INTERVIEW

Chris Crowley on Frozen Selter, Reporting, and the Mayor of Flavortown

WORDS BY SARAH COOKE
NOVEMBER 19, 2020

IMAGE: CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ

Chris Crowley is a writer and reporter with Grub Street, New York magazine’s restaurant website. Since February 2018, he has managed the Grub Street Diet, which has tracked in detail a week of eating and drinking of a notable person every week for the last 14 years.

Before starting at Grub Street in 2015, Chris freelanced and worked in a few New York restaurants. He landed in media after deciding that pursuing a career in academics did not make sense, and that writing for websites was much more sensible. In the past, he’s written about state Senator Jessica Ramos’s advocacy for Queens street vendors and how the late Anthony Bourdain’s recovery helped his own father get sober.

This year, he’s written about the pandemic’s effect on the restaurant industry and workers in New York and beyond. He reported on plummeting business at Chinatown businesses in February as well as employee tension at Eataly over PPP loans, interviewed a Domino’s delivery driver about his Michigan franchise’s handling of COVID precautions, and wrote obituaries for people including the much-loved Jean-Georges cook Jesus Roman Melendez. Most recently, he spoke with 26 former employees of Mission Chinese Food about their experience in the restaurant.

For Currant, Crowley wrote about what he ate during one week in October, then spoke with us about his philosophical approach to the Grub Street Diet, how he got into food, and his method of making toast (it’s a choice). The interviews, held on October 23 and November 3, 2020, were condensed and edited for clarity.

Monday, October 19

I made myself a cup of iced coffee with a bunch of thin ice, and stopped the boy cat from getting to the coffee. 

Drank a second glass of iced coffee. I have a really bad caffeine addiction, and I've started to be turned off by the taste of hot coffee. For a long time, I thought that I could live off only four hours of sleep a night, no Adderall. So I was perpetually exhausted. It was a really effective strategy for self improvement.

I got hungrier, but I wasn't particularly into the idea of eating. There hasn't been a lot happening in my kitchen lately, especially this week, when I was getting ready to publish this article. So I snacked on an apple that had been laying around. Got to prevent food waste.

Lunch was leftovers from Great New York Noodletown: bok choy and flowering duck with chives reheated with rice. I put a little Fly By Jing chili crisp on that, because I was feeling it, but not too much. The flowering chives is my favorite thing there, bar none. Noodletown after 11 p.m. is the best restaurant in NYC.

Sourdough, butter, chili crisp. Chris Crowley

That wasn't enough, so I toasted a slice of Bread Alone sourdough, and then smeared on butter (straight from the fridge) followed by a few spoonfuls of chili crisp. I don’t eat those two together often, which I have no idea why. I do make my toast¹ in this stupid way, forgetting to take the butter out of the fridge and squishing it between the toast so it melts. 

¹Sarah: I need help understanding why you do this to yourself. Is this a recent thing?

Chris: It’s a recent thing. I didn’t have a toaster before, so I wasn’t really eating toast, and I have a toaster now, so I’ll toast the piece of bread, and I’ll do this.

Honestly, I kind of like the texture of cold butter on the right thing—not cold butter, but not totally melted butter. That’s probably the reason why I do it, rather than make an effort.

Worked out, walked, and went to get eggs, seltzer, Doritos, and Bud Light Limes. An old lady started telling me to watch out cause all the eggs were cracked. Some were). “Don’t Stop Believing” came on, so I thought about Tony Soprano, and I thought about one of the three things I've been thinking about a lot lately: how The Sopranos would've handled COVID. (The others are karaoke and buffalo chicken sandwiches.)

Drank a BLL back at home. I have an affinity for this beer, but have had terrible experiences with the Lime-a-Rita.

For dinner, I boiled frozen 88 Lan Zhou dumplings. Also needed to cook tofu (past its expiration date), so I shallow-fried it for a salad with sesame oil, all the basil in the fridge, seared string beans, and Sungold tomatoes marinated in Rancho Gordo’s banana vinegar. (I did not buy this bottle.) Sungolds in that vinegar is maybe one of my favorite things ever?

Dumplings & beyond. Chris Crowley

²When I was a kid, my town had a large Jewish population, and just through osmosis, you would end up going to 13 bar or bat mitzvahs. I feel like it was the time at which that song Sandstorm [Sarah bursts out laughing] was super popular.

I have not thought about that song in a very long minute.

I definitely heard Sandstorm playing somewhere in public last year, and I was like, “What the fuck.” It’s entirely possible that Sandstorm was played at exactly one bar or bat mitzvah that I went to, but I remember it being played a bunch. I feel like I’m trying not to remember too much about those times, because they were very embarrassing.

