Dean, who arrived again from an abroad journey as he launched a brand new, digital model of Connoisseur.
Illustration: Margalit Cutler
Amid the media-industry doom that has ushered in 2026, one publishing story stands out as a wild, hilarious shiny spot. When Sam Dean, a journalist and writer, realized Condé Nast had allowed the Connoisseur trademark to run out, he snatched it up for himself and — together with 4 co-founders — relaunched it this month as a publication. They moved up the debut to coincide with the New 12 months and a New York Occasions piece asserting the venture, which overlapped with a visit Dean had deliberate. “I used to be not speculated to be a 14-hour time distinction away,” he says. “When that story got here out, it was 9 p.m. Taipei time, and I used to be strolling down the road cackling about this ridiculous concept I got here up with a 12 months in the past and roped some folks into — It’s reside.” He spent final week readjusting to Pacific time and catching up on the group chat along with his Connoisseur colleagues whereas getting his bearings again with some tacos de buche, seafood pancakes, and plenty of time with buddies.
Wednesday, January 21
Fifteen hours after takeoff in Taipei and thru the cosmic marvel of the worldwide date line, I contact down in Los Angeles at 10 a.m., 20 minutes earlier than I left Taiwan. I’m ravenous.
We’re staying in East Hollywood on the identical block the place I lived with my spouse, Mariam, for almost 5 years till we decamped to Vermont for her job. Considered one of our former neighbors is normally out of city (he’s a cinematographer, and the film biz has dried up), and he sublets his place to us for reasonable. I like this zone regardless of the eerie presence of Scientology’s massive blue HQ up the block. It’s concurrently Little Armenia and Thai City and — like most locations in L.A. — principally Latino. A 20-minute stroll takes you to the bourgeois bars and low outlets of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and the stretch on Virgil. An Erewhon appeared on the sting of the world whereas we lived right here. I resented its presence, however I used to be not shocked.
En path to the house, I textual content my dad, Rex, to see if he needs to seize lunch. After we make a pit cease to rinse off the aircraft scuzz, he picks us up in his outdated Prius (adorned along with his handmade “Feed Gaza” decals) and we scoot as much as Carousel on Hollywood, the grande dame of the neighborhood’s Lebanese-Armenian eating places. It’s an off-the-cuff however white-tablecloth sort of place, and there’s at all times an enormous household perform occurring — normally a birthday however this time a funeral reception. (կյանք քեզ to Mrs. Soykurt.) We sit exterior by the car parking zone and order a veggie meze plate, kibbeh, and fattoush to separate. Within the gentle of this fried bulgur, muhammarah, eggplant, and lemon, we’re cleansed.
The afternoon passes in a bleary haze, half nap, half cellphone. Nozlee Samadzadeh and Amiel Stanek, the cooking editors (among the many different hats they put on) on the new Connoisseur, are at house in Brooklyn and Hudson, respectively, testing a recipe for rooster wings and rice noodles braised in an fragrant liquid for an upcoming version. One of many many joys of beginning this factor with a crew scattered throughout the nation is that, it doesn’t matter what, somebody is at all times consuming one thing good.
A plan for the night comes into focus round sundown. Alex Tatusian, one other Connoisseur co-founder, goes to select us up along with his associate, Sharanya Durvasula, and we’ll hit the Wednesday wine tasting at Lou up on Hillhurst.
Out of the blue hungry once more, I resolve to get tacos for everybody. I hit the low-key household stand on Edgemont, the place they’ve bought 4 varieties of meat crackling over charcoal, and cargo up a plate (de buche, al pastor, pollo, carne asada). We eat them off the hood of Alex’s automotive within the Lou car parking zone, then style our means via 5 Italian bottles. I like the Lazio Cesanese, however the crew prefers a northern slow-pressed Vernaccia. We purchase each.
Perversely amped up now, hitting daybreak in Taipei time, we resolve to go hold chez Tatusian for an additional stretch. Alex and Sharanya have an unbelievable bar at house — unusual bottles of amari they purchased in Italy, dusty whiskeys from thrift shops in Arizona — and, most necessary, a divine sense of bottomless hospitality. My addled thoughts decides I desire a Rusty Nail (Scotch, Drambuie) with an especially petite little snifter of amaro on the facet. We get a automotive house and collapse.
Thursday, January 22
A wierd sleep. I get up and our Thursday version with a recipe for Alison Roman’s pork cooked in milk has hit the web. I’ve given myself the duty of being the customer-support specialist, so I spend a couple of hours sifting via reactions, pitches, and technical points within the editors’ inbox. All of our subscribers are very excited to see Connoisseur reside once more, however some are a bit of confused as to what precisely we’re doing. I reply to all of them, promising we will likely be fascinating, extra recipes are coming, and, sure, it’s okay to cook dinner this dish with lactose-free milk.
