up.

Once in Dau, I got my bag from the luggage storage compartment underneath (I would never let my bag out of sight on a more “local” bus because it would most likely be stolen, but the Victory Liner is a good operation) and found a trike driver easily to take me to my hotel in Angeles City, which only cost me 150 Pesos ($3) and less than fifteen minutes.

The grand total? About $9 and change and less than three hours door-to-door. Of course, the caveat it that it could easily be double that time or more on a normal day with traffic, but that would be true if you took a taxi or car, too.

I’ll definitely take the Victory Liner again on certain trips!

The post Victory Liner bus trip from Manila appeared first on AllWorld.com.

source https://www.allworld.com/victory-liner-bus-trip-from-manila/ source https://allworldus.tumblr.com/post/182574450857

[shelleyrobbinsus]

Victory Liner bus trip from Manila

There are two kinds of people in the Philippines: those who take “Local” transportation, and those who go “First Class,” as they’ll call them. I’ve found that Local transport usually entails a jeepney (the converted U.S. army jeeps with dozens of passengers crammed in the back that litter the streets by the tens of thousands), shared vans, no-frills ferry rides, trikes (the converted motorcycles with sidecars) and buses. First Class, however, is reserved for those people who can take a metered taxi, a Grab (their version of Uber or Lyft), or are lucky enough to have a car.

The number of people who go “Local” versus “First Class” aren’t always easily segregated by homegrown Filipinos versus foreigners, either. Although there may be a correlation, a lot of foreign travelers are broke backpackers who are brave enough to sweat and push it out like a native son or daughter. Conversely, while most travelers do opt for planes rides whenever possible and hire car services or take Grab cars, etc. for long trips, a surprising number of middle-class Filipinos have cars.

For me, I’ve been a complete travel snob whenever possible, because the comfort, safety, and convenience is worth it. Plus, in a country where plane tickets routinely cost $40-$50 to some beautiful island, why bother with the ferry that takes 12 hours just to save $30?

However, I’m living in Manila now, which I’m finding is NOT a cheap city. In fact, my relatively-humble budget made me a baller in Dumaguete where I lived the last year, but barely allows me to get by in Manila, where a whole lot of locals have the means comparable with the average person in the U.S.

That being said, I can’t spend frivolously anymore, so I’ll save a buck whenever it REALLY makes sense. Such is the case this weekend when I had to get from my McKinley Hill neighborhood in Manila up to Angeles City, the Las Vegas-like smaller city in the province of Pampanga. This was also a necessity because I left several suitcases with friends up there while I was in the States, so I needed to finally pick them up.

It’s only 80km or so north, but transportation is limited to just three viable options for most foreigners: 1) Take the bus 2) Hire a car to drive you 3) Get the Fly The Bus van from the Swagman Hotel

Hiring a car costs about $60, but of course, it’s the fastest and most comfortable method. The Fly The Bus option isn’t bad if you don’t mind being crammed in a van, but it is safe and has AC, etc. That only runs about $10 if I remember right – huge savings, but you have to pick it up at the Swagman Hotel in Malate, which is way too far from my neighborhood to make sense.

And then the bus, which I opted for.

View this post on Instagram

The Victory Liner bus in the Philippines – could be a lot worse!

A post shared by AllWorld.com (@allworldonline) on Jan 8, 2019 at 10:01am PST

My mini adventure started with a lot of Googling and asking friends where to go and how to do it, because it’s not as simple as you may think. First, I had to take a taxi to the Pasay area to the Victory Liner bus terminal there. That taxi ride ran me 170 Pesos ($3) and took 20 minutes, although that could easily be an hour Monday through Friday because I departed on a Sunday (by plan). From there, I found the outdoor queue for tickets and was told by one lady to stand in a certain line. After a fifteen minute wait, I got to the front, only to be told that I was in the wrong line, so I had to get wayyyy in the back of the line next door. It’s more confusing in the Philippines!

But no worries, because just when I settled in for a 20 or 30-minute wait in line, one of the bus driver’s assistants called over to me and asked where I was going. When I told him that I was heading to Dau (the small town/bus station adjacent to Angeles City), he ushered me on and told me that I could easily pay on the bus without a ticket – which ran 163 Pesos – less than the taxi to get there!

I did double check that we were heading towards Angeles City because you never know if my pronunciation of “Dau” is off and I actually end up in the far end of “Mau” twelve hours away! Haha.

I found my way to the back and found an empty pair of seats, putting my backpack on one to try to discourage someone sitting next to me. Trust me when I tell you that this is important, because the seats are not quite U.S. sizes, and I’m pretty wide in the shoulders and hate being jammed in next to someone.

Usually, on a REAL local bus in the province (or countryside, meaning anywhere outside of Manila!) they will not only pack people in 2 or 3 to a 2-person row of seats, but fill up the aisles with people standing, until you’re so jammed against the window and other people that you literally feel claustrophobic and like you can’t breathe! Those buses also stop just about every fifty feet, as anyone along the side of the road can flag them down and get on, bringing their chickens/dogs/puking babies/fish or anything else with them.

Luckily, the Victory Liner is much more of a first-rate option, and there were still some seats to spare, so I did have a seat next to me empty. The air conditioning was fine and my seat also had sufficient leg room, which makes it comfortable.

It took us about an hour just to get to the outskirts of Manila and on the open highway, but that can easily be 3-4 hours, believe it or not, in traffic. So MAKE SURE you go to the bathroom before you depart and don’t drink anything along the way! There is a rest stop about half way to Dau, but the bus didn’t stop because we were making such good time, although they may if the trip takes hours and hours.

In all, it only took us about 2 hours from the Victory Liner station in Pasay to the station in Dau, which is just a flyspeck of a suburb. While the trip was simple, comfy, and enjoyable, I would recommend you check for another thing when boarding – calculate which side of the bus will get direct sunlight and sit on the OTHER side. The sun is no joke beaming through the windows for hours, and even with the window curtains drawn, it really heats it up.

