Chapter 14

THE GREAT, SLOW PIVOT TO RECIPES

Even as I was fighting tooth and nail to win advertisers to keep the lights on, I was being questioned about our content strategy, what we focused on, namely where to eat and what was going on in the food culture. A crucial suggestion came early on from the most unlikely source, a man who rarely set foot in a kitchen.

“I’ve heard about you. You’re too nice.” Gawker founder Nick Denton and I were having breakfast at Nick’s regular table at Balthazar, Silicon Alley’s power breakfast spot, on a late winter’s day in March of 2007. As power breakfast spots go in New York, it’s a fine place to have a morning meal while discussing business. The Balthazar cochefs at the time, Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson (now the chef-owners of the extraordinary restaurant Frenchette), along with its wonderful baker, Paula Oland, developed a most excellent breakfast menu that remains largely intact to this day.

Then, as now, you couldn’t go wrong with the breakfast bread basket, the brioche French toast, or the “Eggs En Cocotte”—eggs, cream, and thyme baked in a ramekin and served with “soldiers” (thin strips of toast perfect for dipping).

That morning I wasn’t there just to eat. I was there to soak up as much wisdom as I could from one of the blogosphere’s most successful entrepreneurs. Nick Denton had, as I have previously noted, invented the group-blog business model with sites like Gawker, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker. Meg Hourihan had asked Nick if he would have breakfast with me. “Nick’s a fierce competitor, and he is all business, so don’t buy his bemused half smile,” she said. “But since he doesn’t have a food blog as part of his stable and he could care less about food, he’s willing to talk to you.”

Nick said, “I’ve looked at your site. It looks good. But why is there no chef gossip on the site?” He paused before answering his own question—I was “too nice.” I explained, “Guilty as charged. But that’s because I just don’t care about who’s having sex with whom in the walk-in at a restaurant. I’d much rather tell people where to get the best pizza in the city, or the whole country for that matter.”

Nick chuckled in response (he could give a rat’s ass about the best pizza anywhere) before asking another penetrating question: “What about recipes?” I hastily responded, “I don’t think the world needs another recipe database, Nick. Do you? There’s Epicurious, Allrecipes, AOL, Yahoo! . . .” I added with false confidence, “Recipes have become a commodity on the web. Plus, recipes aren’t my jam.”

Nick, being all business, gave me a quizzical look (as if to say, Who cares what your jam is?), before posing an essential question: “How many recipe searches are there a month on the web right now?” “I don’t know. I must admit that I’ve never thought about that question before.” Nick shook his head in disbelief before pulling out his phone and Googling the recipe search question. He handed me the phone so I could see the answer for myself. “Thirty million. Holy shit!” He paused to laugh at me before delivering the coup de grâce of the breakfast. “If I were you, I’d figure out a way to do recipes, Serious Eats style.” And with that I paid the seventy-five-dollar check. It was the best and cheapest advice I ever got from anyone. I ignored the gossip advice. Not my jam.

The suggestion to do recipes, Serious Eats style, was obviously great advice. There was just one little problem. I had never developed a recipe in my life. Actually, that’s not true. In New York Eats I had helped the owner of Eisenberg’s write his tuna salad recipe.

Here it is:

Eisenberg’s Tuna Salad

1 can Bumble Bee solid white tuna

Hellman’s mayonnaise

Mash the tuna and the mayonnaise with a big spoon. If you use a fork, it won’t turn out right. All the tuna salad must be eaten the day you make it.

Eat your heart out, René Redzepi, Thomas Keller, and Ferran Adrià.

The rest of the Serious Eats crew as it was configured then was not much help either. Alaina, Adam, Robyn, and Meg were curious home cooks, but they were certainly no recipe developers. Erin had worked in the kitchen at 1789, a very good restaurant in DC, when she was a student at Georgetown. But she had no experience in developing recipes either.

I had investigated buying recipe databases and talked to cookbook editors but quickly discovered that I didn’t have the money or the time to negotiate with big publishing houses or really successful cookbook authors who had retained their intellectual property rights.

So what did I do? As mentioned earlier, I convinced a couple of established recipe developers I knew who were getting some traction on the internet, like my friend Dorie Greenspan, to write for us. And I took a page out of old media’s book by aping what the newspapers and food glossies were doing on a regular basis. I got permission to publish a few recipes we would adapt from a newly published cookbook on Serious Eats in exchange for writing multiple posts about the book. And we would also do a book giveaway. The publishers were thrilled about this promotional exchange and the accompanying publicity. I named the column “Cook the Book.”

