Un's Best of 2022

What moved me in Twenty Twenty Two (or is it "Too?" Did we ever figure this out? Is it possibly both??)

Hi friends! Welcome to my first official newsletter! Thank you for being here.

Starting a newsletter is an idea I’ve been percolating on for some time now. My friend Baxter suggested I write one years ago. She is one of my favorite humans, someone I have deep respect for both personally and professionally, so I took her suggestion to heart. Then filed it away in that cabinet marked “one day.” You know that one? Someone really needs to clear it out, cause it’s full to bursting.

Generally, if Baxter tells you to do something creative, it’s a good idea to listen. Her Christmas tree brought me so much joy this year, and one day (there it is again), I’m going to fill my walls with large-scale prints of her Rising Sea Levels collection — but that’s a post and a plan for another day.

Courtesy of @baxmiller. A modernist take on Ponderosa waterfowls. Covered in 1000 origami cranes. Somebody get her a spread in Architectural Digest already.

As for this newsletter, there is no cohesive theme. No beautiful, unifying 3-2-1 concept like Atomic Habits author James Clear or Jessica Valenti’s relentlessly single-minded daily, Abortion Everyday. I’ve yet to think of a clever title. For now, we’re working with “Un’s Substack.” If you’ve a better suggestion, let a mama know! My DMs are open.

Think of Un’s Substack as a poor woman’s Tressie McMillan Cottom. Do y’all follow her? Cause you really should. She’s one of my favorite feminists, public intellectuals, sociologists, clap backers. I’ll likely be referencing her a lot, so if she’s not your jam, neither likely am I.

My first installment is a Best of 2022 edition. I love Best of, Year-End content. The reflection! The curation involved. So my jam.

Here’s the best of what I read, watched, ate, cooked, experienced in 2022. Peace and love, y’all. See you in the new year. Let’s go.

Best Watches

DP. This series is a devastating, unflinching look at the culture of bullying in the Korean military. DP stands for “Deserter Pursuit” and follows a young army recruit and his more veteran senior as they investigate and bring back fellow soldiers who have deserted the South Korean military. It’s both a scathing account and accounting of toxic masculinity and the toll it takes on the men and culture of Korea writ-large. For those who don’t know, South Korea has a mandatory military conscription policy for all able-bodied men. Blame the ongoing conflict with North Korea.

You may have heard something about this when BTS’s World Wide Handsome Jin’s enlistment made worldwide news earlier this month (click that link, friends. Some interesting context for you).

WWH Jin before and after his required military buzzcut. Source: thenews.com.pk

DP is meticulously casted, acted, and directed, and with just six swift episodes, it’s sized appropriately for a gut-punch of a holiday binge. Just be prepared to have your heart broken, both by the storylines and characters. Your heart will also melt at the lovely bromance at the center of the series. Jung Hae-in (below, left) plays the reticent, quiet recruit and Koo Kyo-Hwan (right) his exuberant senior and resident comic relief. They are two of my favorite actors right now, and I’ve spent a good part of this year catching up on their filmography.

DP’s cast of supporting characters are also a Who’s Who of top Korean actors. You can find it on Netflix, which in my opinion, continues to have the best Korean content that I’ve seen across US streaming services. Here’s a great review of DP by the BBC. Check out the trailer below.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. How much do I love this movie? Let me count the ways.

• The women-led cast with a feminist af storyline that doesn’t feel exhaustingly gimickey or overwrought (as a staunch feminist, it’s all getting a bit tepid and exhausting, isn’t it?)

• Queen Angela Bassett. She is a revelation and I’m ready for her to be Queen of Everything. Ready for her to win all the awards.

• Chadwick Boseman. Our King. Hands to heart center, deep breaths, everyone. I honestly did not know how this franchise could (or should) move forward without him, but Director Ryan Coogler and Co. did a beautiful job remembering and honoring him. The entire film is an homage to Chadwick and his T’Challa. All while building forward in a way that feels authentic and makes sense.

Wakanda Forever is one of those rare films that you immediately want to watch again as soon as the lights come up. It’s THAT good. I loved the original - for the world building, the Afro-futurist imaginings, that iconic scene in Busan (a love letter to my hometown I will never forget). Thankfully, the sequel is equally as compelling, and I am anxiously awaiting the day we can watch in the comfort of our living room as a family.

