THE UNDERGROUND GOURMET - Shopping Like a Chef, Eating Like a Civilian

Bulk quantities, incomplete orders, and pristine produce: What happens when restaurant suppliers brave home delivery.

- By Rob Patrone and Ronim Raisfeld

AS NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S Underground Gourmet critics, we’re incredibly lucky to have a job whose chief requirement— currently suspended—is to constantly go to restaurants and stuff ourselves silly. Aside from the great amount of money spent having elastic inserts sewn into trouser waistbands, the only real downside to this arrangement is the lack of opportunity to experience the joy of cooking. We were thinking about this after the city ordered its restaurants to close, as we took a worried inventory of the contents of our refrigerator and cupboards. What we discovered: old pasta, older rice, stale spices, a concrete block of brown sugar, a tin of Brad’s Organic black-eyed peas, a jar of watermelon-seed butter, a bag of Rancho Gordo popping corn, 11 cans of Skyline chili we’d shipped in from Ohio for a story we wrote in November and, in the fridge, among assorted hot sauces, martini olives, maple syrups, and Hungarian goat horn peppers, some dangerous-looking leftovers from the last restaurant meals we’d had before the shutdown.

While the prospect of subsisting on Cincinnati chili has a certain rustic appeal, we knew it was time to go shopping. But the process of obtaining food safely and ethically in a virus-ravaged city was becoming fraught with contradictory advice.