All of these posts did all right, traffic-wise, but I certainly hadn’t come up with a way, in Nick Denton’s words, to do recipes Serious Eats style. I really needed someone and something to break through the recipe internet clutter, a column that was Serious Eats native and couldn’t be read anywhere else. It ended up taking me two years to come up with that someone and something.

In 2008 Adam Kuban had hired a Cook’s Illustrated editor and writer named Kenji López-Alt to do some burger reviews for our burger blog, A Hamburger Today. Cook’s Illustrated founding editor and publisher Chris Kimball allowed Kenji to freelance for us only because he was writing about things Cook’s Illustrated would never write about. Kenji’s burger posts showed an insatiably curious scientific mind, major cooking chops, and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. He was unabashedly geeky, a fine writer, and a great storyteller. Kenji was as serious an eater and writer as I was, if not more, even though our backgrounds and work experiences were completely different. Plus, he shared my love of everyday foods from many different food cultures around the world. Burgers, check. Hot dogs, check. Pizza, check. Ramen, check. Tacos, double check.

The very first post Kenji wrote for us, on May 12, 2008, put all his insanely prodigious talents on display. It was about what he dubbed the Blumenburger, the difficult and time-consuming burger recipe developed by the famous, scientifically oriented British chef Heston Blumenthal. It begins:

England’s Heston Blumenthal follows in the footsteps of Spain’s legendary Ferran Adrià, in that he attempts to create a cuisine that places a high value on innovation and stimulation of the senses beyond taste. So what happens when one of the most highfalutin’ chefs in the world tries to tackle the hamburger, one of the most well-loved yet humble foods in the world? . . .

So in the name of science, research, and saturated-fat intake, I followed Blumenthal’s recipe for the ground beef sandwich nonpareil. All 12 pages of it. Here’s what I found:

Interesting Figures

You didn’t have to be a food science geek to recognize a major talent on display in this post. It was hilarious, revealing, and indisputably true.

Kenji was no stranger to the blogosphere. He and a friend had created GoodEater.org, which Kenji described to me in an email as “a website and blog that merges conversations on food quality, enjoyment, sourcing, and sustainability.” It was actually really good but hadn’t gotten much traction in the blogosphere. They were still maintaining it when I met Kenji. Unlike Serious Eats, it was never meant to be a business.

Kenji was also no stranger to recipe development. His years at Cook’s Illustrated had given him a deep understanding of how to develop a recipe. Those years had been preceded by many years spent cooking for some of Boston’s best, most thoughtful chefs, folks like Barbara Lynch (No. 9 Park), Ken Oringer (Clio, Uni), and fellow geek chef Tony Maws (Craigie on Main).

Kenji, Robyn Lee, and I agreed to meet for lunch at Trailer Park Lounge, a kitschy spot four blocks from our offices on West Twenty-Seventh Street. I ordered. A lot. In fact, we ordered just about every item on the menu: cheeseburger, turkey burger, grilled cheese, Philly cheesesteak, sloppy joe, chili mac and cheese, nachos, sweet potato fries, and tater tots. I would have ordered more, but there were only three of us.

I said to Kenji right after my prodigious ordering, “I love your burger reviews, but I was wondering if you would be interested in writing a food science column for us. You would have complete freedom to write about whatever you want, in your voice, which I love. You could write about burgers, fried chicken, pizza, anything. I’m thinking it would have both recipes and technique content. I think that given your background [Kenji is an MIT grad whose father is a professor at Harvard Medical School], your passion for both science and cooking techniques, and your strong storytelling abilities, this column would be something you could get excited about.”

Kenji’s face lit up. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to write a food science column. I’ve always wanted to do that.” “Great,” I replied. “We could call it ‘The Burger Lab’ when you’re writing about burgers and ‘The Food Lab’ when you’re writing about other stuff, because you would be digging deep into the science of cooking.”

Over the course of the next few days, Kenji came up with a couple of different ways to structure the column. The one that appealed to both me and him was what he called the MythBusters approach. Kenji would examine the conventional wisdom on any given food-related subject and see if it held up to his extremely close scrutiny. Given his take on the Blumenburger, Kenji had clearly been thinking about this subject for a very long time.

Before Kenji, food science was primarily the province of two other food writers, Harold McGee and Shirley Corriher. McGee’s 1984 On Food and Cooking was groundbreaking, the definitive word on the subject, but he took a scholarly approach (no surprise, as McGee got his PhD in Romantic poetry at Yale, where he studied under Harold Bloom). Corriher’s 1997 book CookWise was a little more down-to-earth, and her voice was friendlier and more conversational. But neither of their voices was particularly contemporary.

