About two hours into the protest, a man and a woman came out of the restaurant and got into a heated exchange with protesters, with the man yelling an expletive at the crowd. Some protesters yelled to them, “Enjoy that exploitation” and “You have no backbone.” In response, the man said, “Prove it,” presumably referring to the accusations in the Times article.

According to three people who have worked at the restaurant, and who requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences, 10 staff members — nearly half of the total — resigned soon after that report was published; hundreds of reservations were canceled, and those customers’ deposits, usually in the realm of $500, were refunded with no comment.

Local businesses that made custom products for the Willows — Camber Coffee, Constant Crush winery and Wander Brewing — said they had immediately ended their collaborations.

Loganita Farm has long been the cornerstone of Mr. Wetzel’s claim that he cooked only with ingredients from Lummi Island. Though he often referred to Loganita as “our” farm, it has never been part of the Willows and is separately owned by Steve McMinn, a former Willows investor.

In a phone interview, Mr. McMinn said he sympathized with the former employees but considered the protest “a tempest in a teapot.” He said Loganita would continue to grow vegetables for the restaurant. “I like producing local ingredients and local jobs,” he said.

Mary von Krusenstiern, the head farmer, worked on the farm for nine years and has lived in the area her whole life. Although Loganita was not implicated in any of the sourcing allegations, she resigned a few days after the allegations were published.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/dining/willows-inn-protests-lummi-island.html

Scott Frankel’s favorite memories of New York gay restaurants aren’t about food.

Universal Grill cranked “Dancing Queen” on birthdays. There was that incredibly hot Italian waiter at Food Bar. Florent was around the corner from a notorious sex club in the meatpacking district. Manatus was so gay, it had a sobriquet: Mana-tush.

Gay restaurants, said Mr. Frankel, the Tony-nominated composer of the musical “Grey Gardens,” “made you feel like you belonged.”

But all those places he so fondly remembers are long closed, as are Harvest, Orbit’s and several others listed in an article, headlined “Restaurants That Roll Out the Welcome Mat for Gay Diners,” that ran in this newspaper 27 years ago. It now reads like an obituary.

Restaurants fold all the time, perhaps nowhere more so than in New York, and perhaps never as much as during the Covid era. The pandemic hit the country’s urban gay restaurants especially hard, said Justin Nelson, the president of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce. MeMe’s Diner, a popular queer restaurant in Brooklyn, permanently closed in November, citing shutdown measures and a lack of government support.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/dining/gay-restaurants.html

“I recognized early that Cindy was no joke,” Mr. Foreman said.

Georgia Brown’s was a hit, particularly with a racial cross-section of Washington’s political class, serving a menu of Southern staples like shrimp perloo and collard greens. It became part of a group of popular Washington restaurants, including Vidalia, Cashion’s Eat Place and Johnny’s Half Shell, where chefs with fine-dining backgrounds served variations on regional Southern food.

“Fine-dining restaurants were still mainly French and Italian back then,” Ms. Wolf said.

She and Mr. Foreman married, then moved to Baltimore, his hometown, in 1994. They opened Charleston three years later, just before Ms. Wolf received a diagnosis of late-stage breast cancer. The nine months of treatments — she emerged cancer-free — were an early testament to her unwavering commitment to the first restaurant she ever owned.

Mike Carson joined Charleston’s kitchen staff as Ms. Wolf was going through chemotherapy. “If you didn’t know — she lost her hair, but she wore a bandanna and all that — you wouldn’t know” she was sick, said Mr. Carson, who is now the chef and an owner of two restaurants in Pennsylvania. “She was working as much as possible.”

Ms. Wolf faced her second cancer diagnosis, in 2008, with the same combination of resolve and discretion. On a trip home to visit family, she didn’t tell her parents she was sick, partly because she didn’t want to deepen the still-lingering trauma of losing an older sister, Cathy, to leukemia, years earlier.

“My family was never able to deal with it,” she said. “My mother just shut down.”

Ms. Wolf weathers adversity, at least in part, by intensifying her focus on food. She and Mr. Foreman took a dining trip to France a month after she finished her first cancer treatments. The trip has become an annual tradition that includes some staff members. An outlier was 2010, the year of the couple’s divorce, when Ms. Wolf went to France four times, alone. “I needed to immerse myself in cooking,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/dining/chef-cindy-wolf-charleston-restaurant-baltimore.html

“I recognized early that Cindy was no joke,” Mr. Foreman said.

Georgia Brown’s was a hit, particularly with a racial cross-section of Washington’s political class, serving a menu of Southern staples like shrimp perloo and collard greens. It became part of a group of popular Washington restaurants, including Vidalia, Cashion’s Eat Place and Johnny’s Half Shell, where chefs with fine-dining backgrounds served variations on regional Southern food.

“Fine-dining restaurants were still mainly French and Italian back then,” Ms. Wolf said.

She and Mr. Foreman married, then moved to Baltimore, his hometown, in 1994. They opened Charleston three years later, just before Ms. Wolf received a diagnosis of late-stage breast cancer. The nine months of treatments — she emerged cancer-free — were an early testament to her unwavering commitment to the first restaurant she ever owned.