This second Black Panther installment, like the first, does the important work of decentering whiteness, this time, focusing on the conflict between the Wakandan and Talokan civilizations. Tolokan takes its inspiration from the ancient Mayans and Aztecs, as well as the fictional world of Atlantis. Here’s a great piece on indigeneity in BPWF. And another here. Coogler and team showing what’s possible when BIPOC run things both behind and and in front of the camera. YES and more please.

Wakanda Forever is ultimately about grief and the varying ways people handle (or don’t handle) it, with space for the audience to grieve both Chadwick and T’Challa. At a time when it feels like we are in a near-constant state of grief, BPWF is both a catharsis and a balm. Wakanda Forever!

Knives Out: The Glass Onion. I’m very into this new era of billionaire-skewering that we currently find ourselves enmeshed in. Few things have brought me more Schadenfreude than the undoing and the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes-ing of one Elon W. Musk (that’s not really his middle initial, friends. I made that up. But it feels right, don’t it?)

I have moments when I’m Very On Twitter, and I found myself in one of them just as the platform was imploding in real time. It was like having a front seat in the Theater of History. I, like you, am so tired of having a front seat in the Theater of History. I currently hate that place. I miss the Boring Times. It was actually terrible to witness the lights go out and Twitter get shuttered WHILE WE WERE STILL IN THE BUILDING.

Pretty sure it was everyone’s first time experiencing an entire global communications infrastructure fall to pieces in a few weeks time due to the hubris and incompetence of the most mediocre white manTM this world has seen in a long while. And we have seen some near-perfect specimens of this mediocrity in our lifetime — enough to last A LIFETIME. Have we not??! Like, it’s VERY competitive out here! Yet, in waltzes Musk like he is The First, with two left feet, guns blazing, and nekkid right down to his bone-deep incompetence.

Wow, I’ve not said a damn thing about Knives Out yet.

About Knives Out: The Glass Onion — Come for the Elon Musk stand-in (played to brilliant perfection by a sun-kissed Edward Norton), stay for the rest of the phenomenal cast. Acting their butts off, dressed to kill, having the time of their lives. Again, this second iteration of Knives Out is a rare example of the student surpassing the master. I enjoyed it more than its excellent original.

Here’s a great Fresh Air interview with the director Rian Johnson (it’s pronounced “Ryan” by the way. I’ve been out here unnecessarily exoticizing it as “RE-Ann”). Knives Out was our Christmas Eve family night film, and we were ok with our 12 year-old watching it. It is — among other things — very much a COVID film, and everyone in the family had thoughts and feelings around it. Especially the 15 year-old. It felt oddly cozy and nostalgic. Memory is wild, y’all.

The Menu. Another flick in the Eat-the-Rich genre. Brutal. Stylish. A true satire, with an operatic, masterful finale that will go down in cinematic history as one of the most outrageous in recent memory. That scene was worth the outrageous ticket price alone. Chef Dominique Crenn served as food stylist and consultant for the exacting meal, a star in its own right. Y’all shoulda really watched The Menu in cinemas, but it will look great on your flatscreens too.

My restaurant-industry and restaurant-industry adjacent friends have lost their minds over this film. Not for its satire, but for its too-realness. Oof. Some could not bring themselves to watch it. Cherry Bombe’s Kerry Diamond instructed me to take food for the journey and it was good advice. Might I suggest some s’mores? You can read Kerry’s interview with Dominique here.

Run BTS. Run BTS is the perfect antidote to our collective polar deep freeze blues. It’s hard to describe, addictive to watch, and you will be blowing up my DMs soon after, I guarantee. I’m not going to say much beyond that. To watch is to know. To watch is to understand. To watch is to fall down that I-just-wanted-to-learn-their-names rabbit hole. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here’s one of my favorite episodes, of which there are many. 159 to be exact.

Here’s Time Magazine’s opinion on the best episodes. Almost all of them were made available on YouTube over this Christmas holiday. One of the World’s Biggest Band’s last and final gifts before the next member’s impending enlistment. Stream it all. Provided that your power is still on. My Ohio family is headed this way — to bake Beef Wellington and to help ring in the new year. They’ve no idea what’s awaiting them. BTS is serotonin, all ARMYs will tell you. Run BTS 7 4Eva.

Best Reads

Clint Smith for the Atlantic. I have loved so much of his writing this year, but one stand out was his sprawling, haunting, heart-wrenching, vital meditation on how Germany reckons with and remembers the Holocaust. Smith infuses all of his pieces with such depth, vulnerability, and personal context. In his Holocaust reflection, he reads the German approach against our own nation’s failures to properly deal with the sordid, violent, shameful chapters of US-American history. Necessary, required reading for these complex times.

