Chef de robot, you’ve been served (chili crunch), a meal at Frog Club, and your music pairing

A trip to Kernel for lunch, and Frog Club for dinner.

No time for rumors and ramblings this week, as I’m too busy in New York. Thank god this Substack is still free…

I went to Kernel this week, a new “restaurant” concept from the founder of Chipotle. I added the quotes because, technically, it’s a tech company offering edible products. There is no POS system or cashier and no substitutions or modifications. They’re selling fun food for a great price, hitting margins while perfecting their technology, which is basically optimizing food systems not not with robots. Oh, and everything is vegan. 

You can only order on your phone. They text you a code when your food is ready for pickup, so you can liberate your food from its locker. In and out. If everyone does their job, Ms. Robot included, there is no reason for humans to interact with each other. I wouldn’t dream of asking if they had a restroom I could use. This is by design, for better or for worse. Removing the opportunity to interact with people feels wrong. Still, when most of your interactions with people are bad, it starts to sound like something you’d consider, like deleting your social media accounts.

I have a soft spot for vegan food that doesn’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. My fried chicken sandwich had a great crunch, served on a custom-made vegan brioche from Balthazar. There are better-than-they-need-to-be veggie sides like carrots, broccoli rabe, and beets, all with savory crunchers and salsa verdes for like $4. Reminiscent of the early days of Superiority Burger, says my editor. Thrice-cooked potatoes, served to-go in perforated containers (perforated with their logo, nice touch), remained quite crispy. This feels like an ideal hangover lunch, minus a large Essentia Water and a Liquid I.V. (Concord grape). Lastly, the vegan oatmeal cookie seems to be cooked like a steak, with a caramelized outer crust and a still-pink middle. The only thing missing was a biodegradable container of milk.

It’s tricky being an artist (sandwich or other) right now. We need social media to find success, but it’s also our main source of anger and pain. How we handle negative comments (and spicy foods) has become an important part of how others judge our personality on the world stage. Now that we’re all characters in our life (which is also a movie), our audience will give our cinematic existence a bad review if we can’t handle the habanero hardballs that actual life throws at us. Right now only the most successful personalities seem to have their social media accounts run by teams of other people. I could see an industry of affordable social media management solutions emerge later this year that AI will instantly replace.

Dave Chang is probably glad he has a social media team this week. I’ll keep it brief, as I don’t want to write about him two weeks in a row, and I don’t know everything about his chili crunch litigations. You can trademark a name, but you can’t trademark a recipe. I pulled up a quote from his 2020 memoir, which I did not read:

“When I’m able to take a step back, I realize that I’ve created my own prison. I physically cannot take on any more responsibilities. There’s no room to do more, and I’m afraid of what that means for my addiction. I want so much to quit and walk away, but I don’t know that I have the courage to give it all up. Recovering alcoholics talk about needing to hit rock bottom before they are able to climb out. The paradox for the workaholic is that rock bottom is the top of whatever profession they’re in.”

I’m curious to see if Dave will apologize on Momofuku letterhead or take the Andrew Huberman route and keep posting through it all. I’d like to see him take a mental health break for a couple of months and let Aziz and Gwyneth host the Netflix show while he plays some pickleball in Malibu for the summer. Oh yeah, and cease the cease and desists.

Frog Club

You’re not allowed to take photos, so I waited until I got home.

If Kernel is a tech company with edible products, then Froggy’s is a troll’s performance with edible memories. I like to repress my bad memories, but I’m more fascinated by Frog Club’s misses (their price tags withstanding). I’m less upset about paying that much for that food because I’m grateful I can afford to patronize the experimental arts. After a recent trip to Foul Witch, a fairly experimental restaurant in New York from the Roberta’s team, a friend of mine admired the swings they took and their attempts to create new things, like tortellini in brodo where the brodo is infused with a glug of amaretto, a sweet, almond-flavored liqueur. I ate that dish a week ago and still don’t know if I liked it. But it was in a cute bowl, in a normal-looking dining room, with cool music playing. For the most part, it made sense; it was a classic dish served in a controlled environment with just a few freaky adjustments. Frog Club is an uncontrolled environment with a few adjustments toward the familiar.

The most interesting thing about Frog Club is that it’s unreviewable. It’s like trying to hold a bag of water from the bottom. I like it when things are sometimes bad, and I think Frog does, too. But everyone’s “bad” is diff, as they say. 

Collina Strada pants. Photo by SSENSE

Some people like the clothing of Collina Strada or the music of Yoko Ono; the joy of experiencing experimental art is that most people do not like or understand it. The decor at Frog Club reminds me of warm suburban comfort in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And the food reminds me of medieval comfort from the late 1880s and early 1920s. It’s not easy parsing all of this information together. I feel like people would react to the place differently if it served a tasting menu instead. They would be more accepting of the performance, which might create a favorable spin on their community (dinner) theater.  

Frog Club’s hamburger on an English muffin felt like 1920. It was flavored with beef and butter and tasted how it tasted. My favorite dish, the one thing I did not order, was their green salad. It was a slaw of herbs, sprouts, dried coconut, cabbages, and seeds with green goddess dressing. Apparently, it came from its own special salad refrigerator that’s meant to keep things crunchy and cold. Everything but the robot—I kept returning to it.

Food is deeply connected to memory, but the memories evoked don’t always have to be happy, perfect times or flavors. Martin Lawrence, in his pièce de résistance, You So Crazy, reminisces about harder times, growing up eating syrup sandwiches. 

I see the specific type of nostalgia Liz Johnson has created with the space, the decor, and the atmosphere. Every absurd decision was intentional. I could see myself making a lot of similar choices, because why the fuck not? Let’s “set fire to the rain,” as Adele sings. We complain about restaurant homogeneity (“not another Caesar, etc.”), but we’ve gotta start taking big swings to get us out of this rut. I initially referred to Medieval Times earlier because of my heavier-than-it-looks silverware and hunks of sauceless oxtail on the bone for $49—but also because, in many ways, it feels like we’re in the dark ages of dining. Whether you like the food or not, Frog Club has put one webbed foot in front of the other on a crusade to go somewhere, anywhere, other than brothy beans and burrata.

Just like the song, though, does setting fire to the rain describe the contradictory elements of a relationship and the impossibility of letting go of your partner? Or is it just about trying to light a cigarette in a drizzle?  

Music Pairing

Crypt Sustain, How To Dress Well (via YouTube)

Tom is an old friend of mine and one of the smartest guys alive. Once, he DJ’d a Sweetgreen store opening on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood and played blistering techno for 90 minutes during the daytime. His beautiful new record comes out next month.