Once in Dau, I got my bag from the luggage storage compartment underneath (I would never let my bag out of sight on a more “local” bus because it would most likely be stolen, but the Victory Liner is a good operation) and found a trike driver easily to take me to my hotel in Angeles City, which only cost me 150 Pesos ($3) and less than fifteen minutes.

The grand total? About $9 and change and less than three hours door-to-door. Of course, the caveat it that it could easily be double that time or more on a normal day with traffic, but that would be true if you took a taxi or car, too.

I’ll definitely take the Victory Liner again on certain trips!

The post Victory Liner bus trip from Manila appeared first on AllWorld.com.

Via https://www.allworld.com/victory-liner-bus-trip-from-manila/

source http://allworldus.weebly.com/blog/victory-liner-bus-trip-from-manila

[allworldus]

Victory Liner bus trip from Manila

There are two kinds of people in the Philippines: those who take “Local” transportation, and those who go “First Class,” as they’ll call them. I’ve found that Local transport usually entails a jeepney (the converted U.S. army jeeps with dozens of passengers crammed in the back that litter the streets by the tens of thousands), shared vans, no-frills ferry rides, trikes (the converted motorcycles with sidecars) and buses. First Class, however, is reserved for those people who can take a metered taxi, a Grab (their version of Uber or Lyft), or are lucky enough to have a car.

The number of people who go “Local” versus “First Class” aren’t always easily segregated by homegrown Filipinos versus foreigners, either. Although there may be a correlation, a lot of foreign travelers are broke backpackers who are brave enough to sweat and push it out like a native son or daughter. Conversely, while most travelers do opt for planes rides whenever possible and hire car services or take Grab cars, etc. for long trips, a surprising number of middle-class Filipinos have cars.

For me, I’ve been a complete travel snob whenever possible, because the comfort, safety, and convenience is worth it. Plus, in a country where plane tickets routinely cost $40-$50 to some beautiful island, why bother with the ferry that takes 12 hours just to save $30?

However, I’m living in Manila now, which I’m finding is NOT a cheap city. In fact, my relatively-humble budget made me a baller in Dumaguete where I lived the last year, but barely allows me to get by in Manila, where a whole lot of locals have the means comparable with the average person in the U.S.

That being said, I can’t spend frivolously anymore, so I’ll save a buck whenever it REALLY makes sense. Such is the case this weekend when I had to get from my McKinley Hill neighborhood in Manila up to Angeles City, the Las Vegas-like smaller city in the province of Pampanga. This was also a necessity because I left several suitcases with friends up there while I was in the States, so I needed to finally pick them up.

It’s only 80km or so north, but transportation is limited to just three viable options for most foreigners: 1) Take the bus 2) Hire a car to drive you 3) Get the Fly The Bus van from the Swagman Hotel

Hiring a car costs about $60, but of course, it’s the fastest and most comfortable method. The Fly The Bus option isn’t bad if you don’t mind being crammed in a van, but it is safe and has AC, etc. That only runs about $10 if I remember right – huge savings, but you have to pick it up at the Swagman Hotel in Malate, which is way too far from my neighborhood to make sense.

And then the bus, which I opted for.

View this post on Instagram

The Victory Liner bus in the Philippines – could be a lot worse!

A post shared by AllWorld.com (@allworldonline) on Jan 8, 2019 at 10:01am PST

My mini adventure started with a lot of Googling and asking friends where to go and how to do it, because it’s not as simple as you may think. First, I had to take a taxi to the Pasay area to the Victory Liner bus terminal there. That taxi ride ran me 170 Pesos ($3) and took 20 minutes, although that could easily be an hour Monday through Friday because I departed on a Sunday (by plan). From there, I found the outdoor queue for tickets and was told by one lady to stand in a certain line. After a fifteen minute wait, I got to the front, only to be told that I was in the wrong line, so I had to get wayyyy in the back of the line next door. It’s more confusing in the Philippines!

But no worries, because just when I settled in for a 20 or 30-minute wait in line, one of the bus driver’s assistants called over to me and asked where I was going. When I told him that I was heading to Dau (the small town/bus station adjacent to Angeles City), he ushered me on and told me that I could easily pay on the bus without a ticket – which ran 163 Pesos – less than the taxi to get there!

I did double check that we were heading towards Angeles City because you never know if my pronunciation of “Dau” is off and I actually end up in the far end of “Mau” twelve hours away! Haha.

I found my way to the back and found an empty pair of seats, putting my backpack on one to try to discourage someone sitting next to me. Trust me when I tell you that this is important, because the seats are not quite U.S. sizes, and I’m pretty wide in the shoulders and hate being jammed in next to someone.

Usually, on a REAL local bus in the province (or countryside, meaning anywhere outside of Manila!) they will not only pack people in 2 or 3 to a 2-person row of seats, but fill up the aisles with people standing, until you’re so jammed against the window and other people that you literally feel claustrophobic and like you can’t breathe! Those buses also stop just about every fifty feet, as anyone along the side of the road can flag them down and get on, bringing their chickens/dogs/puking babies/fish or anything else with them.

Luckily, the Victory Liner is much more of a first-rate option, and there were still some seats to spare, so I did have a seat next to me empty. The air conditioning was fine and my seat also had sufficient leg room, which makes it comfortable.

It took us about an hour just to get to the outskirts of Manila and on the open highway, but that can easily be 3-4 hours, believe it or not, in traffic. So MAKE SURE you go to the bathroom before you depart and don’t drink anything along the way! There is a rest stop about half way to Dau, but the bus didn’t stop because we were making such good time, although they may if the trip takes hours and hours.

In all, it only took us about 2 hours from the Victory Liner station in Pasay to the station in Dau, which is just a flyspeck of a suburb. While the trip was simple, comfy, and enjoyable, I would recommend you check for another thing when boarding – calculate which side of the bus will get direct sunlight and sit on the OTHER side. The sun is no joke beaming through the windows for hours, and even with the window curtains drawn, it really heats it up.

