Food and Drink

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘No food or drink has evolved as much as beer in the past 15 years,’ says J. Ryan Stradal when we meet for a drink at the Beer Grotto, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The author of the New York Times bestselling debut Kitchens of the Great Midwest is in the middle of his Midwest book tour. His latest novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, is a multi-generational saga that starts with two sisters, a stolen inheritance and a dream of making the best beer in Minnesota. It’s a family story told through beer goggles, which charts the evolution of Midwestern brewing from the 1960s to the present day.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. People don’t believe me when I tell them we created Hendrick’s Gin 20 years ago — mostly because the bottle looks like it’s been on the market for more like a century. Over the course of those 20 years, we’ve gone from an unusual little gin to a global brand. We sell more than one million cases a year. The secret is nostalgia. Most of the products we design at Quaker City Mercantile, the creative agency I run in Philadelphia, are known as ‘nostalgia’ brands. Nostalgia can be a powerful thing, but it’s not as easy as slapping a faux-vintage label on and calling it a day. Any nostalgic design has to come from an inherent truth about the brand.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. I love junk food in an insane, passionate way. Perhaps this is because I was a fat kid and though I am not a particularly fat adult, my fat kid-ness has never left me. I am firmly of the belief that if you were once a fat kid, it is an indelible state that can never be escaped, much as one might try. The state of fatness during those years made me who I am today. Or perhaps my love of junk food is just one of the things that makes me distinctly American. We Americans love our junk food. One in three eats it every single day and they do it because junk food is delicious and because junk food is largely an American way of life.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The best bar in America serves water in Styrofoam cups, a half pour. It’s the house specialty. There are half a dozen Chicagoans lining the bar, half a dozen Styrofoam cups. They fall silent when the newcomer enters, eye him as he takes his water. They want to make sure he doesn’t sip it. He does not. The newcomer asks for a Budweiser. ‘Cash only,’ the bartender says. The newcomer produces a bill and then passes the third and final test: he lights a cigarette. The regulars return to chatting and smoking and dumping ash into their Styrofoam cups.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. I met Jen Batchelor at a warehouse space in Brooklyn. She took a square, dark-red leather purse, unclasped it and removed a two-serving mini gold Martini shaker, two ornate cocktail tumblers, specialty bitters and a flask of Kin. Kin, an alcohol-free cocktail concoction that claims to occasion bliss and give rise to euphoria, is made from nootropics, adaptogens and botanics. It resembles a potion; it is not psychoactive. Its devotees will tell you it reconstructs the ritual of drinking.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. ‘No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,’ Thomas Jefferson famously said, laying the blame for insobriety firmly on ‘ardent spirits’. The third president was a notorious wine-fancier with a particularly soft spot for Sauternes, yet it is true that countries with a long history of winemaking tend towards more easeful drinking. Despite the ghastly interregnum of Prohibition, America has become a serious wine-producing nation — and yet ardent spirits seem to have left far stronger a mark, on the national mindset and on the nation’s prose.