Somebody must go grocery looking for lunch, and we determine that somebody is me. I seize my backpack and some totes and set out for Jons, however inside a block I understand I need assistance. The carnitas stand is open on the nook of Lexington. By this time of the morning, the enormous cauldrons are clear, the carnitas are ready to be chopped, and the chicharrones (each the fluffy fried pork rinds and the crackling batons of stomach) are settled in an enormous plastic container. Not desirous to spoil my urge for food, I get only one taco, however once they give me half a pound of meat on high of the tortilla, I don’t object.
On the way in which again from the shop, I cease on the tent on the alternative nook from the carnitas tent. Fifteen {dollars} will get me half a charcoal-grilled rooster, plus rice and beans and tortillas and grilled onions and plenty of salsas. Mariam and I eat properly.
Extra emails, and out of the editors’ thread seems a imaginative and prescient: For some motive, Cale Weissman, one other co-founder on the crew, is carrying a tuxedo and eating on the Waldorf Astoria tonight. He’s harsh however honest. The Waldorf salad: “backside 10 salad tbh.” The braised beef: “unhappy.” A shiny spot: “the dessert tray was really top-tier/wonderful mini paris-brest.” Kathy Hochul is in attendance, however Cale ultimately realizes, when a fellow visitor errors him for a waiter, that he didn’t have to put on a tuxedo.
The night in Los Angeles brings a cocktail party on the Tatusian residence with different buddies in attendance. We start with a nip-size bottle of Nineteen Fifties Scotch that Alex bought in Ravenna and a few batinjan bil rumman wal laban he has made, then transfer to Thai takeout and the wine we purchased the evening earlier than. On the thread, Nozlee is taking a knee and chugging a Modelo after homosexual beer-league hockey. Jet lag is starting to hit me, and if I’m being sincere, so are about three too many glasses of wine. The evening blurs, and we head house after midnight.
Friday, January 23
I awake on the sofa at daybreak. Underslept, woozy, I scrape collectively a leftover breakfast of chilly beans and rooster.
Now we have a bunch interview with Max at Hell Gate to speak co-op media tasks. (We’re operating Connoisseur as a no-investor co-op and giving freelancers who write tales or recipes a lower of the earnings for the three months after their piece goes out). I take the Zoom wandering across the neighborhood within the solar, wishing the passionfruit vines that develop semi-wild had been in fruiting season, too timid to steal a couple of tangerines from a neighbor’s front-yard tree though they by no means appear to eat them.
As I wait out my jet-lag hangover, Amiel seems to be making ready a winter feast at his house in Hudson. He in some way bought a restaurant-supply firm to ship eight kilos of lamb chops, two and a half kilos of Pecorino, recent bay leaves, and a case of grapefruits in a single day. He’s now squeezing recent Greyhounds for everybody, in line with his images on the editors’ thread, and a chef pal is over to butcher and roast a leg of deer their different pal shot in his Kingston yard. Amiel and his associate, Lauren, who’s about to open a diner referred to as Doves, are in some way internet hosting this snow-globe fantasia whereas taking good care of their two tiny children.
By sundown, I’m semi-revived. We stroll the mile-and-change to a spot referred to as Bar Etoile to satisfy some buddies for dinner. It’s a comparatively new offshoot from the individuals who run Domaine LA, a long-standing wine retailer on Melrose, and Mariam’s opening query about Umbrian wine summons the somm-owner, who tempts us with a really costly Slovenian discipline mix in a clay bottle earlier than we land on a extra cheap pair of wines within the $60 zone. Probably the most memorable dish, as usually the case, is an appetizer: yams in a guajillo sabayon, a sort of creamy egg sauce.
At this level, my physique’s inside clock is totally cuckoo. We go to a newish bar on Virgil, which occupies the previous spot of a rum bar that closed on account of a household embezzlement scandal, which in flip occupied the spot of an unbelievable Filipino karaoke dive referred to as the Smog Cutter. The drinks are superb, however the music is taking part in at an excruciating quantity, and so they’re internet hosting some sort of nootropic nonalcoholic-drink-product promo occasion.
I’m able to go house, eyelids drooping, however then Alex asks if I wish to go see a person play saxophone in a mall in Koreatown. Sure, after all I do. A ten-dollar Lyft later I discover myself driving an escalator to Nathanial Younger’s hauntingly stunning melody on a tenor sax to a crowd of what have to be 1,000 L.A. cool children — and I imply children, 20-somethings in black T-shirts and complex pants — plus a handful of uncool jazz millennials like myself. We’re all stacked up and down the central atrium of the mall on sixth and Mariposa, the one with the H Mart and the spa on the third flooring. The sax man switches to soprano and rips into an Ornette Coleman traditional.
The advert hoc present wraps proper at eleven, and we stroll over to DGM (technically DwitGolMok, but it surely may need pulled a KFC and gone for acronym solely), a semi-hidden Korean drinking-food spot. We cut up a seafood pancake among the many crew and some bottles of Kloud and Chamisul earlier than I name it.