Once in Dau, I got my bag from the luggage storage compartment underneath (I would never let my bag out of sight on a more “local” bus because it would most likely be stolen, but the Victory Liner is a good operation) and found a trike driver easily to take me to my hotel in Angeles City, which only cost me 150 Pesos ($3) and less than fifteen minutes.

The grand total? About $9 and change and less than three hours door-to-door. Of course, the caveat it that it could easily be double that time or more on a normal day with traffic, but that would be true if you took a taxi or car, too.

I’ll definitely take the Victory Liner again on certain trips!

The post Victory Liner bus trip from Manila appeared first on AllWorld.com.

source https://www.allworld.com/victory-liner-bus-trip-from-manila/

[clubofinfo]

Expert: From Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Samarinda and Pontianak ***** Several years ago, a prominent Indonesian businessman who now resides in Canada, insisted on meeting me in a back room of one of Jakarta’s posh restaurants. An avid reader of mine, he ‘had something urgent to tell me’, after finding out that our paths were going to be crossing in this destroyed and hopelessly polluted Indonesian capital. What he had to say was actually straight to the point and definitely worth sitting two hours in an epic traffic jam: No one will be allowed to build comprehensive public transportation in Jakarta or in any other Indonesian city. If a mayor or a governor tries and defies the wishes of the ruthless business community which is in fact controlling most of the Indonesian government, he or she will be dethroned, or even totally destroyed. These ‘prophetic’ words are still ringing in my ears, several months after the complete destruction of the progressive Jakarta governor, known as Ahok (real name: Basuki Tjahaja Purnama), who tried very hard to improve the seemingly ungovernable and thoroughly destroyed city, constructing new mass transit lines (LRT), restoring old train stations, cleaning canals, attempting to build at least some basic net of sidewalks, as well as planting trees and creating parks. After Ahok’s first and extremely successful term in office, the opposition consolidated its forces. It consisted mainly of the Islamists, big business tycoons, and the military as well as other revanchist cadres (almost exclusively pro-business and pro-Western individuals) that are still controlling Indonesia. ‘Ahok’, an outsider and an ethnic Chinese, patently lost. Instead of coming to his rescue, several ‘prominent’ but corrupt city planners and architects, most of them enjoying funding from abroad, shamelessly joined the bandwagon of ‘Ahok bashing’. But even defeating Ahok was not enough. He had to be punished and humiliated, in order to discourage others from trying to replicate his socially-oriented example. Already during the election campaign, charges were brought against him, alleging that he had ‘insulted Islam’ during one of his public appearances.  It was total nonsense, disputed by several leading Indonesian linguists, but in a thoroughly corrupt society (both legally and morally) it simply worked. On May 9, 2017, ‘Ahok’ was sentenced to two years in prison, and unceremoniously thrown into the dungeon. Since then, many of his projects have stopped totally, or at least were significantly slowed down. A disgusting filth has once again began covering Jakarta’s canals and rivers. For those who still believed in miracles, all hopes died. Those ‘city planners’ who still conveniently believe that one can ‘work with’ the present regime (they call it ‘government’) correctly assumed that it was once again ‘business as usual’. As ‘Ahok’ was being thrown behind bars, huge sighs of relief were almost detectable all over this misfortunate archipelago! Everything has returned to ‘normal’, at least for those who have been benefiting from the collapse of Indonesia and its cities. The clock of Indonesian history was turned back. It is now almost certain that at least for several upcoming decades, all Indonesian cities will remain what they are now – a living hell, the worst nightmare, and indisputably some of the most horrid urban areas found anywhere on Earth. But readers abroad are not supposed to know all this. Indonesian people are not supposed to understand the situation. It is now all biasa – ‘just normal, just fine. Everything is fine. Read those ANU (Australian National University) papers and you will learn that ‘Indonesia is now a normal country, like Brazil or Mexico’. Nothing extraordinary is taking place. ***** In reality, everything has collapsed. The cities have. Not metaphorically, not hyperbolically, but concretely, practically. A renowned Australian artist, George Burchett, who now resides in Hanoi, Vietnam, once visited Jakarta. For several weeks we travelled together all around the Indonesian archipelago. He was shocked and depressed. Before departing, he declared: I saw many cities, all over the world. Cities are built for the people. For the first time in my life, in Indonesia, I saw the cities that are actually built not for the people, but against the people. It is because Indonesian cities are fascist. They do not serve the needs of its citizens. On the contrary, they are designed to extract that little which is still left in the possession of the common Indonesian folks; extract and give it to the local rulers, as well as to the multi-national companies. ***** Excerpts of the most common definitions of ‘failed states’ are stated in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and can perfectly apply to both Indonesia in general, and to its cities in particular: The governing capacity of a failed state is attenuated such that it is unable to fulfill the administrative and organizational tasks required to control people and resources and can provide only minimal public services… A failed state suffers from crumbling infrastructures, faltering utility supplies and educational and health facilities, and deteriorating basic human-development indicators… Governor ‘Ahok’ tried to change the situation. Crowds cheered. Millions watched, in all the major cities of Indonesia. Hope was born, at first fragile but soon blossoming. Then suddenly: a tremendous blast, full stop, and collapse! The man who dared to inject several socialist elements into the sclerotic, brutal system, ended up behind bars. And it is now all back to the old ‘failed state’ scenario. Life is once again thoroughly empty and predictable. There is hardly any difference between the Indonesian cities. If you put a person in the center or a suburb of Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Semarang, Medan, Makassar or Pontianak, he or she would have no idea, which one is which. All major streets are choked with traffic jams. There are no sidewalks, and even if there are some pathetic and narrow ones, they are overtaken by aggressive and smoke belching scooters, as well as by unregulated and unhygienic street vendor stalls. Thugs are everywhere, controlling the streets. Almost all side streets have open sewage system. When it rains, entire neighborhoods get submerged under filthy water. Tiny carts, pulled by unclean and