Here’s what you might have missed

Laurie Woolever profiled Dominic Sessa, who plays young Anthony Bourdain in A24’s new movie: With Tony hitting theaters in two weeks, the teaser coverage is trickling out. Woolever, once Bourdain’s longtime assistant (he called her his "lieutenant") and now an author, picked at the parallels between Bourdain’s life and Sessa’s for Bon Appétit. Turns out Sessa learned to shuck oysters and move around a kitchen from Eli Sussman, the chef and meme maker behind @thesussmans, who also runs Brooklyn restaurant Gertrude’s.

The Bourdain movie is getting a book accompaniment, too: A24 announced the forthcoming release of Happier, Stupider Times, an anthology of Bourdain’s Provincetown years, which are the subject of Tony (the film’s script was based on early chapters of Kitchen Confidential). The book will feature old Provincetown ephemera, recipes for dishes like clam bakes, and previously unreleased images of Bourdain. (Next week, publisher Bloomsbury will also release a new edition of Bourdain’s lesser-known fiction work, titled Three Crime Novels.)

A TikTok-famous Arizona pastry chef outed himself as a manosphere apologist: Will Porter of the popular Arizona bakery Sablé has gained a large following for his baked goods and, well, his good looks, too, with viewers frequently commenting on his appearance. Porter appeared in a new “debate me”-style video from the provocative digital media company Jubilee titled “1 Anti-Manosphere vs 20 Manosphere,” in which he was positioned on the manosphere side, claiming that “women care more about looks than personality,” among other arguments. He’s since turned off the ability to comment on his TikTok videos, and issued a statement to the Phoenix New Times disavowing misogyny and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.

The cyclospora updates got messier: Late last week, produce purveyor Taylor Farms recalled some of its iceberg lettuce over links to the current cyclospora outbreak. But earlier this week, the FDA retracted its previous report that the sample of lettuce from Taylor Farms had evidence of cyclospora, claiming that it should be “considered a false positive.” The reversal has led to new waves of speculation about Taylor Farms’ government ties, with Wired reporting this week that the company has donated millions of dollars to conservative groups in recent years, including $1 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

Texas Monthly’s taco editor assessed the ethics of covering a certain type of taqueria: José R. Ralat wrote about the limits of reporting on home taquerias after he and a video journalist friend recently visited Carnitas Conejo in Ennis, Texas, which they had learned about through TikTok. The business was shut down by the health department after someone who saw Ralat’s friend’s video complained; cottage food laws in Texas prevent people from selling meat cooked in non-commercial kitchens. Ralat’s argument: Sometimes, gatekeeping can be good, especially when it can protect small businesses.

The tavernification of New York City: I contribute to Eater NY’s weekly openings roundups, which, lately, means seeing the word “tavern” quite a bit. Is the tavern the new bistro? Capitaine, the “seafood tavern” that recently replaced the bistro Libertine, is an almost too on-the-nose example. This week, while making sense of the city’s wave of taverns, Grub Street’s Matthew Schneier argued for another analog: The “tavern” may be the new “gastropub,” a way for chefs to partially obscure sophistication and ambition under the all-pleasing premise.

Can Alice Waters’ incredibly influential Chez Panisse change with the times? That’s the question New York Times critic Tejal Rao posed this week in her latest piece, a combined review of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971, and Bar Panisse, which opened in December. Giving both restaurants two stars (“very good”), Rao offers a fair assessment of a restaurant so clear in its vision that it’s been imitated to the point of cliche, but also identifies the merits of its follow-up’s fresher approach — under the helm of a chef who didn’t get her start at Chez.

Apparently, we’re calling them “rockstar chefs” again: The immediate post-pandemic years saw a move away from the chef-bro hagiography, and a growing reticence to frame hot-tempered chefs as auteurs. A newly announced BBC series suggests a return to the old-school perspective, or at the very least, that era of kitchens: Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, and Heston Blumenthal will appear in The Rise of the Rockstar Chef, which will follow the “rock and roll revolution” in British cuisine that resulted from the chefs’ rivalries, as Deadline reported.