Everything is a Luxury Item Now

Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last time we covered the rise of AI-made reservations. We must address one oft-ignored issue that’s become too acute to overlook: Whoever is in charge of wine at Trader Joe’s needs a wellness check. I’m seeing apple pie wine. I’m seeing pumpkin spice chardonnay. I’m concerned and I want to help. This week chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park fame entered the consumer packaged goods (CPG) game. His new product is called Riff, a line of boxed pasta dishes that come with seasoning mixes and crunchy toppings, plus suggestions on each box for how you can incorporate fresh ingredients. (Riffs—get it?) Also important: 13,000 cases later, the CDC has announced the Cyclospora outbreak is over. Phew! One less concern among the many other food safety issues currently unfolding—like “small stones and other hard objects” in ice cream. Also in this week’s Open Tab: why every food item seems like it’s a luxury item, Chipotle’s shiny new partnership with Palantir, China’s blueberry scam, and the legacy of Prince’s favorite cheesecake. The era of expensive everything A burger at DC’s Le Diplomate will set you back $29—more than twice what it cost 13 years ago, as The Washington Post reports. In New York, Gigi’s set off a wave of menu pricing discourse with a $77 roast chicken, they’re doing $100 hot dogs in Florida, and across the country, prices at McDonald’s have doubled over the last decade—even as serving sizes have gotten smaller. Why is everything so much more expensive now? The answer is multifaceted: The war in Iran is skyrocketing fuel prices which, in turn, has a profound impact on global food systems, plus inflation is rising steeply—hence this week’s Fed rate bump—and, finally, restaurants’ supply, labor, and utility costs are still rising. A lot of restaurant items are priced as luxuries, but our sense of luxury has also skewed in recent years. Caviar, once rarified, is now par for the course. Wagyu beef, a high-end, hard-to-source import years ago, is on countless menus at all price points. For $158—that’s two roast chickens at Gigi’s—you can indulge in an all-you-can-eat Wagyu and seafood experience, in fact. All this means diners will learn to be more discerning. With prices like these, determining which meals warrant this kind of spending is all the more important. Why is Chipotle working with Palantir? What’s the opposite of a joint slay? Whatever that term might be, that’s how I’d describe an international fast-casual restaurant chain partnering with a multibillion dollar tech giant hell-bent on destroying every last scrap of data privacy for normal people. I am talking, as you may have guessed, about the new collab between Chipotle and Palantir. Palantir, which has been contracted to work with ICE to track migrants’ movements, will be working with Chipotle on a food safety risk platform—essentially a means to try to reduce the number of food safety incidents at the chain’s locations. “The platform brings key information together in one place, enabling our teams to more effectively identify trends, prioritize follow-up, and make proactive, data-informed decisions,” Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs and food safety officer, in a statement to Wired. Will all of this actually result in greater food safety at Chipotle or is this simply a scheme to collect data on your burrito order? Well, reader, at this juncture it’s hard to say. The great blueberry scam Approximately a decade and a half ago, the fruit giant Driscoll entered the Chinese market to make blueberries happen, bringing in growing technology to lay claim to the best blueberries with the best genetics, according to The Wall Street Journal. By 2025, Chinese production of blueberries doubled that of the US. But Driscoll wasn’t the only one cashing in on the blueberry rush. Chinese business owners allegedly copied those blueberry-growing technologies, and some even stole Driscoll’s copyrighted blueberry varieties. The blueberry market in China is booming, but Driscoll has filed more than 20 lawsuits (and won two) seeking damages against Chinese companies, according to WSJ’s report. Prince’s favorite cheesecake lives on Vanessa Drews started making cheesecakes just for the love of the game—a cheesecake-head, if you will. That all changed when Prince (yes, that Prince) developed a taste for Drews’s desserts. Last September, she opened up a brick-and-mortar shop four miles from the late icon’s Paisley Park home, where she serves up the same Prince-approved recipes. Read on to discover the rest of Drews’s story.