underpaid men, collect garbage. All the cities face the same problems, and all the cities look precisely the same. Sanitation, water quality and garbage recycling facilities are at similar levels to those of the poorest sub-Saharan African countries. With food and fuel prices up many Indonesian children are forced to work Slums are omnipresent – huge and brutal. In fact, most of the neighborhoods of the Indonesian cities, called kampungs (‘villages’), could easily fit the international definitions of slums. ***** A few years ago I was invited to speak at the University of Indonesia (UI). Various students asked me: “Why? Why is all this is happening in our country? And is there any solution?” I replied that, of course, there is a solution: “socialism and central planning. But it would also have to be determined and real, and it would have to include a full-hearted anti-corruption battle, as well as a decisive ban on selling all natural resources and utilities to foreigners.” I added: “And tell your professors to stop salivating over-funding from the West, and flying to Europe in order to learn about ‘administration’, ‘good governance’ and city planning from those who have been robbing your country for several centuries.” I believe that students liked the sound of what I was saying (not sure they were still capable of understanding the meaning of my words). However, predictably, I was never invited to the UI again. ***** Indonesian cities are like open sores. Everything has been stolen from them and as a result, what makes life bearable is clearly missing. Only what the ‘elites’ do not want, is what has been left for the people. Hungry and Homeless in Jakarta There are hardly any public parks in Indonesia, at least no parks of any significance. Cities have no river or seafronts, in a striking contrast to South American, Middle Eastern and even African urban areas (not to speak of tremendous and beautiful public spaces, parks, promenades and exercise areas in China). Dirty, clogged and polluted driveways are called ‘streets’ and ‘avenues’. There are no sidewalks, or if there are, they are just one meter wide, with broken tiles or deep potholes. Where sidewalks are not really needed, there may be actually some built – along one or two streets in the very center and in front of some government buildings, connecting basically nothing. This clearly shows that nothing is actually designed for the people. It is important to understand that the government of Indonesia, on all levels, is not actually an institution that consists of men and women who are determined to improve the country and to serve its people. On the contrary! In Indonesia, a great number of politicians belong to or are somehow affiliated to the military, which has ruled the country brutally since the 1965 Western-backed military coup. That coup destroyed everything socialist and Communist, banned Communist ideas, and murdered between 1 and 3 million people, including almost all the progressive intellectuals. On top of it, most of the politicians are businesspeople, tycoons and oligarchs, and the great majority of them of unsavory reputations. They have been robbing the nation and its people for more than half of a century, and there is absolutely no reason why they should stop doing it now, or anytime soon. For these individuals, to grab the top political positions is nothing more than about maximizing the profits. ‘Indonesian democracy’ which the West loves to glorify (no wonder, as Indonesia de-facto functions as an obedient colony, plundering its own citizens and resources on behalf of the West), consists of countless political parties, of which not one of them is from the left, or defends the interests of common people. Moreover, a great majority of the ‘civil society’, of the NGO’s, are subservient to Western economical and political interests. Many, if not all, of these organizations are directly funded from Washington, Berlin, London or Canberra. (I described the situation in my latest novel, Aurora. Indonesian companies and its government are one single entity. And they are decisively and in unison plundering the entire archipelago of its natural resources. The 4th most populous country on Earth produces almost nothing. (Read my book Archipelago of Fear in English and in Bahasa Indonesia). The ‘philosophy’ of this unbridled plunder is then applied to ‘urbanism’; to the way Indonesian cities are governed and basically abandoned to the markets. Not even in Africa where I lived and worked for several years, is there such absolute and shameless theft of urban land by the elites (of which members of government are part). Once all this is determined, to understand the reality of Indonesia and its cities becomes much easier. Once this is defined, Indonesian cities ‘begin to make sense’. ***** In reality, there is not much that could be called ‘urban’ in the Indonesian cities. Be it a city like Pontianak with 600,000 inhabitants, or Jakarta with 12 million (28 million including the surrounding cities and suburbs). Wherever one goes, profit over people is taken to the extreme. Like those logged out, mined out and polluted islands of the archipelago, Indonesian cities are designed in a way that brings maximum income to the extremely small group of individuals and businesses. The price has to be paid by the impoverished, often ill, badly-educated, and literally choking majority. The tremendously low level of media outlets, education, pop entertainment, as well as constant religious encroachment and feudal family structures, are purposefully spread and upheld, so the population does not think, does not doubt and does not rebel. The results are shocking. Indonesian cities are like palm oil plantations or open-pit mines, with some elements of military barrack colonies (of course, there are some special quarters for the overseers, with large and kitschy houses, like those that dot South Jakarta). Here, nothing is constructed to make life great, colorful, ecstatic, meaningful and happy. There are no permanent concert halls, no theatres, and no grand public museums (one that recently opened is private, and serves to further politically indoctrinate people, this time targeting the ‘urban middle class’). There are no pedestrian neighborhoods, and no free and public seafronts. Not one architecturally valuable structure has been constructed in any Indonesian city after the 1965/66 military/religious coup. In Indonesia, a ‘public area’ is synonymous with a mall, in fact, with countless malls of various sizes and qualities. Inside the malls, there are chain eateries and chain shops, as well as cafes. There are also a few cinemas, showing mostly Hollywood junk or local horror films. On the weekends, there are bands playing old Western and Indonesian pop tunes, offering absolutely no variety. Some 50 songs are recycled again and again. The most favorite is, predictably: “I did it my way”. There is nothing ‘extra’ in the Indonesian cities. Here everything is stripped to absolute basics: you somehow survive on your meager salary (with prices, at least for the food and consumer goods being as high or higher than in Tokyo or Paris), you somehow move to your workplace and back, sitting for hours