Smith also provided thoughtful commentary on this year’s World Cup. The essay titles alone:

• How to Cheer for America in the World Cup,

• A Kid’s Eye View of the US vs “Whales,”

• What We Ask of Black Athletes.

In general, the discourse around this year’s World Cup was . . . interesting. Much of it about the human rights abuses of hosting nation, Qatar. I personally chose to watch the games. Wrote a couple of Instagram posts, got into my first social media dust-up in awhile about the Qatari games. My commitment to my activism came into question. Contradictions were made. You can read it over there.

Here are my parting thoughts from this year’s games:

1. The World Cup has always sports-washed the human rights violations of their hosting nations, so why the uproar and call for boycott now? It’s clear that some of the critique has to do with Qatar’s actual horrendous human rights abuses, but too much of it also smacks of an unexamined Islamophobia. The frothy self-righteousness coming out of Europe in particular is. . . interesting. 

2. I was immensely moved by how important these games were to the Qatari people. The emotion, the pride. Only possible when you call home a place that is terribly misunderstood and misrepresented in and by the world. To tell your own story and to be seen thru that lens for the first time? Powerful, transformative stuff. That will stay with me for a long, long time. 

3. The hotness of these soccer players certainly caught my eye (soccer players are the models of the athletic world, can we agree?), but it is always the geopolitics that captures my heart and imagination. It was fascinating to watch unfold both on and off the pitch. It will be more fascinating still to see the seeds of what we saw sown during this World Cup grow into the 2024 games. Let’s gooooooo!!!!!!! 

The tongue seen round the world. The tongue that launched a thousand marriage proposals. The tongue belonging to Korea’s #9 Cho Gue Sung.

Jay Casper Kang’s New York Times Newsletter. As many of you know, I’m currently working on a documentary about the intersections of race, education, and mental health. I read the entirety of Jay Caspian Kang’s newsletter offerings on higher ed and equity, mostly for work, but also out of great personal interest. Sadly, Kang has ended his stint at the New York Times. But he penned a beautiful farewell that also serves as both an overview and primer to his work. As a careful researcher and vetter, he’s provided links to many of the pieces he wrote for the NYT within that farewell.

Kang is a bit of a controversial figure in progressive Asian American circles, but don’t let that deter you from engaging with his work. He has got some provocative ideas worth paying attention to. Disruption at its best. I also don’t think that Harvard should discriminate against Asian American applicants, and college admissions has a lot to answer for in terms of how they discriminate against and dehumanize our young people. H o w e v e r — I’m with Jay Caspian on this point: maybe taking Harvard to task for their evolving affirmative action policy and their effects on Asian Americans isn’t where our energy should be. What exactly are we fighting for with these law suits? The right of our AsAm children to have a fair shot at the few token spots in Harvard’s admitting class? A higher education system that is truly equitable and improves lives on a systemic level? What is the end goal and what are the strategies we need to get there?

Some additional food for thought: supporters of these affirmative action cases against elite universities are often the same people who i.e. rally against Critical Race Theory being taught in our K-12 schools (Spoiler: this was a false narrative meant to feed the current culture wars. SEE: my “Worst Of” insert below).

I also highly recommend Kang’s The Loneliest Americans. It’s read by Intae Kim with a kind of seething sarcasm that I quite enjoyed. Very K-rage. Which I’m into. Kang is also very not about the binary, also something I’m very into. If you are also into it, check out Jay Caspian Kang.

Tressie. Everything she wrote in 2022, including her tweets and Instagram captions. Just go read it all.  Here’s that lovely shoutout from Trevor Noah so you can cry all over again.

Below, their funny, zesty, cerebral, last conversation. Twitter is mentioned. Dr. McMillan Cottom shows up in magenta. She blows up the idea of public spaces. Drops truth bombs every 5 seconds and links them all up like an elementary school connect-the-dot. Hot damn.

Is that magenta or BarbieTM pink?

Is ChatGPT smarter than a 4th grader? As we close out 2022, it seems like everyone has thoughts — and likely nightmares — about the chatter around ChatGPT. Apparently, neither a 4th grade teacher nor Judy Blume could tell whether a 4th grader or a bot wrote an essay. I’ve been having an ongoing, terrifying, fascinating, sometimes hilarious conversation with my former AP English teacher (AKA the woman who taught me how to write AKA now my friend) about its possible ramifications.

