Sam Sifton, the founding editor of NYT Cooking, will help our features desks lay out a service-first blueprint for coverage going forward. Read more in this note from Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn. For generations, the culture and lifestyles sections of The New York Times have provided our readers with rich, evocative and sophisticated coverage.
The writing, depth and breadth of our features report connects us deeply with an audience curious about the world and eager to understand the cultural moment. Even in a moment of crisis, like the coronavirus pandemic, our readers seek out distinctive voices, authority and expertise from our features departments. And in some ways, that coverage feels more essential and powerful as the world feels upended and uncertain.
Those departments deserve a champion. And so we are pleased to announce that we are promoting Sam Sifton to the masthead, as assistant managing editor overseeing our cultural and lifestyles coverage. Sam is the perfect leader to take on this assignment. He has a deep understanding of features coverage and how to make it urgent and vital to our readers. Sam came to The Times in as an editor in Dining, moved to Culture as a deputy, and then was named Culture editor. From there he served as restaurant critic and National editor, and then with Product, helped build one of the most successful standalone businesses in our history, NYT Cooking.
Sam is an enthusiast and advocate for lifestyle and culture coverage, high and low. But there was no home cooking, because I was eating out six nights a week. I only really had a family meal a week to cook, and oftentimes I didn't want to make it a big production. I spent a lot of time eating rich, fantastic meals, so at home I was interested in eating very simple food.
I worried a little bit—have I lost the touch or the desire? And that's not at all the case. I'm back to cooking like mad at home, and still trying to figure out every time I go to a restaurant and have something delicious, how can I do that at home. Epi: You touched on this briefly when you mentioned salt and fat, but what do you think are the most important lessons a home cook can learn from a restaurant chef?
SS: I think in terms of flavor, you need to know that restaurant chefs use much more butter than you do and [they] use much more salt and pepper than you do. This is why the food tastes so good. If you add butter to it, it tastes better. It's just a fact, and if you lead a relatively healthy lifestyle, there's nothing wrong with that. So that's one thing. But the other thing—and this pertains to Thanksgiving more than perhaps any other meal of the year—is this French idea of mise en place, or having everything you need to make the meal set up before you start cooking, so that you're not caught in some maelstrom of activity where everything is chaotic and hectic.
Holidays are difficult enough as it is without adding to the chaos with an improvisatory take when it comes to the preparation of the food. If I had to boil it down, the three things we can take from restaurant cooks are more butter, more salt, and prepare your materials before you start cooking. Epi: Looking back at your days as a critic days, what are your three favorite restaurants?
SS: Oh, no, I have like favorite restaurants. One of the things that I learned was that—everyone knows this, right? There are more than 20, restaurants in this city. Oh, yes, we know it! But to understand that you really can go to a different kind of excellent restaurant every night for the foreseeable future is really something cool. And I can say, that just having gone to the restaurants that I've gone to, there are dozens and dozens of restaurants that will never be reviewed in The New York Times that are great restaurants to go to and have a place in the library of restaurants that one could go to.
I feel like Imelda Marcos with her shoes when it comes to restaurants. One of the downsides of being a restaurant professional who is involved in saying what restaurant is good and what restaurant is bad is that I'm asked three times a day where to take my husband for his 40th birthday, where to take my mom for her 80th, where to take someone for a marriage proposal, or first date, or whatever.
You would think— I would think—that this would become annoying, but it doesn't, because it's just not that hard in this city. There are so many great restaurants. If you ask three or four follow-up questions—Is she allergic to anything?
Does she like French food? So to get around to answering your question, that's how I think about where to go to dinner. I think: What is it that I'm looking for this evening? The answer might be sticky-tabled Chinatown Chinese.
It might be French bistro fare. It could be super-extravagant Japanese. It could be peasant Italian. And there's a restaurant for each and every one of those. So that's a long-winded way of saying, no, I don't have a top three in New York City. I don't have a top three in the whole world. But I'm perfectly happy, any night you have it available, to have dinner at Per Se, and I'm generally prepared, if the chicken wings are really good and the beer is cold, to go to that bar that you like.
