Taste Notes is One Thing’s signature curatorial effort, an intermittent collection of things we find cool and interesting. Scroll all the way down for an Apartamento founder’s Menorca farmhouse, Elif Batuman’s Airbnb fails, and a very fresh moka pot design. KC is Kyle Chayka, NG is Nate Gallant.
Just for the gc: This compendium of riffs on the group chat, the social unit of our time, from LARB was really fascinating. The text thread is a potent private space for discourse that we all recognize but don’t often speak about in public! One micro-essay begins: (KC)
IN A GROUP CHAT, a friend in New York is telling the rest of us about a “nightmare situation.” The night before, he went out with a couple friends who ended up not getting along. As a result, he had to mediate between the two. The night was messy, and the story is harrowing. While we in the group chat express our sympathy for the ordeal, we are also loving every detail. We hang on every text, waiting for the next, indulging in what Lauren Berlant might call the “conspiratorial pleasure” of being privy to a point of view in a story that others, particularly those featured in the story itself, may not have access to. This distinguishes a conspiratorial “us” from everyone else in the story.
Are you a tasteboy?: Harry Krinsky at Good Hang newsletter (&c.) diagnoses some of the masculine consumerist archetypes of our time (“GRWM guy”) in this very fun post and pinpoints a problem: if liking nice things is basically cringe and generic, then wtf are we even doing? At the heart of this quandary with taste, I think, is the matter of time. The internet encourages you to think you can do anything within the space of a day or week, but actually cultivating an enduring sense of what you like and why you like it takes years, decades, entire lives. You don’t become a true tasteboy overnight by buying some Stoffa swag; you have to live it. (KC)
The Tepid Taste Boy path is the sort of proverbial ‘touch grass’ approach. It acknowledges that something that supersedes having Good Taste in Scandinavian button-downs, is knowing how bad, unhealthy, and perhaps most importantly in this case, swagless, beaming oneself online is. Even the most tasteful fit tossed on in the context of that totally fucking CIA-sponsored ‘paging doctor beat’ trend signals 500 things about your relationship with yourself and the internet before it signals one thing about your Personal Style.
Special: DC Restaurant Discourse
Nate Gallant, on what’s overrated: The Times has ranked the restaurants of DC, and it’s not a bad list at all. Still, it’s very geared towards overpaying for imitations of NYC-lite, upscale concept restaurants that don’t always deliver what I feel are DC’s culinary strengths. In my experience, the Capitol dining experience rewards less overpaying for a downtown-style vibey bistro and more the chiller, more accessible mom-and-pop stop (Vegz, rather than Rasika) or its more elevated form (Afghania, rather than Lapis), but I suppose the true gift of DC’s food scene is the embarrassment of options which are not normally at the forefront of haute cuisine. Still, not including Pesce, the newly revived, excellent seafood spot, is too bad, as it’s a rare place in town which will deliver on the price-tag for upscale dining. Also, the Peter Chang empire of restaurants around the DMV are uniformly fine but not worth this rank. For their ostensive variety of diasporic Chinese cuisine, they don’t excel so far past the much cheaper staples (say, Han Palace), innovative newcomers (Tiger Fork), or standout fusion-spots (Sura or Chiko) if you ask me, although clearly both the NYT reviewers and the Post’s Tom Sietsema would disagree.