every day in horrific traffic jams as there is no public transportation even in such cities with 2-3 million inhabitants, like Surabaya or Bandung. You cook and wash your dishes and clothes in terribly polluted water, and try to save on outrageously high electricity bills. There is absolutely nothing to do in your neighborhood. There is, of course, always a mosque nearby or sometimes a church, if that’s what you fancy. There are no parks, no playgrounds for children. There is no sidewalk to walk to a cafe, and so, if you want to actually go to a cafe or to a bookstore (all the bookstores in Indonesia are increasingly poorly stocked and heavily censored), you have to jump onto your scooter or into your car again, if you have any strength left. The chances are – you have no time for anything, anyway. A 3-4 hours long daily commute, your exhausting work, and all you have time for is to collapse in front of the television set and get indoctrinated, neutralized and idiotized even further. You learn to smile when you actually want to die, or at least to shout. You sense that nothing could ever change for better, and that your life is finished, perhaps at 25, or even earlier. Eventually, some people do it sooner than others: you become religious, and you become traditional, conservative and ‘family-oriented’. There is nothing else, really. The cities of Indonesia will make sure that there is nothing else. They are the perfect machines, manufacturing obedience, extracting everything from human beings, and giving nothing in return. ***** I often describe the coup of 1965 as a “Cultural Hiroshima”. While in Japan, the US openly experimented on the health of millions of human beings, in Indonesia the experiment was of a totally different nature. The area of interest to the Empire was: What would happen with a progressive anti-imperialist nation that counts on a complex and diverse culture, if it is bathed in blood, if its theatres and film studios are shut down, 40% of teachers get murdered, women from left-wing organizations get their breasts amputated, writers are locked in Buru Island concentration camp, and urban planners are thought to design cities like Houston, Dallas or LA, but in a country with salaries that are 10% or less than those of the U.S.A.? The answer is simple: “It would turn into Indonesia. It would become Jakarta, as it is now”. For the Western demagogues and the imperialist planners, “Indonesia” and “Jakarta” are not only the names of the country and the city: they are names of the concept, of a model. This model, forced on the colonies, is perfect for the West and its interests. Jakarta: One of better public sidewalks It is also perfect for the Indonesian ‘elites’, who are often getting dirty at home, plundering all they can, but do relax and play and often evacuate their entire families to Singapore, California, Australia, Hong Kong and many other ‘safe and clean’ places. It is the cheapest; the most efficient of concepts designed to plunder, and to royally fuck a nation. Not surprisingly, the West has tried to replicate this ‘successful Indonesian model’ in many parts of the world. It even tried to inject it into Russia, after the USSR was first mortally wounded and then destroyed. It tried to force it on Chile… My much older friends in Santiago told me that before the 9-11-1973 coup perpetrated by General Pinochet on behalf of the West and its companies, several people around President Allende were threatened by the right-wingers: “Watch out, Jakarta is coming!” ***** Jakarta came! It is here, all over Indonesia, in all of its cities, and to varying degrees in most of the countries that have fallen under the Western neo-colonialist boot. But what does it really mean, ‘Jakarta’? Is it just a name or is it also a verb, an infinitive? “To Jakarta…” It is ‘to take everything away from the people and to give nothing back’. ‘To Jakarta’ is to lie and to loot and to convince human beings, through long decades of indoctrination, that everything is just fine, and as should be. ‘To Jakartize’ the nation is to make almost the entire population irrelevant, to deliver the loot on the silver trays to both local and foreign rulers, leaving only dirty and polluted rivers and canals behind, as well as tremendous traffic jams, smog, bizarre overpasses with no escalators, and broken tiles along the driveways. Even filthy beach in Jakarta is for a fee The ‘Jakartized population’ is obedient, explosively violent, edgy, but not towards the regime, turbo-capitalism, corrupt elites and their Western masters, but towards each other, as well as towards the minorities. Jakarta gets very little criticism from the official mainstream Western and local media, and almost no genuine analysis from academia. No surprise: to attack the reality of the Indonesian cities is like attacking the entire Western neo-colonialist system imposed on various parts of the world. To tell the truth would destroy any journalistic career, as it would torpedo almost any chance for a well-remunerated university tenure! Very often, all that one could expect in terms of a realistic description of the situation in Indonesia, are random exclamations overheard on board departing airplanes, or some ‘anecdotal evidence’ from the pages of travel magazines and blogs. It appears that what normal people see with their own eyes is in direct contradiction with what the mainstream media and academia presents as ‘facts’. On 17 September 2017, a Malaysian newspaper The Star wrote: Based on a real-time air quality index uploaded to the Airvisual application at midday on Friday, Sept 15, Jakarta ranked third as the most polluted city in the world… In mid-August, the application showed that Jakarta was at the top of the list, followed by Ankara, Turkey and Lahore, Pakistan. “Escape Here” magazine ranked Jakarta as the No1 city in its report “The 10 Worst Traffic Cities in the World”: It happens to be the country’s capital and one of the most poorly designed cities in the World, a combination that makes getting around here a disaster. An ever-increasing number of car owners that come from the expansion of suburbia that surrounds this mega-city are to be blamed for the 400 hours a year that citizens spend in traffic. It is actually hailed as being the worst traffic in the world. It doesn’t seem like there is any solution for this mega-city as the infrastructure here falls into the hands of the local government and contracts are renegotiated annually; which means long-term projects are pretty much impossible. An average trip in this city takes about 2 hours… On 2 September 2015, even the official propaganda English language newspaper of Indonesia, the Jakarta Post, re-published the survey ranking the horrendous Indonesian capital as the 9th ‘un-friendliest city on Earth’: Jakarta, the Indonesian capital notorious for gridlocks and bad air pollution, ranks 9th among the world’s least friendly cities this year, a recent survey by an international travel magazine shows. Readers of the highly regarded luxury travel magazine Conde Nast Traveler included Jakarta for the first time on its ’10 unfriendliest cities in the world’ list this year. In the survey, one of the readers said Jakarta was ‘the scariest place I have ever been to ‘with its congestion and aggressive locals. The ‘scariest place’: but, of course! What could one expect from the capital city of the country that in the last half a century has committed 3 monstrous genocides (against its own population in 1965/66, against the people of East Timor and an on going genocide against the people of Papua)? What could one expect from cities that have been totally robbed of green spaces and, in fact, of everything that could be called ‘public’, where the arts have disappeared and where absolutely everything has become commercialized; where everything and everybody is now expected to be the same – behave the same way, look the same way, sound the same way, taste the same way. Try to look different, and if you are a Papuan, Chinese, African, or white, just try to walk on those broken tiny sidewalks of Surabaya, Jakarta, Pontianak, or Medan. You will be shouted at; you will immediately become the target of naked racism. People will stop and point fingers, or worse. A few days ago I filmed from a boat sailing on a polluted river passing through Pontianak city, on an island in Borneo. Two children on the shore immediately raised their middle fingers and began yelling: “Fuck you!” Just like that: with no warning and for no reason. And this is, of course, not the worst that could happen. If I was Chinese… were I an African… Everybody knows it. Nobody speaks about it, nobody writes… According to Western ‘analysts’ and academics, Indonesia is a ‘democratic’ and ‘tolerant’ nation. The deeper it is sinking, the more oppressive and intolerant it becomes, the more devastated it gets, and the more it is glorified. Lies are piled up on lies. “The Emperor has beautiful clothes’, everybody shouts, as in that old children’s tale. But, in fact, he is naked! It is clearly “political correctness” at work. One is supposed to be ‘sensitive’ to the local ‘culture’, religion, and way of life. The only defect of this approach is that in countries such as Indonesia, the local culture, its way of life and even the extremely aggressive religions, are all the direct result of the fascist regime that was directly imposed onto this nation by the West after the 1965/66 slaughter.  Had the socialist pre-1965 course be allowed to naturally flow, Indonesia would now be a truly normal, socially-balanced, secular and tolerant nation, and its cities would serve the people, instead of the other way around. Just a normal river in Jakarta Here, the ‘political correctness’, is once again, protecting the crimes against humanity that have been committed by the West, by the local elites and the military, as well as by the religious leaders. The local ‘culture’ is not being protected at all, as it is actually dead, murdered. The cities are dead as well. Their carcasses are stinking, horrifying, monstrous, stripped of all hope. People living in them are choking, humiliated, marginalized, unwell, and constantly robbed by the system. Bizarrely, it takes an elitist magazine like Conde Nast to notice… It takes random travellers to speak out… One would never read such comments in the reports coming out of the Australian National University or on the pages of the New York Times. ***** Just outside the city of Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia, on the Island of Madura, several enormous ships are being manually cut into pieces and sold for scrap by destitute local people. Periodically things explode, collapse, and people lose their faces or limbs. It is a horrible sight: truly haunted, disturbing. Just like in Bangladesh, although here, it goes almost unnoticed. In many ways, I believe that the Indonesian cities resemble those ships, and those polluted coastal areas where the ships are broken into thousands of parts and then sold. Once proud, they are now humiliated, in pain, being torn to pieces while still alive. Only real fascism can treat its citizens this way; only a regime that has lost its marbles, and gone thoroughly insane. Indonesia cities… What do they really consist of? Well, they are made of those tiny and crammed homes, filthy canals, potholed driveways, of indescribable pollution, of mosques and churches. Then there are a few office towers in their centers, countless shopping malls and several luxury hotels where the elites can escape and take some rest from the daily nightmare, which is ‘normal life’ here. Golf courses everywhere, but no decent public parks, as even those few green areas have been already thoroughly privatized. ***** Now the former governor of Jakarta, ‘Ahok’, is in jail for daring to change things; for building public transportation, cleaning the rivers and building a few tiny parks. He is in jail for relocating squatters to public housing, and for trying to serve the impoverished and humiliated majority. His clearly socialist deeds were immediately smeared and discredited by the elites, by the Western-funded NGO’s and by corrupt city planners. Even when this could not stop his determination and zeal, religion was unleashed. Most of the religions are, after all, regressive, pro-business oriented, and ready to support any fascist regime. ***** How much deeper can Indonesian cities sink? When are they going to become uninhabitable? People are already dying; thousands are, unnecessarily – from cancer, from stress, from respiratory diseases. Millions of human beings are wasting their lives. They are alive, but it is only a bare existence, not really life: they are moving mechanically, cutting through the filthy air on their scooters, eating junk food, constantly surrounded by decay and ugliness. Why? For how much longer? The forests of Borneo, Sumatra and Papua are burning. All over this archipelago, everything is logged out, consumed by mines, ruined by monstrous pollution. The extraction and looting of natural resources is the only real economic ‘engine’ of today’s Indonesia. The cities are not faring much better. They are actually not faring any better at all. It is time to wake up, or it could get too late. But the nation appears to be in a total slumber. It does not notice, anymore, that it is really in freefall. It was conditioned not to notice. It was made to accept, even to celebrate its own collapse. Those who forced Indonesia into all this will not tell. As long as there is at least something left, something that can be extracted, utilized, looted, they will be cheering this great Indonesia’s ‘success’ and ‘progress’. I encourage all those people from all over the world who would want to see the true face of neo-colonialism, of savage capitalism and right wing disaster, to come to the Indonesian cities! Come and see with your own eyes. Come and take a walk; don’t hide in your comfortable cities full of leafy parks, concert halls, art cinemas, public transportation and theatres. This is real. This is a warning to the world! Come and see how cities look like in a country where Communism and socialism are banned, where a colony does not even realize that it being colonized, and where everything is served on huge silver plates straight into the gullet of that monster called fascism. Ketapang, West Borneo, Indonesia • All photos by Andre Vltchek http://clubof.info/