Is it the end of writing as we know it? The end of teaching? The end of what it means to be human? Or will we make course corrections as we often do in the face of seismic technological innovations? Professor Tressie also had some thoughts on the matter. Her essay, titled “Humans this Christmas” arrived in my in-box just in time for the holidays. Jingle all the way.

From the list above, it looks like I didn’t do a whole lotta book reading this year, but 2023 is all about remedying that. 

Here are some of my top books from 2022.

The Unlikely Art of Parental Pressure. Y’all. I probably shouldn’t say this, as I professionally put myself out there as an Impact Producer for a film about our bonkers college admissions racket and its impact on student mental health and well-being, but the kids are not alright. And I truly do not have the answers. It’s always a wild experience to be impact producing while living through the exact thing you are supposed to be impact producing. And we and our 15 year-old sophomore are deep in this college mess.

I’ve been doing a lot of research in search of some answers. One book I’ve found helpful is Drs. Chris Thurber and Hendrie Weisinger’s Unlikely Art of Parental Pressure. Their simple but mind-blowing premise: When it comes to parental pressure, stop focusing on the kids and turn your attention onto the parents. A cultural reset, folx. I am both shook and feeling attacked. I’m only a few chapters in. Will report back if there is interest among the forum (that’s you, folx).

Lenika Cruz On BTS. Ok, so technically, this book began as articles for The Atlantic, but their author, Lenika Cruz — one of my absolute favorite culture writers — has now compiled her essays into a sweet little purple primer. Her sleek volume will do a great deal in explaining to all the confused people in our lives why we are in this Bangtan Sonyeondang shit for life. We’re tired of explaining ourselves. Please get with the program and stop making us feel some kinda way about our devotion and interests. Or don’t. We don’t care.

In this Bangtan Soyeongdang shit for life. Apobangpo. IYKYK. Borahae and goodnight. Insert sassy Jimin look. And sashay away.

@3.65kg𝑾𝑯𝒀 𝑰𝑺 𝑯𝑬 𝑺𝑼𝑪𝑯 𝑨 𝑫𝑰𝑽𝑨🦋 #bts #jimin #foryou #fyp #btsarmy #kpop #btsedit #xyzbca

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“The Worst Of” Insert

Remember that time the local Q Anon came after me, hilariously accused me of being a Marxist communist infiltrator sent from Cary, North Carolina to destroy my suburban Philly community from within through my unpaid volunteer position as the PTO president of one of our district’s two middle schools? Then doxxed me, made me feel unsafe in my home, lose sleep about the safety of my children at their schools? Then both the police and lawyers, including the ACLU, told me that there wasn’t anything I could really do about it? Remember that? No? Well, it was hard for me to forget.

I penned a piece that we shopped around election season last year (cause all of this had to do with that completely batshit crazy election cycle). It came close to making it into the Washington Post and a few other outlets, but ultimately didn’t. I decided to publish it on my own via Medium with the goal of releasing it and moving on. I’m inserting it here, between “Best Reads” and “Best Eats” so as not to end my first newsletter with it. The title is Our Weimar Republic Moment. Give it a read if you’d like. Send me thoughts. Schedule a Zoom to discuss just how bonkers these past few years have been. I’ve been partial to soju lately.

Best Eats

Viv’s Fridge. Nothing brings me Freudenfreude** quite like seeing my friends succeed, and my friend Vivian is on the cusp of her New Big Chapter. I had no idea about the big wide world of vending machine food, but V’s about to blow the doors off of the whole concept. At least in this country. My family and I had the pleasure of eating many of Viv’s Fridge offerings over Thanksgiving. 

Featured: The most surprising and extraordinary turkey I’ve ever had. Four kinds of stuffing, sweet potatoes, collards, a refreshing fennel salad, and Jeni’s (of Jeni’s Ice Cream) famed cranberry marshmallow relish.

Viv’s Fridge includes lovely appetizers, but also full-on, restaurant quality heat-n-serve meals procured from a giant vending freezer. Amazing. I will never get over Vivian’s turkey this year. Perfectly cooked, tender, with a warm maple and black pepper vinaigrette + pecan cranberry relish. Whew! It’s a recipe you can find in her Deep Run Roots cookbook. This application to turkey proves that you don’t need to smother it in gravy to make it taste good. It was a surprising take on this traditional meal and I absolutely loved it. Btw, V says it works equally well with roast chicken — for a celebratory weekend meal.