Mike Carson joined Charleston’s kitchen staff as Ms. Wolf was going through chemotherapy. “If you didn’t know — she lost her hair, but she wore a bandanna and all that — you wouldn’t know” she was sick, said Mr. Carson, who is now the chef and an owner of two restaurants in Pennsylvania. “She was working as much as possible.”

Ms. Wolf faced her second cancer diagnosis, in 2008, with the same combination of resolve and discretion. On a trip home to visit family, she didn’t tell her parents she was sick, partly because she didn’t want to deepen the still-lingering trauma of losing an older sister, Cathy, to leukemia, years earlier.

“My family was never able to deal with it,” she said. “My mother just shut down.”

Ms. Wolf weathers adversity, at least in part, by intensifying her focus on food. She and Mr. Foreman took a dining trip to France a month after she finished her first cancer treatments. The trip has become an annual tradition that includes some staff members. An outlier was 2010, the year of the couple’s divorce, when Ms. Wolf went to France four times, alone. “I needed to immerse myself in cooking,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/dining/chef-cindy-wolf-charleston-restaurant-baltimore.html

“There’s a supply and a demand. We just need to connect the two sides,” he wrote in a letter announcing the group, which he said would resemble Teach for America, the nonprofit that recruits graduates to teach in low-income schools.

“Our stated goal is to generate 100,000 U.S. jobs by 2025,” he wrote.

The idea drew widespread attention from the news media, including The Times, and donations poured in — mostly from big banks, including UBS and Barclays, as well as from Dan Gilbert, the head of Quicken Loans, and Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, the online shoe retailer.

In 2012, Venture for America selected its first class, 31 men and nine women.

The group trained them at a monthlong boot camp at Mr. Yang’s undergraduate alma mater, Brown University, and then helped them apply to work for two years as fellows at start-ups in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Providence, R.I.

The start-ups paid the fellows up to $38,000 a year, and gave $5,000 to the nonprofit. Many companies jumped at the chance to land top talent at a bargain rate. Venture for America encouraged fellows to come up with their own business ideas, offering to help them find funding.

Soon, Venture for America began recruiting much larger classes of fellows and expanding to more cities as Mr. Yang raised more money — and made increasingly large declarations about the success of the program.

While leading Venture for America, Mr. Yang ultimately told donors the organization had already created as many as 5,000 jobs. While running for president, when critics questioned the claims of success, he said it had created thousands of jobs.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/nyregion/andrew-yang-venture-for-america-jobs.html

Supporting small presses, which have strained to weather the industry’s fluctuations during the pandemic, can take the form of shopping from independent bookstores. These stores and presses often have relationships to each other, Ms. Hill said. “Independent bookstores support independent publishers. That’s a tight community,” she said. “The book industry is such a delicate ecosystem. Supporting independent bookstores keeps the ecosystem healthy.”

Some small publishers sell directly from their websites, including Melville House, Akashic Books and Future Tense Books.

Second choice: Barnes Noble is also a crucial part of the book retail ecosystem, Ms. Hill said, and a crucial outlet for writers and publishers. The key is to “spread it around,” Ms. McKean said. “If we only shop at one retailer, that’s bad for everybody.”

If you want the fastest delivery

It’s hard to beat Amazon on shipping speed. The retail giant offers free domestic shipping between five to eight days of ordering for all users and two-day shipping for Amazon prime members.

Second choice: Any order placed before noon on Bookshop.org will ship that same day, said Mr. Hunter.

If you want the lowest cost

Amazon also largely wins out on price. “Most indie bookstores will be transparent with the fact that oftentimes, we can’t compete with Amazon on prices,” said James Odum, communications director for The Strand bookstore in New York City.

Second choice: Barnes Noble also tends to offer significant discounts, especially online.

If you want the best selection

For readers seeking the largest possible range of reading options, Amazon features over three million books available online. Book recommendations are surfaced through both an algorithm customized to the individual user and through an updated list from Amazon book editors.

Second choice: “Independent bookstores can order nearly any book anyone wants,” said Mr. Graham. Beyond the breadth of selection, independent bookstores have the benefit of more curated selections, with individual booksellers advocating for their favorite books. “There’s really no algorithm equivalent to it,” said Amy Stephenson, a representative for the Booksmith in San Francisco.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/books/books-to-buy-price-selection-authors.html

When she was hired full-time, she said, Mr. Wetzel told her she was in line for a sous-chef position. (Many employees said they had heard the same promise, usually when they were on the verge of quitting.) But she said that after two years of watching younger men steadily being promoted ahead of her, and seeing other women chefs ignored, she resigned.

Mr. Wetzel said: “I support female chefs with all my heart (so much so that I married one). Anyone that would claim that I don’t support female chefs is lying.”

Many former employees said they put up with Mr. Wetzel’s offensive language, sexism and bullying, because a recommendation from him is a springboard to any cooking job in the world. But many others left midseason, or walked out midshift.

“There were countless times I tried to get upper management to bring in H.R. to deal with our problems,” said Anne Treat, 42, who was fired in September 2020 after confronting Mr. Wetzel. “There was no interest in why we were constantly losing employees.”