Kyle Chayka, on food vs. vibes: As Nate and I often discuss, DC restaurants suffer from a vibes problem. There are many, many places across the small city to get a great meal, but you kind of have to pick your priority in terms of food or atmosphere. Many of the NYT’s picks are restaurants installed in soulless glassy office or condo buildings on desolate blocks, filled with decor that’s more bolted on than lived in. You can see from the plating photos that prettified aesthetics are a value, presumably to signal the legitimacy of higher prices. Besides the very legit Reveler’s Hour, the list misses the kind of neighborhood spots that deliver on food as well as a sense of locality and interconnectedness. The casually perfect Italian bistro Bar del Monte is nearly brand new but feels as though it’s been in its spot for many years. Martha Dear is like Greek Roberta’s, in menu as well as personality. KooKoo in Columbia Heights serves heartfelt Iranian food without fussiness. Donsak has real, fun Thai with tons of hominess and charm. La Tejana, the best breakfast tacos outside of Texas and home to a new evening program, is somehow not mentioned. The list just feels a bit… corporate! (KC)
Boxy fits: On my recent work trip to Japan, I was introduced to an incredible indigo artist named Yuko Kitta who works these days largely with ready-to-wear clothing and household fabrics, doing pop-ups in both commercial and museum spaces around Japan. The naturally dyed fabrics are beautiful, sustainably produced and dyed using traditional Okinawan indigo harvesting and dyeing methods. She’s had an atelier in Okinawa for some time, but I otherwise would recommend following Kitta on Instagram for updates on when she’ll begin shipping internationally again–I’ve heard it was soon. (NG)
Wet martinis are in: According to a charming piece in NYT, though anyone who has had the Julia Child’s Martini at the abovementioned Reveler’s Hour could have told you that. (Are there any new restaurants in NYC besides Eel Bar? I can’t tell from the press.) (KC)
IYKYK: This is the Instagram account for the “19th century converted cattle shed” in Menorca (the cooler version of Majorca) owned by one of the founders of Apartamento magazine. (KC)
European real-estate watch: If you’re fleeing the US, why not check out this ancient Tuscan castle for €550,000 (olive trees, check), or a lovely seaside townhouse in Valencia for €199,000? (KC)
Actual vintage stores: If you haven’t noticed, every formerly empty storefront in Cobble Hill and the West Village is now a “vintage store,” but the weird semantic wrangling of capitalism seems to have done its business on the term, which is now little more than a placeholder. Most of these spots display not an eye for curation, but merely the willingness to pay the first few months of rent to house large dumps of ready-to-wear designer items from the past two seasons from one group of wealthy New Yorkers, now ready to be bought by another at just about the same prices they were purchased for originally. This is exactly where The Real Real got in trouble, but here we are. For something very different, check out The Vintage Twin, in the East or West Village. Incredible finds, a solid amount of masc fashion, largely for less than $50. Curation lives! For more coastal elitism, I can wholeheartedly recommend both Mercy and ReLove in Oakland for exactly the same reasons, thanks to the expertise of my most fashionable friend in the Bay Area. (NG)
New coat technology: Jony Ive may be exaggerating when he says he reinvented buttons, but these pastel-colored outdoor layering systems created with Moncler actually look quite cool. (KC)
International art highlights: The Common, a literary magazine run by the brilliant author and editor Jennifer Acker, is one of a few literary magazines left which remains very committed to translated fiction and nonfiction. I always enjoy perusing a special or regular issue of theirs to see something wholly and completely new to me, although their previous issue surprised me most with some visual rather than written arts. Check out this very striking print portfolio of contemporary Eritrean art, about which I knew absolutely nothing until taking a look at this issue. (NG)
Listen to these two jazz albums: Minoru Muraoka’s Bamboo from 1970 has one of my favorite versions of “Take Five,” with extravagant solos on Muraoka’s shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute. I knew the first track, but I recently started listening to the full album, which is great. After reading Richard Brody on the semi-forgotten piano player Charles Bell, I’ve been listening to his one compendium available on streaming all week, and it is incredible. Bell’s “My Favorite Things” will blow your mind. (KC)
Very online late-night TV: The very-online, very funny game show After Midnight is back and better than ever. I personally do not need ten minutes of Taylor Tomlinson stand-up at the intro, but for those who do it’s a treat and she’s really nailing a role that has, needless to say, been dominated by annoyingly snarky men (mostly Chris Hardwick and Joel McHale). The game show portion is the only thing that has allowed me to laugh lately at the internet and its increasingly rapid destruction of our culture and political institutions. (NG)
The strife of the writer: Elif Batuman complains at length about her Airbnb and writer residency issues in her Substack. Luxury problems, but I’d read her version of Out of Sheer Rage. (KC)
For the past few months, I’ve been very stressed out about not getting as much work done as I had hoped at the luxurious residency I was at in Rome, which is the kind of sentiment you can’t express without sounding like a total wanker, and yet is one of the emotions of the human heart. At some point in March, I started to panic and dropped a chunk of change on a 3-week Airbnb on an island in Turkey for July, thinking I would hole up, talk to no one, spend no money, and work through all the chaotic impressions of the past months.
Home renovations: It’s worth email subscribing to read the full 4000 words of the Wirecutter founder Brian Lam describing how he built, and then rebuilt after a friend’s fuck-up, a wooden deck around the traditional Hawaiian home that he has restoring for years while he waits out his NYT acquisition non-compete time. King shit. This is my catnip. (KC)
New design is possible: In upmarket moka pot news, I am slightly entranced by one of the relatively new Alessi Moka Pot designs, which delivers more than previous iterations on the unique balance of sharp lines and smooth surfaces that make their designs more than shiny and expensive mid-century modern replicas. (NG)
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