I love talking food and its futures with Vivian. We had some intense conversations in the early days of the pandemic. Remember? When the food industry was reeling, abandoned, and shuttering. Your favorite local haunts hung out to dry, left to the vagaries of late-stage capitalism and its pandemic-era cruelty. Vivian often brings a healthy pragmatism to a space often run amok with romanticism. This pragmatism is also accompanied by her signature creativity, deep love, curiosity, and a can-do attitude. You see all of this reflected in Viv’s Fridge.

As an aside, she’s also one of the few chefs who’s recipes, if you follow them, tastes like you remember them in the restaurant, and I think that gives her a lot of street cred. No gatekeeping here, my friends! So you can imagine my dismay upon learning that her fridges are limited to North Carolina. I’ll just have to use her cookbooks to keep me fed and warm at night. Her pandemic-proof book, This Will Make It Taste Good is currently in my end-of-year short stack.

Read this Jenn Rice-helmed piece for Eater about the latest in Viv-vending news.

**Side note: my favorite word of 2022 is “Freudenfreude,” the opposite of “Schadenfreude.”

Here’s a Bah Humbug! piece on Freudenfreude. Apparently, people of the Teutonic persuasion both here and abroad were upset at the inaccuracies, both linguistic and cultural (I cannot). The whole debacle just makes me love the word even more. I also felt a rush of gratitude for being born Korean. Ach! Du meine Gute. Freudenfreude ftw!!

Hot pot. 2022 was the year my voracious family of four returned to restaurants. We still aren’t going often, but when we do, it’s usually to one of the two K-Pot locations in the Philly area. To eat there requires a harrowing 40+ minute drive, but Dear Reader, this meal is worth risking your life for. K-Pot is immersive, adventure eating. A chaotic riot of grilling, dunking, swishing, swirling, ordering, eating, more ordering, more eating, feeding one another delectable little bites with chopsticks — and not necessarily in that order. The setting is a cavernous, smoke-filled room with cacophonous K-Pop hits playing on larger-than-life screens.

If you plan on visiting us in the coming year, it’s likely that you will also make this Oregon Trail-esque journey across the apocalyptic wasteland that is Eastern PA’s highways and byways.

To barbecue your own meats, to revel in your personalized hotpot, to gently fondue paper-thin slices of pork belly and kobe beef, enoki mushrooms, watercress, crown daisy, and all manner of vegetables, noodles and seafood of every stripe in your roiling, boiling broth of choice.

I oscillate between the Tom Yum and the spicy seafood. And I rarely pause to drink. Because, honestly, who can spare the room? You’ve got to squeeze every last ounce of joy from the $28 all-you-can-eat set price. Hit the soju upon your return home, before you waddle off to bed. Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for the psychedelic dreams that come for you in the night.

Almost every damn thing I ate in Korea. From the bastardized breakfast egg toast to sublime haenyeo-powered meals made with ingredients hitting your plate straight out of the ocean. This requires a whole separate installment(s) of its own. Stay tuned. 

This punch. Like most of you, I am a busy-ass person. And as a busy-ass person, I am consistently annoyed by the complexity of Half Baked Harvest’s recipes. But there is no denying that they work and I cannot stay away. Everything she posts, I bookmark. And it’s hard to imagine leaving any ingredient out. It’s infuriating.

My pro-tips to make this delightful but labor-intensive Christmas pomegranate punch feasible.

• Prep as much as you can the night before. Because nobody has time to juice (an entire-ass cup of) limes, PLUS candy cranberries and rosemary sprigs the day of the party.

• I substituted the Cointreau with Grand Marnier, because I find it more versatile and they are both orange-flavored liqueurs.

• Shop well in advance of your event. The ingredient list isn’t necessarily stuff most folx having stocked in their pantries.

• And for the love of god, definitely deseed the pomegranate the night before. I’m debating whether it’s worth even including these (it is. Sigh).

We are planning on making this again to ring in the new year, goddesses help us. I’m convinced that Half Baked is actually Mrs. Claus and has a retinue of elf labor at her disposal. It’s the only way any of this makes sense.

I also baked up her Monster Christmas cookies, and they were a crowd favorite. This is, again, a kitchen-sink recipe that I would recommend halving so as not to start your new year off with a pricey Kitchen Aid repair job. Am I resentful? A little bit, yeah. I’d be a bit more charitable if she didn’t begin every video announcing how very easy her recipes are. Let’s be truthful about the effort involved, can we, friends? It’s almost 2023 and people got stuff to do.