Likewise. Most of my memory is shot, but then in therapy, I remember stuff, and I’m like, “Oh no, I would have preferred to keep dissociating.”

I dressed the dumplings with a condiment of dark soy sauce, a lot of rice vinegar, and sesame paste, and ate while watching an episode of Pen15. There are scenes that make me feel as awkward as I did when I was at that age². Except, now I can drink, so I also had a couple of vodka and yuzu gimlets, when we made a big batch on Saturday, and I got a little tipsy, so I ate a couple fistfuls of Doritos, which was a mistake.

Tuesday, October 20

Made myself a cup of iced coffee.

Thought about what to have for lunch, and dinner. Snacked on handfuls of Doritos throughout.

Talked about the possibility of getting pizza (only the slice shop nearby is not good) or chalupas from Guadalajara de Dia 2. (I have always wondered, but never investigated, if Guadalajara de Dia 1 exists.) I ended up making Japanese egg rice with a hefty amount of dark soy sauce, but also ginger and sesame oil. Sesame oil is intoxicating; I would drown in it.

Popped a grapefruit seltzer, Polar, into the freezer and took some vodka sauce out for dinner. Right now, the freezer is stuffed to the gills. I went insane in late August, and bought, I think, $140 worth of fancy tomatoes. It might have been more. It was probably more. It was stupid. I, no joke, was short on money because of this. And late bills.

I ate some of those tomatoes, but mostly I turned them into Hazan’s sauce, Daniel Gritzer’s vodka sauce, and a tomato salsa from La Piña en La Cocina. (A website I learned about from Tammie.)

So there are 11 bags of tomato sauces in the freezer, plus a couple bags of salsa, and a couple mason jars of fermented tomatoes and chilies. But... I also have 12 pounds of Alaska salmon from Illimania, which I had forgotten I ordered back in May. (I'm impulsive and disorganized.) There’s also a bunch of venison and a turkey leg that my best friend, who I grew up with, hunted. He hunted the leg, not the whole turkey.

Forgot my grapefruit seltzer was in the freezer, which turned out well. It got very slightly slushy, maybe like the beer slushie they served at Uncle Boon’s? IDK, it's been a while. Snacked on some chocolate covered peanuts and drank another seltzer.

My afternoon was mostly interviews, which were a welcome break. I talked with Bryan Washington³ about what he's been eating in Houston. For the third interview, I went for a circuitous walk, and decided because we were low on olive oil to buy some more Ops. I like to have a nice olive oil and a meh olive oil. I also bought sourdough, even though there’s bread at home, because theirs is tops. It's so soft and tangy. 

³How does the Grub Street Diet work? Do people send in what they wrote, or do you have a conversation?

I treat it as an “as told to.” A lot of the writers send it in as something much more complete, though, and I have a guilt complex about that. [Chris laughs.] What I do is reacquaint myself with things that people have done, and I also read a bunch of profiles and news stories and look at their social media. I try to let people talk about their interests and ask them questions about that.

I took a philosophy minor in college, and I had a professor named Jennifer Gosetti. She would talk about this idea that the most influential philosophers don’t want to deal with everyday, quotidien small things, but in reality, most of our lives are made up of these seemingly insignificant moments and interactions and experiences. 

Not to be like Grub Street Diet is this deeply serious thing, but I think that when it works best—and this is what attracted me to it—is when what she's talking about applies to it. It’s not at its most interesting when it’s just about what somebody’s eating. It’s really interesting when you’re able to probe a little bit into why people are the way they are, or how they see things in the world.

⁴What came first for you? Was it a love of food that led to writing or vice versa?

There are a few different parts to it. Because my dad's father was abusive and then he skipped town, his uncle helped raise my dad, so my dad grew up around his restaurant. Then, when I was growing up, my dad would cook five times a week. I have these distinct memories of him cooking chicken marsala and it making my stomach hurt. I think it was because he was drunk and didn’t cook the wine fully off. [Chris laughs.] 

I always wanted to write when I was younger. I also had a lot of social anxiety, and that was really bad for me. You’re undermining yourself the entire time, and you don’t have faith in any of your ideas. But food was this thing that I was really familiar with and therefore the thing I felt comfortable writing about.

Food is something that’s very interdisciplinary. It is a part of everyone’s life in a way that nothing else can really be. It just touches everything, and I think that’s never more true than now because of climate change.

So, I guess it was the food. Well, it was the writing, because I was a teenager, but then I went to school in New York City and was like, “Restaurants are cool.” [Both laugh.] 

Ate one slice of bread with olive oil and salt, and at some point a fistful of Doritos. Then decided to eat another. Drank another seltzer. Sometimes I drink seltzer by the gallon.