[easyfoodnetwork]

Ruth just wanted to eat somewhere — anywhere — that wasn’t a chain Their vibe had been great on the app, but for their first date, the girl suggested the Garden, and Ruth almost ghosted. It was the newest location, the one on York Boulevard that got spray-painted with anti-gentrification graffiti saying things like, “GO BACK 2 UR SUBURB” a couple weeks back; after cleaning it off, the Garden had made a big show of installing a community fridge. Honestly, Ruth wouldn’t have agreed to go if she couldn’t have walked there from her house. On a Saturday night, York was busy, the outdoor parklet tables overflowing at Torchy’s Tacos and Shake Shack and True Food Kitchen; people with laptops were still hunched in the Go Get ’Em Tiger, and tired-looking parents hauled growlers of beer from the Golden Road pub, maybe with a six-pack of Bud under their arm. The Garden was the street’s newest addition, its glass exterior covered in long green vines, looking disconcertingly hip and inviting next to the local chain Thai Town, huddled in a former barbershop. The girl, Sierra, was waiting inside, perusing the menu projected on the wall in old-school Italian-joint cursive. She was shorter than Ruth had expected, and the ponytail peeking out from her trucker hat was bright pink. She greeted Ruth with a huge smile, and Ruth tried to act normal; meeting someone after messaging back and forth always felt so unbearable, even worse if they were actually cute. Sierra was cute. They bantered back and forth about whether the cauliflower parm would be good or a disaster, and agreed they could not not get mozzarella sticks. After ordering at the counter, they sat down and a runner immediately brought out a basket of warm breadsticks, the only reminder of the chain that had spawned the Garden. The breadsticks were the best thing, soft and salty and comforting. Ruth’s cauliflower parm was soggy on the bottom, and Sierra’s vegan alfredo was like slurping nutritional yeast. Their messaging over the app had been playful and cheekily uninformative; now Sierra explained she was a storyboard artist on a kids cartoon about girl superheroes, airing on Prime. Ruth used to lead with her now-defunct Instagram ice cream business, or even her old restaurant in New York, the one that closed. But the endless grind of first dates had sanded down her pride, so she stuck to honesty: She was a corporate chef at Alexa’s. “So we both work for Amazon,” Ruth said. “What are the odds?” “Honestly, this isn’t the first time this happened on a date,” Sierra said. “Though you’re the first chef I’ve gone out with. And I brought you to a competitor!” The Garden was not a competitor; Alexa’s did full table service, with good wines and produce pulled from the Whole Foods pipeline. Every dish was made by a person, at some point, from scratch. Ruth didn’t like how tightly she clung to this. “I appreciate Olive Garden’s way with breadsticks.” “I was so pumped when this place opened in the neighborhood.” “It’s not really my style?” “Then on the next date, take me somewhere with better breadsticks.” She laughed, and Ruth decided she liked her. Sierra came back to Ruth’s fixer-upper bungalow she’d run out of money to fixer-up, and they made out for a while. It was pleasantly awkward; neither quite knew why they liked the other yet, but what they stumbled onto was promising. Sierra said she’d be back for breakfast the next morning, a move Ruth honestly kind of appreciated because she’d worked a surprise double shift Friday and needed sleep. The next morning, Sierra let herself in with a bag of glossy chocolate Dunkin Donuts and sweet, milky coffee. Ruth asked if this was technically a second date, and Sierra slid her hands up Ruth’s loose T-shirt. The ice melted in the coffee by the time they got to it, but Ruth was glad for the doughnuts, even if they were a little stale. Both she and Sierra worked 70-hour weeks — animating an empowering kids show was a real nightmare, it turned out — so they stole time together when they could. Mostly, they spent Sundays together, since Ruth was working Saturday nights again, the exact thing selling out was supposed to fix, but Alexa’s kept expanding and taking her chefs to open in Venice and Inglewood and Glassell Park and then she was stuck expediting again. Alexa’s was technically a New American restaurant, built around exclusive deals with farmers and Whole Foods’ zero-waste pledge (if a bunch of bruised peaches went from Whole Foods to Alexa’s house jam, everybody except the cooks who had to scramble to make jam was happy). The menu was shaped by algorithms that analyzed purchases and searches, or that’s what corporate claimed; Ruth would never have put Huli Huli chicken and a brown butter pasta on the same menu, but she had dutifully developed the recipes and watched them sell out night after night. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. Ruth kept putting off taking Sierra out for old-school Italian all the way across town. Instead, on Sundays they’d spend most of the day in bed, ordering in Sweetgreen if they couldn’t remember the last time they had vegetables, or Domino’s if they didn’t need to feel virtuous (mostly, they didn’t). Occasionally, they’d walk down to York or head to Figueroa for brunch. At the Houston’s in a historic former hotel, they always split the spinach artichoke dip, and at the Taco Bell Cantina that opened in one of the many former Mexican restaurants that used to line the neighborhood, they drank shitty bright blue frozen cocktails under a local graffiti artist’s mural that was preserved alongside the Taco Bell logo. Ruth hadn’t gone out this much since moving to Los Angeles, and it felt gross, sometimes, eating nothing but chain food. They were all too salty, fat-laden and yet flat, so perfectly calibrated to please so that they slid into pandering. But it’s not like there was very much else, not anymore. Late one Sunday morning while Sierra was listing off the usual brunch and delivery options, Ruth tried to express this to her, but all that came out was, “The thing is all these places kind of suck?” Sierra stared at her phone. “I will not let you slander Domino’s in bed.” One of the characters on her show was obsessed with greasy pizza, and she had personally designed the cheese pull. “Don’t you miss eating at mom and pops?” “Taco Bell and the Garden are mom and pops. They’re all franchises.” “We should make actual memories together.” “Sharing breadsticks at the Garden is a real memory!” Ruth took out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. She found the image of pork belly drenched in a glossy red sauce she’d been thinking of and showed it to Sierra, saying they should try something authentic. So they put on pants and drove to Alhambra and went to this new Hunan restaurant every food person Ruth followed on Instagram was hyping up. When they opened their menus, Sierra let out a snort and pointed to the cute illustrated map of the restaurant’s 50 locations across China. After that, Ruth’s thrashing about chain restaurants became a thing, mostly a cute joke. Sierra regaled her friends about her obsessive chef girlfriend dragging her to an old-school burger stand literally