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Every year, it seems, there's more wonderful, rigorous, thoughtful, serious stuff out there to read — here on Eater, to be sure, but beyond our borders, out in the wide world of the rest of the internet (and the occasional printed page), there are extraordinary journalistic riches to be found. These twenty-one stories are the most exciting, most fascinating, most memorable reading experiences I've had this year. These pieces (presented in alphabetical order, by author) were chosen using a highly subjective rubric: I read them, and I loved them. It's an imperfect accounting — inevitably there are more stories that I didn't read than did, and some stories that I did read and did love aren't on here for various reasons. (Like Lauren Collins' hilarious, rigorous excoriation of the World's 50 Best Restaurants list in the New Yorker, easily as wonderful as anything named below, which sadly can't have a place on my own list because Collins made the fatal error of quoting me in it. Or literally every one of the Eater features we ran this year, about whose brilliance I can't even vaguely gesture at feigning objectivity.) In any case, here's my list of the best long-format stories published in 2015 about food, drink, restaurants, and all that surrounds them. —Helen Rosner, features editor "Its recipes weren’t written to appeal to the palate. Their instructions were designed to make the Teenage Fondue or Party Sandwich Loaf look a certain way: theatrical, performative, misleading. The focus on tuning precise colors and shapes — the shocking green of 'Lime Ribbon Delight' or the perfect heart shape of 'Cherry Berries on a Cloud' or simply the persistent symmetry of concentric circles and shingles — is here, as in all arts and crafts, a means for triggering observation." Such a brilliant pairing of writer and subject: Tamar Adler, champion of naturalistic cooking, coming out in praise of lurid midcentury gelatin salads. (Also not to miss: exquisitely unsettling images by Italian photography duo Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.) "During my self-conscious and anxious teen years, I would never be caught eating something so heavy or meaty in front of boys; I would bring little more than rice and carrots for lunch to the high school cafeteria and nibble on bowls of sliced cucumbers in the college dining hall. Displaying any sort of appetite felt somehow deeply unattractive, and demonstrating restraint felt right." The intersection of women and meat is jam-packed with rich topics — feminism, femininity, eating disorders, celebrity, the male gaze — and Andrews goes at all of them with fists raised. "Why there? Because within a three-minute walk there are a clinic that dispenses methadone, the substitute opioid used to treat heroin addiction; two outpatient substance-abuse programs; and a needle exchange. The neighborhood has few cheap options for hanging out. The White Castle allows only paying customers to use the restroom. The management at a Subway and two Dunkin’ Donuts claim their bathrooms are out of order." At a McDonald's in the middle of New York City, tourists, nuns, and office workers rub shoulders with a crowd of regulars who might, without this powerful, important, tremendously humanizing story, go willfully unseen. "Look at the menu of just about any fast food restaurant, whether it’s a big franchised operation or a small mom-and-pop affair. If they have a 'chicken club' sandwich on the menu, it basically means they took their regular chicken sandwich and stuck bacon in it" An exhaustively researched, guffaw-inducingly no-bullshit history of America's foremost triple-decker sandwich, from the nineteenth century to today, complete with taste tests. "My mother meant an interlude in our afternoon, a pause for cake. But there was also an interlude in our eating. A pause for a photo, then a pause to share it. This pause is an act in itself. Like many rituals, it is strange, until — after enough exposure — it is not." Sharing photos of what you're eating isn't quite as intimate as actually sharing a meal, but it's still something — and this essay fluidly unpacks what exactly that something might be. John Birdsall / Jarry (complete version only available in print) "You can use transparency — visibility — to change the culture of the kitchen, even a forty-five-seat modern Indian place like Mistry’s, sharing a strip-mall lot with a check-cashing place and a shitty taqueria, near the freeway in north Oakland. Not exactly the grandeur of the queer food capital I’d imagined, but it feels like home." An expansive, honest conversation with and about gay cooks at all stages of their careers, anchored on issues of identity, sexuality, visibility, and power. "'Most people want community more than cocktails, and that’s what neighborhood bars offer,' Schaap told me recently. 'Great neighborhood bars aren’t an antiquated idea; they’re timeless.' Yet these bars, where you go once a week to see your friends or shoot the shit with the bartender who gives you a buyback after a couple rounds of Jameson, are becoming harder to find. And when you do find one, you just worry about its inevitable demise, or worse, the wrong people discovering it." Equal parts requiem and call to arms, this is a melancholy look at the economic and social forces that threaten — but also, paradoxically, could maybe keep afloat — the disappearing American dive bar. "Beyond the region (and, if we’re being really honest, within its cultural bounds, too) fried chicken does not play like a complicated icon of black expertise, entrepreneurship, and stereotype. Instead, it’s now a meme to be mimicked, a trend to be exploited. Like bluegrass music in Japan or a Thornton Dial assemblage pulled from his Bessemer, Alabama, garage and hung at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the craft benefits from the remove and the framing but loses something in the translation." With the food of the American South now a bona fide national trend, it's often presented as a dreamy fantasy of the antebellum era. Edge finds that to be just the latest installment in a long history of translating the violent, racially turbulent history of the South into diner-friendly menus.
