Eater

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Kriston Jae Bethel/Bloomberg via Getty Images The COVID pandemic accelerated a labor shortage in the industry. Now, restaurant owners and chefs across the country say they’re still struggling to recruit and retain talent. In the spring of 2021, restaurants across the country were scrambling to find staff. After a calamitous year of intermittent closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many local governments were beginning to loosen indoor dining restrictions. As vaccine distribution widened, operators couldn’t keep pace with pent-up demand. Restaurant workers who’d been laid off during the height of the pandemic were reluctant to reunite with their former employers,...

David Scott Holloway After years of assisting Mario Batali and then Anthony Bourdain, Woolever has written a memoir that’s tricky to classify and even harder to put down Laurie Woolever’s memoir Care and Feeding is many things: a workplace memoir, an addiction memoir, a chronicle of being young and a little bit lost in New York City, an account of working in close proximity to fame. Woolever is a longtime journalist and cookbook author who also worked as an assistant to Mario Batali and then Anthony Bourdain. While those two men are part of Woolever’s story, her book is, above...

Elena Veselova/Shutterstock My five-day journey of brining and braising the St. Patrick’s Day staple yielded delicious results I don’t know why I find making corned beef from scratch so intimidating. Perhaps it’s the fact that the project requires almost a week — which means a lot of time for things to go wrong. Maybe it’s because it involves raw meat sitting around for an extended period of time. Or put both together, and I’m worried this giant hunk of raw beef won’t cure properly (even though it ultimately needs to be cooked anyway). All my anxieties were put to rest...

Seafood season offerings from Wendy’s McDonald’s and Popeyes. Why fast-food restaurants observe seafood season — and not other religious holidays According to Wendy’s, it’s “seafood season.” That means the chain’s limited-time-only Crispy Panko Fish Sandwich is widely available from now until April 20. Wendy’s can hedge, but you might have figured out that since its final day on the menu is Easter Sunday, this is a sandwich designed to cater to those celebrating Lent, a Christian observance — mostly but not exclusively practiced by Catholics — in which many practitioners abstain from meat (which in Catholicism includes mammals and poultry,...

Cayla Zahoran Photography/Huso https://ny.eater.com/maps/top-chef-restaurants-nyc-chefs-cooking-television-show-kwame-onwuachi-printemps-pig-and-khao-huso...

Eater Staff / Our Place The Instagrammable cookware brand’s latest tagine is its most interesting release in years, and it benefits the Middle East Children’s Alliance in Gaza When Our Place debuted the Always Pan in 2019, it not only sparked a wave of interest in Instagrammable- cookware brands, but kicked off the increasing speed at which its contemporaries — think Great Jones and Caraway — began whipping up product launches. But now that the aesthetic home goods space is more crowded, to stand out in 2025, brands have to think beyond just cool color choices, and have something to...

Matthew Kang Fly By Jing chile crisp is manufactured in Chengdu. Trump’s tariffs on China means everything is in flux. Fly By Jing is one of the reasons everyone you know loves chile crisp. The punchy, direct-to-consumer brand was founded in 2018 by Jing Gao, promising to bring a “not traditional, but personal” taste of her hometown of Chengdu to American audiences, with products like Sichuan chile crisp, zhong sauce, and hot pot base. “We want to take Chinese food out of the so-called ethnic aisle and make it part of everyday cooking everywhere,” Gao told Eater in 2022. “Our...