On TV, the Food Network’s Alton Brown had taken the food science mantle from Corriher and McGee with Good Eats. Kenji and I both love Alton. But Alton’s voice is completely different from Kenji’s (a little more acerbic, less pop culture oriented, and a lot more theatrical), and he has a very different style of visual storytelling. Plus, Alton’s voice is first and foremost a television voice, though he has also written many books and even developed a stage show that he’s successfully taken on the road.

We agreed that I would pay Kenji thirty dollars a column to start. Before you start laughing, that was five dollars more than we were paying everybody else—not because I was taking all the money we were (not) making and spending it on helicopter rides to the Hamptons, but because that was all we could afford. And sadly, it was double what a lot of other food blogs were paying for posts.

The first Food Lab post, “How to Boil an Egg,” appeared on Serious Eats on October 9, 2009. It was an immediate viral sensation that became the most popular column on Serious Eats at the time. It was quintessentially Kenji. First he busted the three myths that egg boilers have had foisted upon them for years. It turns out that the age of the eggs, the pH of the water, and whether your pot is lidded or not make no difference when you’re trying to optimally boil an egg. And he tested a host of other variables that really did matter.

That post was pure genius and pure Kenji. I loved everything about Kenji’s Food Lab posts: his “Harold McGee meets the Simpsons,” perfectly pitched, pop culture–drenched writing voice (Kenji claimed that two of his major influences were Mr. Wizard and the old TV show MacGyver); the way he framed his narratives by taking his readers on a journey; his obsessive rigor; and his methodology, which readily admitted his failed attempts along the way to perfection. I ate a thousand slices of pizza when I wrote my pizza book in search of the perfect slice. Kenji probably ate a hundred hard-boiled eggs in his search for the perfect hard-boiled egg recipe. Same obsessiveness and passion, different subjects. The Serious Eats community agreed with me about Kenji’s talent. Within three months his “How to Boil an Egg” post had gotten 144,000 page views, ten times what any recipe post had gotten on Serious Eats at the time.

A few days later Robyn Lee, now editing our burger blog, A Hamburger Today, emailed Kenji to see if he was interested in being our burger recipe tester. Which he was.

One of Kenji’s first Burger Lab posts was about his attempt to re-create Shake Shack’s burger, our favorite fast-food burger.

There’s nothing special about the burger—REGULAR SQUISHY BUN, A ¼-POUND PATTY OF GRIDDLED MEAT, LETTUCE, TOMATO, AND SAUCE—but like all good burger experiences, the sandwich is far more than a sum of its parts. To recreate the experience at home, I had to eat it, dissect it, deconstruct it, research it, eat it some more, rebuild it, break it down again, reconfigure it, taste it, eat it one more time, and finally reconstruct it again. Here are the results of my labor, from the ground up.

I was at his apartment when he was trying to replicate the Shake Shack burger, and after about a dozen tries, boy, did he nail it. One bite, and he sent me hurtling back to the line in Madison Square Park. More Kenji brilliance. Taking something seemingly mundane and making it sublime. Kenji was put on this earth to become the Serious Eats recipe czar. Plus, it seemed only right that Kenji idealized the Shake Shack burger, given its prominence in the history and evolution of Serious Eats. The Shake Shack burger is still a pretty damn good one to this day, even though there are now hundreds of Shake Shacks around the world, and Shake Shack is a publicly traded company.

A recipe strategy that would satisfy Nick Denton was forming before my very eyes, thanks to one extraordinary find. Kenji’s voice and storytelling style were the essence of Serious Eats. Successful blogs like Serious Eats created a world unto themselves that readers wanted to live in. Successful magazines do the same thing. I realized at that moment that something was either right for Serious Eats or it wasn’t. I recognized Kenji on an almost cellular level not only as somebody whose creative output fit perfectly within the Serious Eats ethos but also as someone who could push our mission of serious deliciousness forward.

I asked in a follow-up email if Kenji wanted to take charge of all of our recipe development content. “We could call you our recipe czar.” Kenji responded in an email: “Recipe czar sounds fun and interesting, and I’m a free agent as far as Chris [Kimball] is concerned. [I had asked if his recipe czar duties would conflict with his Cook’s Illustrated relationship.] What would the details be in terms of turnaround, number of recipes, and compensation? And finally . . . I was asking if we’d be able to start at $30 from the beginning (which is what I was getting for my AHT stuff), with the possibility of getting a per-piece raise if it proves to be worthwhile for you in the future.”

