In the grand, greasy carousel of global gastronomy, where every other week a turmeric-stained chef is hailed as the Gandhi of ghee, Nisha Katona has managed the rare trick of not becoming a caricature. While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through war crimes and crypto collapses, the Liverpool-based barrister-turned-restaurateur quietly built a curry empire…
Rick Stein and the Global Shrinking of the World’s Frying Pan By a correspondent who has eaten his way through three passports and still feels empty Padstow, Cornwall—population 2,065, seagulls uncounted—should be too small to matter on the planetary stage. Yet Rick Stein, the 77-year-old television chef with the expression of a man perpetually smelling…
International Dispatch – National Pancake Day By H. V. Loring, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of TikTok dances, humanity collectively decided that the best way to commemorate its fragile existence was to dedicate a Tuesday—yes, a Tuesday—to batter fried in butter. Welcome, dear reader, to…
Greggs: The Pastry-Cased Geopolitical Weapon Britain Never Knew It Deployed By Our Man in Terminal 5 Pret, nursing a lukewarm flat white In the pantheon of soft power, America has Hollywood, France has wine and sulking, and China has TikTok algorithms that know your blood type. Britain, meanwhile, has Greggs—a chain whose flaky sausage rolls…
Nigella Lawson and the Global Comfort-Industrial Complex By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Heathrow Duty-Free and Existential Dread It takes a special kind of soft power to make a cup of cocoa feel like a geopolitical event, yet Nigella Lawson has been doing exactly that for three decades—quietly exporting British domesticity to a planet that increasingly…
In a World on Fire, the World Sits Down for Grits By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Geneva, Switzerland — While the UN Security Council convened its 2,847th emergency session on the precise shade of existential dread we should adopt this month, a parallel diplomatic channel was quietly unfolding three thousand miles away in a Tennessee-themed…
Trisha Yearwood: How One Georgia Kitchen Became a Soft-Power Superpower By Our Correspondent in the Expat Bar, Terminal 3, Dubai If you’ve flown over the Pacific lately, you may have noticed turbulence that isn’t meteorological: it’s the collective stomach-growl of long-haul passengers binge-watching Trisha Yearwood’s “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen” on seat-back screens. The three-time Grammy winner…
Shivi Ramoutar and the Paradox of the Global Kitchen: Why Your Next Jerk Chicken Might Start in a Frankfurt Test Tube By the time you read this, Shivi Ramoutar’s new cookbook is already propping up a wobbly table in a Jakarta co-working space, doubling as a mouse-mat in Lagos, and serving as ironic décor above…
San Gennaro in Little Italy: The World’s Cheapest Globalization Masterclass By Dave’s Locker International Desk Every September, roughly one million human beings shuffle down Mulberry Street, New York, to celebrate a Neapolitan bishop who died in 305 AD. They are greeted by the scent of deep-fried dough, the clatter of carnival games, and the distant…
Musetti: A Global Love Affair With a Twelve-Cent Doughnut Hole By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the last functioning traffic light in Naples, the planet has quietly agreed that the pinnacle of human ingenuity is a sugar-dusted sphere of fried dough the size of a golf ball. Italians call it musetti;…