It's the best restaurant city in the world. Epi: Does your work as National Editor take you on the road a lot? Any recent favorites on the national dining scene?
SS: Yes, as National Editor, I oversee the coverage of 14 news bureaus around the country, and I have made it my commitment to travel as much as possible to see the bureau chiefs and the correspondents around the country, and that's been really fascinating for someone who has kind of been stapled to New York City for three years. To be able to go to Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Kansas City, Phoenix, and all around the country to experience some measure of the lives of the correspondents has been really great from a news-gathering perspective, but it's also been really great from a food-consuming point of view.
The reports of the terribleness of food in America are way overrated. There are some really good restaurants out there. I had a great meal in Atlanta at a restaurant called Miller Union —[there's] a kind of vegetable shaman chef down there who is a really smart, interesting cook.
I had a meal in Houston at a restaurant called Underbelly that was really terrific. I've done pretty well out on the road. That said: There are plenty of nights when you're going to be bellying up to the bar at T. Fridays or wherever, but I would say you'd be amazed at the number of great restaurants that exist in American cities. What were some of the more outrageous questions you received?
SS: The Times has a tremendously well-educated and well-informed readership, so I wasn't getting a lot of unbelievably ridiculous questions, but because it also has a global readership, I was getting some pretty difficult questions to answer. A guy in Mumbai wrote in to say that he had managed to secure a turkey, but his oven was too small. There was a neighborhood tandoor oven where he seemed to imply he could take the turkey, but he was a little nervous about what he should tell the tandoor chef, because of course they don't have turkeys.
I thought about that one for a while, and then just said, "Tell him it's a big chicken. It's like a chicken—you just cook it a little longer. I did get a panicked call once from someone who was very concerned because he had rinsed out the bird and discovered in the process that the cavity between the legs—the main cavity where some people put the stuffing—went all the way through to where the head had been—the front cavity and that back cavity were connected as if it were a tube, and was that a problem?
And I thought, really? So I asked him to think about it for a little bit and call me back if it was still a problem. He sent me a note later saying that he had figured it out. It was all connected—just one bird. The cooking, while scary to many, is easy to handle, and I think [my] book provides the kind of baseline knowledge you need to cook a really terrific Thanksgiving meal.
But the hard part of Thanksgiving is how to deal with the rest of it. How to deal with drunk Aunt Wilma or your angry brother or your depressive aunt, and how to handle complicated family dynamics, the rigors of travel, and differing political opinions—all this stuff that makes it a very stress-inducing holiday for so many.
And for that, I simply say steer through the accident. Give thanks. Even the people who say they don't want to be there want to be there—they want to share in this great secular holiday. With the presence of food and drink and candles and the tablecloth, you can really do a lot to make people feel better, and it's important as Thanksgiving hosts to remember that that's your job.
Make people feel better and have a good time and give thanks for their presence. It sounds sappy, but it actually works. Epi: In the book, you include several different turkey recipes, including roasted, grilled, smoke-roasted, and deep-fried versions.
Do you have a favorite technique? SS: It depends on the bird, the weather, the guests, my mood—it depends on so much. We made a turkey mole a couple times that was really unconventional but kind of neat, and I remember it fondly. I was deep into frying for many years and I would fry exclusively, and then I would fry one bird and roast another bird.
One of the reasons why I loved doing this book and why I love Thanksgiving is that the traditions are always changing. This is why it's such a peculiarly American holiday and a holiday that is reflective of America itself. It's always changing, and yet it's always the same. You always have that fried turkey until that year that you don't have the fried turkey because it's pouring rain and you decide to roast. You always have your mother's creamed onions until you don't.
You always drink prosecco at the beginning and eat oysters until the year that you don't—and then something else happens, and you say that's going to be our new tradition. Only in America would we say "that's our new tradition. I don't have a favorite, although the original first recipe in the book for roast turkey, which is the roast turkey I've been cooking since college, is absolutely the default.
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