I couldn’t believe our good fortune. I had my recipe czar, as we quickly worked out a contract for those duties that was both fair to Serious Eats and helpful to Kenji in his quest to generate regular income as a freelancer.

There was one small problem. I had no one on staff to edit Kenji’s recipe posts. Those duties fell to Erin and the newest member of the tribe, Carey Jones. Carey had interned for us in the summer of 2006, when she was still in college. Carey is a terrific, prolific writer with a passion for cocktails, and a very precise line editor. However, neither had a lot of recipe editing experience. But Carey and Erin, always up for a challenge, threw themselves into editing Kenji’s recipe posts. Some heated moments ensued, but mutual respect allowed them to work out most of their differences.

The Serious Eats community embraced Kenji immediately. And so did everyone else at Serious Eats headquarters, including Carey and Erin. Kenji was headstrong and opinionated but a good and funny colleague. The tribe was coming together rather nicely.

Kenji turned out to be ridiculously prolific. He immediately started turning out multiple posts a week for Serious Eats in addition to all the other freelance gigs he had to take to earn a semblance of a New York living. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked him one day when he was at the office. “Four hours a night,” he replied with a chuckle. His wife, Adri, has since confirmed that he was not kidding.

Being married to a literary agent and having written a couple of books myself, I had a pretty good sense of what goes into a book worth writing and publishing. I immediately saw a Food Lab book in my head. In December of 2009 Kenji and I went out for another burger lunch at a now-defunct branch of Bill’s Bar & Burger in New York’s then-newly-fashionable Meatpacking District.

We sat down for lunch. Kenji knew the drill. I ordered for both of us: a modest four burgers, sweet potato and regular fries, Bill’s excellent onion rings, and a couple of malts. “See,” I told Kenji, “I can show some restraint when ordering if need be.”

I quickly turned the conversation to the matter at hand. “Kenji, you need to write a book, dude, a Food Lab book. My wife is a terrific agent and a big fan of your posts. You should talk to her and see what she thinks. If you like her, she can be your agent. And if you don’t like her, talk to other agents. You don’t have to go with her on my account.” Somehow I didn’t think paying him thirty dollars a post allowed me to dictate his choice of agent.

Vicky and Kenji got along famously. Kenji worked really hard on his book proposal for The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science—“the book that [geeky British celebrity chef] Heston Blumenthal would have written if instead of a multimillion dollar research lab and an infinite source of high-end ingredients, all he had was a home kitchen and a supermarket like the rest of us.”

He and I made a deal. I would license him the name “The Food Lab” for free for two books. And I would also grant him a gratis license to use some of the Food Lab’s content in his book. Serious Eats and I would not participate in any way financially in his book. Again, at thirty dollars a post I didn’t think it would be fair to do that, though my experience in a similar situation had been that old media would ask for either a licensing fee or equity participation in the book.

To me this was a win-win negotiation for all concerned. Kenji was growing my business exponentially in terms of audience for the princely sum of thirty dollars a post. As long as he continued to do that, he should be able to reap the full benefits of writing a book. It turned out to be the best deal either of us ever made, given what’s happened to both Kenji’s career and Serious Eats.

While Vicky was shopping the book to publishers, Kenji continued to write his posts for us as a freelancer and oversaw all our recipe posts as our recipe czar. Even all of that plus private-chef and catering gigs did not add up to a New York living. Adri, an equally brilliant fellow MIT grad, was in graduate school at NYU getting her doctorate in computer science, so it’s fair to say that money was really tight in the López-Alt household.

By the spring of 2010 Vicky was getting a lot of interest from cookbook editors all over town. They were all reading Serious Eats religiously by that time. It certainly looked like a smart and forward-thinking publisher would be making an offer for the Food Lab book.

One lovely late March morning Kenji emailed me and asked me to meet for coffee. I sat down. Kenji looked concerned. “Listen, Ed, somehow Chris Kimball got wind of my book proposal. He offered to pay me what he said was a fair advance and publish my book under the Cook’s Illustrated umbrella. Not only that, he also said he would put my name on the cover as the author. Chris said it would be the first time a name other than his would appear on the front cover of a Cook’s Illustrated book. Finally, he said he would publish any other books I wanted to write. But—and I know this is a big ‘but’ for both of us—he said that I could never write for Serious Eats again.”

Damn. Kenji had quickly become our most popular writer on Serious Eats, far eclipsing the rest of us. We really couldn’t afford to lose him, but then again I didn’t have the money to offer Kenji the full-time job with benefits he really needed. So I was in no position to make any other counteroffer than the promise of a bright future at Serious Eats once I did have the money to put him on staff.

