Author: Jawdah Hannad Basara

Something feels subtly different when you walk into a concert venue on a Friday night when the lineup is predominantly young, Gen Z young, the kind of crowd that found their favorite artists on TikTok. There aren’t many people in the bars. Beer lines are shorter than those for water and sparkling lemonade. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone in particular. It’s not a declaration. It’s simply the new standard. Even though the numbers have been increasing for the past 20 years, the magnitude of the change is still startling when you examine it closely. According to a Gallup poll,…

It turns out that the answer has been sitting there for years if you walk through the produce section of any good grocery store. Not behind a prescription counter or in a supplement aisle, but rather in the peaceful stack of blueberries by the door or the bundled broccoli that someone is constantly shifting to get to the bagged salad behind it. After decades of researching the relationship between diet and illness, researchers and dietitians have discovered a pattern that is both comforting and somewhat annoying: the foods that seem to reduce cancer risk are almost aggressively common. For a…

Between taking a seat and opening the menu, there’s a brief period of time when something subtly feels off. Persistent enough to stay, but not dramatic enough to get up and go. The majority ignore it and place their orders nonetheless. Almost all chefs don’t. A specific type of radar has been developed by those who work in professional kitchens. It has very little to do with chandeliers or Yelp ratings and is based on years of observing what distinguishes a disciplined operation from a chaotic one. Before a single dish is served, the little details—the physical reality of a…

A British Sunday is marked by a certain aroma: roasting meat, something caramelizing in a hot oven, and the subtle sweetness of parsnips starting to burn at the edges. For the majority of the nation’s history, that scent was associated with lunch, family, and a weekly reset that was almost religious in its regularity. On a Sunday in, say, 2015, you could enter a village pub and see the same routine in action: Yorkshire puddings that had reached unbelievable heights, crisp roast potatoes, and carved beef. It was reliable. It was England. There is still that smell. However, other flavors…

The food industry seldom rewards a certain kind of stubbornness. The industry tends to ignore, at least temporarily, chefs who establish themselves in small towns, refuse to pursue the gravity of London or New York, and maintain that the land they were raised on is sufficient. That type of chef is no longer Mark Birchall. However, he may have been a short time ago. The Lancashire market town of Chorley, where Birchall was born, is difficult for most restaurant critics to locate on a map. The assumption was courteous but obvious when he opened Moor Hall in 2017, inside a…

Nestled beneath a residential block close to Euston station, there isn’t a sign worth taking pictures of, no Instagram-worthy mood lighting, and no PR firm sending press releases to food editors. Served with a bowl of rich, intensely spiced dhal, the flaky, slightly blistered roti canai costs less than a pint at most central London pubs. For many years, Roti King has been there. It has long been known to the locals. And that was sufficient for a very long time. The thing about London’s actual dining culture is that it relies almost entirely on trust, unlike the version that…

Most people pass the Brutalist building on the Strand without giving it a second look. The architecture is angular and frigid, giving the impression that it is more of a statement than an invitation. This makes it somewhat fitting that Ikoyi, a restaurant that recently won the title of world’s best, is located behind its doors. For almost ten years, Ikoyi has resisted every attempt to be clearly defined. Chef Jeremy Chan and his schoolmate Iré Hassan-Odukale founded Ikoyi in 2017. Initially marketed as a Nigerian restaurant, which the founders have had to repeatedly clarify was never quite accurate, the…

A child eating fruit is not the first thing you see in a Mexican schoolyard. It’s the cart’s absence. For years, vendors set up shop just beyond the gates, selling Dorilocos, chili-dusted peanuts, and frozen sugar in plastic cups. The after-school crowd would swarm them in the same manner that children everywhere swarm anything that adults haven’t had time to forbid. The government then made the decision to outlaw it last spring. Mexico quietly instructed its schools to empty the shelves with the message, “Farewell, junk food!” posted to X. The ban, which went into effect at the end of…

If your flat white seems to cost more than it should, that’s because it does. A cup that cost roughly four euros eighteen months ago is now closer to five-twenty, and those who pour it are not being avaricious. They are performing calculations that are no longer accurate. A study published in early May stated that the average pound of ground roast was 9.46 dollars, up 55 percent from two years prior. In January, arabica futures reached 3.80 dollars per pound on the ICE exchange, the highest level since mid-December. These figures do not represent a passing spike. This feels…

There’s a bag of lettuce in your refrigerator right now, and you might be surprised by how strange its life has been. It most likely began in soil that was nourished by nitrogen extracted from natural gas in the Salinas Valley of California. It was cut by a diesel harvester. It was transported over the majority of a continent by a diesel truck. Petroleum was also used to make the plastic film that kept it crisp. If you go back far enough, lettuce is essentially refined oil that has learned to be environmentally friendly. Additionally, oil is currently embroiled in…