Best Experience

My Korea trip. Hands down. I’ve already a whole host of topics I’d like to cover in future newsletters about what I learned and ate and relished while in Korea. People ask how my trip was, and they just want me to answer with a vague “good” and keep it moving. But I do not comply. Instead, my stock answer is my truth, which is that this trip changed my life. I don’t want to move on. It was a life-changing, paradigm-shifting, course-correcting, healing, fucking mad-delicious, magical pilgrimage that I will never get over. And I don’t want to move on. What more can you ask of a vacation? What more can you ask of anything really? I feel returned to myself. Did you hear that, world? I am returned to myself. Korea did that. 

We’re already planning the next Korean vacation (Summer 2023!), this time with the whole family. And there are other exciting, upcoming events tied to my October trip. Another “stay-tuned.”

I almost don’t want to say this, but it’s already likely too late, so I’m going to just say it: Get Thee to Korea. Post haste. Before it becomes the next Prague. It’s too heartbreaking to contemplate and I don’t want to think about it anymore. Why do us tourists ruin everything? Here’s a link to info about their new K-culture and workcation visa programs. See you in Seoul!

Miscellaneous and Year-To-Come

We’re still talking about World Cup over here. And every day I am shooketh awake by a half-clad Korean player on the cover of Vogue Korea or Elle Korea or W Korea or wherever, blowing up both my Instagram feed and group chats. Here’s a small sampling. 

Above and below, #11, Hwang Hee Chan, otherwise known as Sport Bra Man.

Above: #7 Son Heung Min, Team Captain, National Treasure of Korea

Above: More Hwang Hee Chan, this time with clothing, yet still very alluring.

I could go on, there’s so much more, but we’ll be here all day. Def made my Best of ‘22. #9 — Mr. Cho Gue Sung —  Noona is forever changed. How dare you. 

Moving on, my to-read list for the future is basically everything on Madeline Miller’s Best Of list. Is it delulu of me to think Madeline and I would be fast friends? Based on our taste in books? We could swap long COVID stories and Best Of lists. Share antihistamines and punch recipes. She’s local, you know.

I got Johannes the new Ed Yong and Tastes Like War for my niece this Christmas. Bella, if you are reading this, I am sorry to have ruined the surprise. Please let me borrow it when you’re done. Thanks. P.S. There are other surprises too. Love, Emo. 

In terms of want-to-watch, Everything Everywhere All at Once, because #MichelleYeoh. I know, I know. I should have seen it in the cinema. Sigh.

Michelle has been an icon for decades now and I’m well aware of what she is capable of. Time Magazine finally figured it out, and had the good sense to crown her Icon of the Year. It’s about time she got her flowers. Ready to give her all the awards too. I need a Michelle Yeoh-Angela Bassett sweep of awards season. Who’s with me?

Decision to Leave. Park Chan-Wook has been one of my favorite directors since my insufferable I-only-watch-foreign-films-phase back in the early 2000s. Forgive me. I had just come back from a year aboard, and was. . . insufferable. This film looks moody and dark and like it will fuck you up for at least a week. Good times. Bring it, streaming services. We’re ready to be wrecked.  

Speaking of wrecked, my friend Stacey (@ssprenzphoto on Instagram) has me consistently swooning and lusting after all the meals to be had in the RTP. That’s the Research Triangle Park for the unknowing — the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill-Cary area of North Carolina. There are few corners of this country that rival what the RTP has to offer food-wise. Fight me. I don’t care where you live. LA. New York. Charleston. Fight. Me.

Of the many new places (and old places) I dream of visiting in the RTP, Cheeni Indian Food Emporium is at the top of that long list. The interior looks like a pastel-infused fever dream ready for its Bridgerton: Bollywood close-up.

It is cornucopiac. (That’s a word. I swear). Eater Carolina named Cheeni their 2022 Restaurant of the Year and it’s not hard to see why. See below and swoon away.

Gin cocktail made with Cheeni’s cranberry chutney. Photo by Stacy Sprenz.

Whew! you’ve reached the end! Thank you, friends for reading my inaugural newsletter. I know we’re all overwhelmed with things to read these days, so I appreciate your time and attention. Eat well, rest well, find joy. See you in two weeks! 

Necklace from the Bernie event in Philly during this (again) bonkers election cycle. You can find it here.