surrounded by a luxury apartment building (Shake Shack was taking over the lease) and a 7/11 secretly serving Sri Lankan food and a backyard barbacoa set-up, all of them requiring at least an hour in traffic, maybe more. Ironically, this kind of restaurant tourism wasn’t a thing Ruth had had time for when she had her own restaurant, but now that she had gone corporate, sometimes there was such a thing as a slow week, so she could check out other people’s restaurants. Actually, Sierra would continue, the barbacoa stand they’d spent all Sunday seeking out had been glorious, but it was also so sad — the city had raided it the next week. The cooks at Alexa’s told Ruth the city was raiding street vendors all over the city, not just on commercial strips, now that the big chains were lobbying the city to clean up “unsafe” competition. For Sierra’s birthday, Ruth surprised her with tickets to a secret pop-up supper club high up in Montecito Heights, hosted on a terraced patio overlooking the hazy towers of downtown. It was run by two white, queer chefs, an impossibly attractive tattooed couple, who were maybe 10 or 15 years younger than Ruth; in New York she would have known them, but out here she was so disconnected. There was a land acknowledgment and prompt to send money to a local mutual aid fund, and then 15 small courses of pepino melons over glass noodles, blistered purple okra with popped buckwheat, and hot-smoked salmon collars with a yuzu-miso glaze, broken up by two “palate cleanser” courses: a Spam sando and tiny Magnum ice cream bars. The food wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was seasonal and playful, and Ruth had only a few quibbles over technique: The house sourdough was overproofed, and the popped buckwheat did nothing for the okra. “So what’d you think?” Ruth said on the ride home. “Great view,” Sierra said. “That whole house was insane.” “I really loved the corn pudding, but I’m not so sure about that buckwheat on okra.” “There were a lot of really pretentious courses, and then, like, tiny ice cream? I wish there’d been more stuff like the bread and butter.” “Oh, I thought it was overproofed,” Ruth said, but Sierra wasn’t even listening. “Maybe you’d hate your job less if you did pop-ups like this, too,” Sierra said. “Who says I hate my job?” “Ruth, you work for the biggest corporation in the world and you hate chain food.” “I hate chains because they swept in and took up everyone’s leases after COVID and now no one can open a restaurant.” “I guess this means you don’t want to go to McDonald’s right now.” “Why don’t we try to find a taco truck?” But even along Figueroa, which used to be lined with trucks, their bright signs scrolling BIRRIA MULITAS ASADA in the night, no one was out. The Garden was still open, though; Ruth sat in the car as Sierra ran in to get breadsticks. That week at work, Ruth’s job was to find a use for this new buttermilk the company had sourced. It was genuinely fermented buttermilk, and good quality; it was perfect for biscuits, and if she could find a recipe that worked at scale, Alexa’s could change this dairy farmer’s life. By the end of the week, she had a biscuit she thought worked, and she gave it to the pastry cooks to test for the next night’s service. She even texted Sierra to tell her to swing by early for dinner, the first time she’d invited her to work. Ruth grifted some company time making a fresh batch of the biscuits herself to bring down for Sierra; when she got to the kitchen, she saw the cooks unwrapping a huge frozen pallet of premade biscuits to lob in the oven, next to the batch the pastry cooks had left to rise. “What the hell is this?” “We’re A/B testing, apparently,” Alonzo, the new chef, said with a roll of his eyes. “Kyle said these really taste homemade.” Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Kyle was the efficiency officer sent down from Seattle to oversee what he called Alexa’s “workflow.” He’d already been asking a lot of questions about why there were pastry chefs working here when most desserts could be bought frozen, as if the whole point of Alexa’s hadn’t been to offer a premium restaurant experience. Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of masochism inspired her to bring Sierra a basket with one of the packaged biscuits and one she’d made herself. Sierra was sitting at the wine bar drinking ginger ale; Ruth tried not to watch her too intently as she munched on first the packaged biscuit, and then Ruth’s. “Which do you like better?” Ruth said. “Is this a test?” “Either you can tell me or let the cameras assessing your expressions take a guess.” “Wait, are you serious?” “The cameras are a staff rumor.” But they all wore fitness trackers that monitored the tone of their voices as they spoke to each other and to guests, and produced a rating on “harmony” and “service” at the end of shift. No one shouted in the kitchen. But the servers had learned that only the most obsequious tone of voice got them good customer interaction ratings. Sierra broke off a piece of both biscuits and chewed thoughtfully. “To be honest, I wish you guys had breadsticks.” She said it with a little flirty smile, trying to deploy it as an inside joke. “Clearly biscuits aren’t worth the trouble,” Ruth said, and took the basket back. “So this was a test.” “One of these is a recipe I’ve spent all week on, from a batch I made myself, for you. The other came frozen out of a box. If my own girlfriend can’t tell that my version is better, then there’s probably not much hope for me here.” “Babe, I don’t even like biscuits that much —” “When you get your check, be sure to leave your feedback about breadsticks.” Sierra asked her to sit down; Ruth made excuses about having to work back in the kitchen, and then hid, taking up space and messing up people’s flow. Kyle would not have approved; the step tracker was probably wondering who was standing stock still during a busy service. At one point, she tried scrolling Instagram to distract herself, and there was a message from one of the pop-up chefs, asking if Ruth could get them a job at Alexa’s until they finished rounding up all their investors, you know? They were sure they’d find a space soon. “You’ve never cooked for me before,” Sierra said on the car ride home. “Maybe if I’d had your cooking, I would have recognized it.” “You don’t seem to care much about food, so I don’t see the point.” “What the fuck, Ruth. I care about you.” “I mean, the cooking doesn’t make me who I am, right? We used to have to remind each other of that all the time. That we’re more than a job.” “I work for this huge company and make something I care about. Why can’t you try to too?” They had the conversation they always had, about how Ruth should start a secret pop-up, and Sierra would do all the branding and promotion, and then she’d get rich investors and live her dream again. The next week, Ruth got her pay docked for rudeness, probably from when she’d snapped at Sierra about the biscuits. On Sunday, they went out to the Garden, and Ruth ate breadsticks until her mouth tasted of nothing but salt. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34UCH3U

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