🟧 The best anchovies on the internet

Pasta inspo + this week in culture

Are blossoming cherry trees in spring the most beautiful sight in the world? At least in DC they are. 🟧 This week, Kyle buys ecommerce anchovies imported from Cetara, Italy for a pasta recipe 🟧 Paris learns to love slop bowls 🟧 NYC “microscenes” 🟧 Zelda in your browser

---

Things of the week

• Morandi’s force field: The photographer Joel Meyerowitz spent time in the legendary 20th-century Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi’s preserved Bologna studio documenting its contents: cracked ceramic vases, dusty glass bottles, anonymous model cylinders. Meyerowitz’s newly reissued book collects the images. Morandi was “assembling a force field of geometric objects,” the photographer told Hyperallergic. If you don’t know Morandi, you should, and you’ll like him.

A Meyerowitz photo of one of the bottles Morandi painted (background added)

• Reality TV is kind of dying: The annual number of unscripted series being produced has dropped a third since 2022. "There are fewer channels greenlighting fewer shows, and it all seems to be moving unstoppably to the bottom," says Mark Cronin, a producer on the Below Deck franchise. Maybe reality is just user-generated on TikTok now.

• There’s a new weather app in town, from the founder of Dark Sky.

• “Microscenes”: T Magazine maps New York’s creative subcultures and their niche gathering spots, including such highlights as the Midtown subway and a Chinese restaurant. Prompts the question: Is doing absolutely anything in NYC a “scene”? Is my bathroom a microscene??

• An heirloom calculator: Casio’s new S100X calculator costs $624 and has glossy black finish from a month of hand-applied lacquer by a Japanese lacquerware house founded in 1930. Only 650 will be made.

• Parisian slop bowls: A Sweetgreen-style restaurant called Elle & Dee’s is getting buzz in Paris, where shrinking lunch breaks and creeping wellness culture have made giant “influencer lunch” salads suddenly aspirational.

• Do some Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker sailing in your browser. IYKYK.

• There’s going to be a Labubu movie, duh.

• If you were on Tumblr in 2014 you might recognize the “art hoe” discourse. Here’s another specimen.

• Silicon Valley AI companies are showing off by hosting private dinners in clubby rooms, forgoing big parties and flashy seafood towers.

• LL Bean is allowing U.S. shoppers to buy its Japanese designs for a limited time, including an amazing field coat.

• Best thing we read this week: The FT throws a midnight omelette party as described (theorized?) by Martha Stewart and documents it in exhausting detail, including super fun party photos in an actually normal-sized apartment. Why don’t more publications do lifestyle projects like this??

---

The best anchovies on the internet

by Kyle Chayka

photo by One Thing

It’s kind of a commitment to spend $30 on anchovies. They don’t have the reputation of a luxury fish, at least to Americans. They tend to be packed into pungent tins, little bricks of flavor to be wholly dissolved into something else. Still, I find myself using them more and more often in home cooking, blended into a caesar dressing or chopped up with garlic to toss with radicchio. That mounting enthusiasm is why I took a chance on Nettuno’s alici salate, a large jar of salt-cured anchovies in water from Cetara in southwestern Italy, right near Amalfi. These are ANCHOVIES, unignorable. They are finger-sized, full-bodied, with a skeleton you must extract before cooking. The salt is rock sugar-sized and must be rinsed off. They are also the most delicious little fishies I have ever eaten, with an almost fruity oceanic flavor and bouncy texture, slightly closer to Spanish-style boquerones, albeit much funkier.

I first bought a Nettuno jar from a provisions store in Kent, Connecticut, at the urging of the proprietor, who assured me it would be worth it — she imported them herself. The jar lasted for many months, deployed a few anchovies at a time. But when it was empty I mourned its absence. So I hunted down a way to buy them online, which was offered by the Italian importer Gustiamo. We are living through a renaissance of specialty groceries delivered via ecommerce. The anchovies shipped wrapped in bubble wrap and brown paper, heavily insulated. I cracked them open and the scent of the Tyrrhenian Sea filled the kitchen. (Thankfully the seal contains the smell in your fridge, where you’ll store these fishies.) My most frequent use of the ingredient is to chop up the meaty filets and add them to vegetable-heavy pasta so that the briny fish oil helps coat the pasta and thickens any sauce. Below, a quick recipe.

Anchovy midnight pasta (thx to Rachel Roddy)

• ~5+ cloves garlic

• ~3+ anchovies

• 1 dry Italian chili pepper or pinch of flakes

• 1 lb spaghetti, ideally thick and bronze-die

• 1 bunch of parsley

• parmesan cheese

Filet the anchovies and chop them up into small, but not tiny, chunks — as large as you might want to get in a bite of pasta. Slice the garlic cloves. Chop the parsley stems into bits and separate the leaves. Boil salted water and add the pasta. Meanwhile, saute the garlic and chili in a generous amount of olive oil (our recommendation is Mr. Papou’s) on very low for 5 minutes until soft. Then, add the parsley stem bits and anchovy chunks and keep sauteing. Some will dissolve. Throw in a 1/4 cup of the boiling pasta water into the saute pan, keep on a low simmer. Then transfer the (very) al dente pasta into the garlic / anchovy / oil / water mixture. Keep cooking while stirring & flipping (use tongs) until the pasta is a desired texture and the sauce coheres and thickens, adding more oil or pasta water to complete. Toss in grated parmesan cheese and parsley leaves at the end while still hot before serving, so that the cheese melts and the parsley wilts a little.

---

🟧 One Thing on groceries

• An Asian grocery store for anywhere,

• Good bulk olive oil is a life hack

• RIP millennial groceries

• Hype olive-oil chips

• Light roast vs. dark roast coffee

---

🟧 Most popular links from the previous edition

• Death of a creative agency

• Japanese weekly planners

• Why tech bros are obsessed with “taste”

• Jony Ive’s post-Apple designs

• A new glossy international magazine