I didn’t have any right to, but I took Chris’s completely legal and legitimate offer personally, as an attack on Serious Eats itself. I didn’t know Chris well, but we had spoken on a number of occasions. In fact, in one phone call he had professed to be a fan of Serious Eats.

I tried to smile as Kenji was telling me about Chris’s offer, but I’m sure he could see from my now-ashen face that I was crestfallen. I managed to quickly recover. “Look, Kenji, I understand why you’re thinking about taking Chris’s offer. Your wife’s in graduate school, you’re writing for me for thirty dollars a post plus your modest monthly stipend for being our recipe czar. Frankly, I don’t even know how you’re making ends meet at the moment. I wish I could offer you a full-time job right now, but I just don’t have the money to do that. I think I’ll have it within six months, but there’s no guarantee of that. I do think that in the end you’ll end up having a more fulfilling and remunerative career at Serious Eats, with the freedom to write whatever you want in your own voice. But I also know that it’s self-serving for me to think that. So if you decide to take Chris’s offer, I’ll totally understand.”

Kenji was clearly conflicted. “I understand what you’re saying, Ed. Let me think about this over the weekend and talk it over with Adri. I’ll let you know on Monday where I’m at.”

The weekend seemed endless. I went into catastrophe mode, trying to imagine Serious Eats without Kenji. Things would definitely be harder, but I consoled myself by telling myself that we had been growing and getting better without Kenji, and somehow we would figure out a way to keep doing both. I kept going over the numbers to see if I had the money to hire Kenji, but it just wasn’t there. And I kept trying to put myself in Kenji’s shoes. Chris had made him an incredibly compelling offer.

By the time I walked into my meeting at Ferrara with Kenji on Monday, I was prepared for the worst, convinced that Kenji was going to be leaving. Even before ordering, we got down to business. “Adri and I talked a lot about Chris’s offer, and though Adri, who’s in charge of money in our household, was certainly tempted by it, in the end we both decided that staying at Serious Eats is the best thing for me to do. I have a lot of faith in you and Vicky.”

Wow, wow, wow. I couldn’t believe my ears. I was blown away. I almost started to cry, but I caught myself just in time, dabbing my eyes for an imaginary speck of dust. “Obviously I am thrilled with your decision. We are going to kill it together. I’m going to try to find the money to hire you ASAP.”

I left the coffee shop still feeling stunned and jubilant. For Kenji to make that decision at that moment was not just courageous. It showed that he had enough faith in both Serious Eats and me to turn down what was clearly on its face a better offer. I also felt the added weight, the responsibility, of justifying Kenji’s confidence in me by delivering what I promised. I added Kenji and Adri to the growing list of people I had made promises to: Mike, Vicky, Bob, all the other investors. I couldn’t bear to think that I might let them all down in the end.

Later that spring Vicky secured an excellent offer from a legendary, now-retired cookbook editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, at W. W. Norton, one of the most prestigious publishing houses on the planet. More important for both Kenji and me, that offer was healthy enough to take a lot of the financial pressure off Kenji and Adri.

In August of 2010 I made good on my promise, which had been more of a wish and a prayer at the time. I hired Kenji full time. He went on to stay seven years as our recipe czar and culinary director. He wrote an email to everyone in the office when he was about to start: “Hey guys—just wanted to write to let you know how excited I am to be coming on board at Serious Eats. I told myself when I finished at Cook’s that I’d never work for ‘the man’ again. Somehow even after taking this job, I don’t feel like I’ve broken that promise (though to be honest, I’ll miss the vacation days that freelancing offers). I couldn’t wish for a brighter, smarter, more passionate hard-working, or downright fun group of people to work with. I’m really looking forward to it. See you in the office in September, and at my place for pizza on Sunday, 2 p.m.” Little by little, the Serious Eats tribe was growing in all the right ways.

With the guidance of Vicky and Maria, Kenji’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science became a runaway New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2015. Unsurprising, even though in typical Kenji fashion it ended up as a fifty-dollar, 910-page book. The Food Lab won both a James Beard Book Award and the IACP Cookbook of the Year Award in 2016.

When I brought Kenji on full time, I still hadn’t solved the riddle of how to make Serious Eats a self-sustaining, profitable business. But hiring Kenji and focusing on recipes brought me and Serious Eats into a business realm that could more easily scale without raising a lot more money. Or so I thought at the time. The success of Kenji and the Food Lab also bought me an even more valuable commodity: time. Why? Because potential investors saw original, innovative recipes that generated exponentially more traffic as a valuable commodity. Serious Eats and I could take a moment to breathe.