Welcome to Close Friends: Unfiltered and irreverent restaurant reviews, copied and pasted straight from my DMs. Edited lightly for grammar and clarity.
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Chef Marcus Jernmark’s tasting menu ($150) at one-Michelin-starred Lielle in Los Angeles, California, on Thursday, October 15, 2026.
TLDR.
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Plate-by-plate of chef Ivan Ralston’s tasting menu (R$1,650) at three-Michelin-starred Tuju in São Paulo, Brazil, on Tuesday, July 28, 2026.
First stop: Tuju’s ground-floor garden, where “Totem o Homem Tatu” awaits, a zoomorphic wooden sculpture carved by Indigenous artist Stive Mehinako (Kulikyrda Mehinako).
Tomato and Mushroom (R$70) | “Our take on the classic Bloody Mary, but not so ‘bloody’ as it is, is one of the non-alcoholic cocktail options on our menu. With tempered and clarified tomato juice, finished with mushroom salt made here.”
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I reviewed dozens of food memoirs and cookbooks from 2006 to 2010 on Gastronomy. I couldn’t get enough of Bourdain and Reichl, of course, but also had the time and interest to read more niche topics like the “war” over foie gras, America’s hyper-competitive cooking circuit, and why French women don’t get fat — diet culture was wild in the early aughts.
It’s hard to pinpoint when I stopped reading food-related titles for pleasure, but as my nine-to-fives increasingly centered around food and restaurants, I gravitated less toward those topics in my free time.
Recently, though, I’ve been reaching for food memoirs again. The excitement I felt turning the pages of Hunger Like a Thirst by Besha Rodell (2025) and Hannah Selinger’s Cellar Rat (2026) was reminiscent of discovering the genre two decades ago.
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