While making dinner, I put a couple red bell peppers straight on the burner to roast them. I’ve been doing this pretty often this year—I go on these kicks, often obsessive, with ingredients, the same as I do with songs. I’ll listen to some track relentlessly, be unable to kick it, and it’ll go from being one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard to something I can’t listen to anymore, please skip it. I’m trying not to do this with romesco. I’ll also use the red pepper in salad, and I’ll make different sauces, like ajvar.

Dinner was rigatoni with the vodka sauce, which, according to Daniel’s instructions, you make by cooking the pasta three minutes shy of al dente, and then add it and some pasta water to the pot. Get it nice and thick. I grew up on Italian-American food, because my dad is from Queens and his uncle owned a red sauce restaurant⁴. I don’t remember eating a lot of vodka sauce growing up, probably because my dad was drinking all the vodka. 

Pasta by Chris. Chris Crowley

Along with the pasta, had a simple salad of lettuce, red bell pepper, mint, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Plus a Miller, because a few were leftover from camping. I try to drink less days than I have lately—I sort of vacillate between being reckless and prostrating myself—because addiction is like blue eyes in my family.⁵

Ate dinner while watching Pen15 again. I love the chemistry they have with the kids, the way they capture the weirdness of being that age, how recognizable all the characters are, and how they’ve captured the way that social circles operate in middle school. (I'm thinking about the pool episode.)

⁵You mentioned that you wrote that essay about your dad in one day, right? 

That essay [“Anthony Bourdain, Addiction, and Hoping for a Better Life”] was the first time that I talked publicly about my dad’s addiction. My editor had asked me to write something, a nonspecific prompt, and this was what I came up with.

I remembered a conversation I had with my dad where he said he had been in the throes of his addiction when Bourdain really came around. My dad was drinking until I was 18. I don’t think I talked about it to any of the friends I grew up with; it was a lot easier to talk about it with people I’d gone to college with. 

I wrote [the essay] over a weekend. I talked to my dad and interviewed him a little bit, then I submitted it. When you talk about something like this, it’s a release. I think that's much healthier than holding it in and feeling like it’s something to have a lot of shame about.

I’m also just someone who has a lot of shame and guilt. I think that’s just in my DNA. [Both laugh.] I like to tell myself it’s because my dad’s side is Catholic, and it’s like, this is wired into us through generations of being told to feel horrible about ourselves. 

Wednesday, October 21

Started working super early. Drank my coffees, and didn’t really eat a lot except some more Doritos, because I spent most of the day chewing on my nerves. I definitely ate a handful of those chocolate covered peanuts, and late in the morning I took the last of the Soom chocolate halva spread and stretched it across another slice of the sourdough. A little salt, and you have happy taste buds. I try to always have this chocolate halva in my fridge (I eat it by the spoonful), but I’m not the kind of person who actually remembers to do that shit.

By the early afternoon I was like, huh, I should probably consume something more, even though I wasn’t really interested in food, so I ate another slice of bread with yogurt, roasted red bell pepper, mint, and feta. Fine! This was a bread day. 

I’d made plans earlier in the week, thinking work would be more relaxed Wednesday (wrong), with my friends Priya and Alex. We hung out on her neighbors balcony; they let her and her boyfriend use it when they’re gone. On the way over I popped by Grandchamps to pick up a couple orders of akra, fritters of malanga and cassava blended with epis, which come with a killer pikliz and remoulade that I would buy by the bucket. Also, white rice with bean sauce, which, damn, smelled so good. Alex texted me that he would get a bottle of white wine; he warned it might be bad. (It wasn’t! We love a plot twist.) 

We ate the akra and rice and beans, and then Priya’s matar paneer, with more rice and malawach, which was a crispy change of pace from my sourdough week. After dinner, we got more wine, because I was very much determined to “have a night." This time, the white wine was bad, like cheesy Italian-American restaurant's pinot grigio bad, so Alex did not lie. This was a good thing, because it meant we drank less wine.

Priya’s boyfriend, Seth, made three desserts, because he operates on a higher plane of existence, including a couple he was recipe testing for someone’s book. Also, he made soft pumpkin cookies with a cream cheese frosting. Very Christian Girl Autumn. Priya said, “I love anything cream cheese frosting.” (Very Christian Girl Autumn.)

Later, when I was listening to some recordings and fact checking, I stole a slice of Ops pizza from the counter. Then I stole another.

Toast by Chris. Chris Crowley

⁶What are some of the things you’ve learned about people from doing the Grub Street diet?

To me, what’s interesting are the decisions that people make about what they eat and what habits they have, not the particular products they buy—unless that’s for a specific reason. What’s interesting is why people do things, not what people purchase.