Saturday, January 24
I get up uncontrollably early once more, solar up, canines barking, and do extra publication tech help. Electronic mail is an odd creature, and Yahoo doesn’t like us. We’re additionally getting some nice pitches, which I cannot reveal right here.
My sister Sophia lives shut by, and he or she and her pal choose me up for lunch at a newish place referred to as Chainsaw that I wish to take a look at. It began as a pop-up within the chef’s storage in Echo Park, and I’d been to a few the occasions again when it was getting going. Now it has a brick-and-mortar not removed from Bar Etoile. I get the sense {that a} real-estate man have to be pushing exhausting to get new eating places within the space, a working-class zone with a shrine to Santa Muerte across the nook. Once we present up, Chainsaw is slammed.
The chef, Karla Subero Pittol, was born in Venezuela, and the menu on the café leans in that course: We order coffees, arepas, and an off-menu salad and lomo saltado I’d seen on Instagram. I’m ready to be aggravated at ready many minutes to get $12 arepas, however once they arrive and we eat them on high of the sidewalk telecom-access field, they’re plain — crunchy and crumbly, deliciously sauced.
Again house, I flop on the sofa aspiring to nap however then see the information that federal brokers have killed a protester, Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis. I can not sleep. We begin texting on the editors’ thread, and Nozlee, who had simply been bruléeing the highest of a spumoni ice-cream cake with a tiny pen-size torch at a pal’s occasion in Philadelphia, begins reaching out to Twin Cities buddies to supply a narrative on how the protest motion is feeding itself out within the chilly.
I had deliberate to go east to the San Gabriel Valley for a dish I grew to become obsessive about in Taiwan — fatty pork over mustard greens which have been pickled, dried, after which rehydrated — earlier than stopping by a pal’s occasion, however, napless and upset, I’ve to bail on it. Darkish falls, and I eat some leftover rooster Mariam pulls collectively into sandwiches. A pal had agreed to come back over for a quiet hold, so I stroll to Erewhon, reluctantly since it’s the one wine retailer open inside a couple of blocks, and choose up an eccentric rosé on sale, an amaro, and a few overpriced potato chips. We lounge round for a few hours, then I give sleeping one other shot.
Sunday, January 25
What’s sleep? Does it depend if you happen to simply ruminate together with your eyes closed for a few hours?
By means of some sophisticated car-borrowing logistics, I find yourself downtown and hop on the Gold Line to get to Boyle Heights, the place I’m assembly up with a chef pal, Rogie Hernandez, to catch up and speak about what he needs to do for Connoisseur. He has labored in kitchens throughout L.A. and staged with a Michelin-starred chef in Bangkok a few years in the past, however once I met him via a music-journalist pal, his major factor was throwing DIY exhibits on the mechanic store the place his dad labored.
Rogie’s now head chef at a brand new upscale spot on the Sundown Strip in West Hollywood referred to as Galerie. He was promoted from sous after his boss determined to turn out to be a fish rep, and now he’s operating the kitchen from high to backside, hitting the farmers’ market within the morning for substances and shutting up late at evening. However it’s his time without work, so he picks me up on the prepare station and takes me to Santa Rita Jalisco, a truck with a devoted eating space. On his rec, I get some al pastor tacos and the pescuezos, fried rooster necks served with pink salsa and tortillas. Jonathan Gold as soon as described considered one of these as “a tanned, meaty cylinder surmounted by an Elizabethan collar of pure crunch: hidden bits of chewy meat and a corona of pure, fatty pleasure.” He stays right.
We cease again at Rogie’s place for a bit of beer, then hit the street along with his girlfriend and one other pal on the town to cowl the Grammys to go get extra meals. I’d thought the plan was to go west, again towards my house, however as a substitute Rogie hangs a left and we’re off to Monterey Park, ending up on the Hong Kong Café for some milk-coffee-tea and fried rice-noodle rolls as a snack. He graciously schleps me again to East Hollywood after, then heads out into the evening in pursuit of one other hold.
The weekend ends with a bit of oasis of calm. Mariam and I are due for dinner with two buddies, one a literature professor and the opposite a novelist, at their house up Beachwood. Once we arrive, their camellia tree is in full bloom at nighttime and classical music is on the turntable. They pour some Kirkland Champagne, left over from New 12 months’s, and make us salmon, a lentil salad, a inexperienced salad, and good bread with butter. My physique welcomes the greens. The finale is a mango yogurt parfait — the yogurt made by Ari’s on the Hollywood Farmers’ Market — and a soothing rooibos mix referred to as Rolex Gold, which we’re assured is bought by a completely stoned teaman and served with some milk.
EAT LIKE THE EXPERTS.
Join the Grub Avenue publication.
Vox Media, LLC Phrases and Privateness Discover
See All