Going to Mr. Johnson, the longtime manager, was the only recourse for the many employees who clashed with Mr. Wetzel. But, they said, Mr. Johnson boasted about a “hands-off” management style that made it unnecessary for him to intervene, and never acted on complaints against Mr. Wetzel.

Mr. Johnson did not comment for this article, but Mr. Wetzel wrote, “Reid Johnson records, reports and acts on every complaint in the workplace in the appropriate manner.”

Mr. Wetzel added that the Willows has “an independent H.R. consultant available at all times,” but would not confirm when the person was hired. Employees said it was during the 2020 season, as the senior staff was resigning en masse and the Willows, like many workplaces, was forced to confront its institutional racism and other problems.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/dining/blaine-wetzel-willows-inn-lummi-island-abuse.html

American and European officials have been looking to rein in internet behemoths for years. But it is hard to imagine Western regulators bringing about a change in fortunes as significant as the one that has befallen Mr. Ma. Mr. Xi has asserted broad control over China’s private sector, demanding commitment to the party and to social stability above profits.

Xiao Jianhua, once a trusted financial lieutenant to many Chinese elites, was snatched from a luxury Hong Kong hotel in 2017. Ye Jianming, an oil tycoon who sought connections in Washington, was detained, as was Wu Xiaohui, whose insurance company bought the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. Mr. Wu later went to prison. Lai Xiaomin, the former chairman of a financial firm, was executed this year.

“The general iron rule is that there should be no individual centers of power outside of the party,” said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute and author of “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers.”

Beijing’s clampdown on tech is already rippling through boardrooms beyond Alibaba’s.

Ant Group’s chief executive, Simon Hu, resigned in March. A few days later, Colin Huang stepped down as chairman of Pinduoduo, the mobile bazaar he founded and took public within a few short years. Pinduoduo announced his resignation the same day it said it had attracted 788 million shoppers over the previous 12 months — a bigger number than Alibaba.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/technology/jack-ma-alibaba-tycoons.html

Brian Tran, a co-owner of Honeybear Boba in San Francisco, said he had also been searching desperately for more tapioca. He expects to run out by the end of next week if he cannot replenish his supply.

“A boba shop without boba is like a car dealership without cars to sell,” Mr. Tran said. “It’s like a steakhouse without steak.”

Boba Guys, one of the most successful boba chains in the country, said in an Instagram post this month that some boba shops had already run out of tapioca balls and that others would follow in the next few weeks. The owners of Boba Guys also operate the U.S. Boba Company, which produces and sells tapioca pearls to other stores around the country.

The boba shortage, which was reported earlier by The San Francisco Chronicle, has boba fans in a panic. A post sharing the news in the Facebook group Subtle Asian Traits, a gathering place for Asian people around the world, attracted 10,000 comments and messages of dismay and sadness.

Boba is “something that translates across a lot of Asian cultures,” said Zoe Imansjah, a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an administrator of the Subtle Asian Traits group. “Something so simple can bring a lot of people together.”

Ms. Yuen, 21, gets boba once or twice a week and sells boba stickers online. She said she had grown up visiting a boba shop near her house in South San Francisco with her parents, and now considers getting boba a great way to socialize with friends.

“A lot of my Asian-American friends will bond over boba,” said Ms. Yuen, whose family is from Hong Kong. “Hong Kong has a lot of good milk tea. It brings us back to our roots, in a sense.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/business/boba-shortage.html

Foreign brands are far from done in China. Its drivers helped power a jump in Tesla deliveries. IPhones remain immensely popular. Campaigns against foreign names have come and gone, and local brands that emphasize politics too much risk unwanted attention if the political winds shift quickly.

Still, interest in local brands marks a significant shift. Post-Mao, the country made few consumer products. The first televisions that most families owned in the 1980s were from Japan. Pierre Cardin, the French designer, reintroduced fashion with his first show in Beijing in 1979, bringing color and flair to a nation that during the Cultural Revolution wore blue and gray.

Chinese people born in the 1970s or earlier remember their first sip of Coco-Cola and their first bite of a Big Mac. We watched films from Hollywood, Japan and Hong Kong as much for the wardrobes and makeup as the plot. We rushed to buy Head Shoulders shampoo because its Chinese name, Haifeisi, means “sea flying hair.”

“We’ve gone through the European and American fad, the Japanese and Korean fad, the American streetwear fad, even the Hong Kong and Taiwan fad,” said Xun Shaohua, who founded a Shanghai sportswear company that competes with Vans and Converse.

Now could be the time for the China fad. Chinese companies are making better products. China’s Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2009, doesn’t have the same attachment to foreign names.

Even People’s Daily, the traditionally staid Communist Party official newspaper, is getting into branding. It started a streetwear collection with Li-Ning in 2019. That same year, it issued a report with Baidu, the Chinese search company, called “Guochao Pride Big Data.” They found that when people in China searched for brands, more than two-thirds were looking for domestic names, up from only about one-third 10 years earlier.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/business/china-xinjiang-boycott-heytea-nio.html