I look for people who are really opinionated. It’s just human, getting into arguments about things that don’t really matter, like what kind of pizza you like. It’s a form of sport and a form of interaction. It’s a form of community when you’re arguing about those things. 

For something like this, where parts of it are mundane, the opinions are what matter, because it doesn’t ultimately matter. We’re not talking about issues of agriculture; we’re talking about what seasoning you like on your bagel.

Thursday, October 23

I ate a lot more anxiety for breakfast, along with my iced coffee. 

We got a couple breakfast sandwiches from a bodega nearby, these were pretty good. Mine was sausage on a bagel⁶.

But then I got on the phone for, like, an hour or something, and had to zap mine in the microwave. I added a little Valentina, because I couldn't find the Cholula. Heartbreak.

I ate that, and that was pretty much for during the day, except some snacking here and there on more chocolate covered peanuts. I don’t know why, they’re not particularly good.

Went for a walk around 2:45 p.m., and made some mental notes for Friday, including that it’d been too long since I ate taco arabes, while blasting Deerhunter.

Didn’t really eat much until after work, when I went and met up with my friends Johnny (he'd left the country in March for what was supposed to be a week, to renew his visa, and then didn’t get back until September) and Noah. We drank some Modelos and Sunday lagers in McCarren Park, under the fog, while people barbecued and played sports. 

We decided to go eat somewhere, outside. After a little discussion and little internal dialogue, we ended up walking over to Cozy Royale. (I said this to Luke at Eater, I try to let my decisions be guided by what I’m hearing from people who work in these businesses, and ideally I'd like to know what I can about the owners.) I guess the guiding principle is, don't be an asshole.

This was the first time I ate anywhere in a little; the last time was to meet a source who works in bars. (Her universe, she explained to me, is her apartment, her place of work, and Diamond Reef.) I do want to see what's going on at the businesses, and how people are handling this⁷. It's helpful, in its own unfortunate way, to have a bartender you've never spoken to tell you the same specific things you've been hearing from others.

We ordered a handful of dishes: some pepperoni rolls that weren't quite on the Totino's spectrum; a salad; a roasted cabbage dish, with smoked pork jowl and anchovy, that was pretty intense; and “sticky little pork sausages.” (They were, indeed, sticky.) I drank a Bijou, for no particular reason other than I think gin and Chartreuse make great friends, and then a Vieux Carre, because I like those, and wanted to.

⁷How do you approach reporting on New York City without getting attached to the narratives that are often created about it?

I feel like the pandemic-recession combination is a good way to talk about this, because there’s so much to write about, and so much that’s not going to be written about, both because of issues that people talk about in media, but also simply because there’s too much to write about—especially considering how many fewer journalism jobs and fewer locals news reporters there are.  

This was a thing with Hurricane Sandy, where there was all this coverage about downtown Manhattan, and I only found out about what was happening in southern Brooklyn because of Allison and Matt Robicelli. I went to Staten Island the week after the hurricane, and it was just wrecked. It felt like the coverage wasn’t weighted towards those communities as much. 

To me, it’s not just an issue of coverage in other parts of the country; it’s also coverage of the city itself—who gets covered, and through what lens. I guess I feel like my responsibility is to try and chip away at the things that aren’t being told otherwise. 

When you think about living deliciously, what is the lifestyle you imagine yourself having?

It’s a line from the movie The Witch: “Does thou want to live deliciously?” The line is a temptation, not a literal thing. I just think Guy Fieri saying it is really funny. [Chris laughs.] 

I’ve always been really bad at envisioning what I actually want, which is an answer to your question, I guess. Without being able to give cliched answers, I’m probably still figuring out what I want. 

I’ve thought about the fact that, as an atheist, I think that life is sacred because this is the only chance anyone has. I don’t mean that in a depressing way. It was certainly informed by losing two of my friends, one of whom died in an accident—which has also reinforced my feelings that this is your only life, and why I consider it so criminal or heinous to take that away from people. 

It doesn’t mean that you can give into the nihilism of existence and the fact that things feel very meaningless and that the odds are against us, and you never know what’s going to happen. I see things like food or music or art as a sort of affront to that, to not giving into nihilism and letting the meaninglessness of life take over. I think food specifically, because it’s something that’s necessary that we can turn into something that gives us pleasure and makes life a little more bearable. And that’s why, I think, the trivialness of food actually has more of a meaning, because it’s a way of resisting that aspect of life.

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Sarah Cooke is a freelance writer and reporter based in Washington, D.C. Her reporting, which explores the intersection of food, culture, and power, has appeared in DCist, Eater DC, and Washington City Paper.

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