But London’s food scene success isn’t quite that cut-and-dried. Landlord greed has added steeply rising rents to restaurants’ costs of maintaining Michelin-star expectations. Successive governments have kept Value Added Tax at 20%. Brexit and the resulting immigration laws have squeezed out the global labour pool previously depended upon to staff front-of-house and kitchens, adding to the problems caused by rising food import costs and ever-increasing energy bills.

High-volume chains and mid-tier establishments struggle, and a number of good independents have had to close for lunch to stay afloat. Yet try and get a reservation in any restaurant - high end, ethnic, or neighbourhood – which has featured on Instagram, and unless you’re a free-loading, promo-promising influencer or a celeb with a ‘name’, you’ll have to book weeks if not months ahead. More often than not, you’ll be eating in a minimally but expensively designed room where you’ll have to shout to be heard above the shrieks of laughter from the tables on either side of you only inches from your elbow, and a carefully curated playlist loud enough for a nightclub dance floor.

The average age of most diners in any such on-trend restos is well under forty. It’s a sector of society that can’t ever expect to have a house or an apartment of their own unless funded by the bank of Mummy and Daddy, so instead spends its earnings in desirable public spaces because to save hard-earned money makes little sense. London property prices may trail Hong Kong and Zurich but they are more expensive by far than New York, Paris, and Amsterdam. London’s salaried young are eating out not less often but more, seeking to be part of the community, to make some kind of post-pandemic connection. Before Covid, a three-course dinner at an average mid-range London restaurant (not ethnic which are always cheaper) cost around £40 without drinks and service. Now it clocks in at between £50 and £90 before drinks and service (a standard 12%). But young diners willingly pay a premium for dishes they haven’t even chosen themselves but which have been curated for them on tasting menus that once were the province of high end restaurants only.

Despite closures continuing in the middle and lower-price market, dozens of new restaurants open in London each month, with between 220 and 250 each year since Covid. The bulk of successful fixtures have been at the upscale end, many of them in Mayfair. Luxury fine dining drives their success, despite the economic and staffing challenges. London holds 88.

Michelin stars. Renowned chef Jason Atherton of Soho’s Bocca di Lupo has opened Row on 5 on Savile Row. On St George Street, wood-fired Igni, helmed by Theo Clench previously of Shoreditch’s Michelin-starred Cycene (olde English for ‘kitchen’) serves up a seafood tasting menu. The former Gavroche site on Upper Brook Street has been taken over by Bonheur, where chef Matt Abé has already garnered two Michelin stars. Elite restaurants such as these can charge £150 or more a head at dinner.

At the affordable end of a night out, in the first quarter of 2026, two pubs a day across the UK closed, with the loss of 2,400 jobs. Since 2000, 16,000 have shut their doors. Yet across London (and in major UK cities) in neighbourhoods where rents are lower, success has come to those which have transformed themselves into gastropubs, with kitchens celebrated for high quality food at reasonably affordable prices whose lower checks to the diner are partly helped by ordering good draft beer instead of wine. In Soho, The Devonshire and Upstairs at the French House are notoriously hard to get into. The Harwood Arms in Fulham, southwest London, is Michelin-starred. Not all serve contemporary versions of traditional British comfort food. The Tamil Prince in Barnsbury, North London, is celebrated for its South Asian cooking; Richmond’s The Red Cow is revered for its authentic Cambodian menu. Eat at Hammersmith’s modest The Salutation and most of the unpretentious pub’s other dinners relishing its Thai dishes are South East Asian.

Despite the challenges, with diners still enthusiastic about eating out at the higher end of the cost spectrum, restaurateurs who focus on responsible sourcing of seasonal food and who provide chef-led innovative or immersive experiences are likely to survive the volatility of the London restaurant scene.

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An appeals court is keeping intact a federal judge’s ruling requiring the Kennedy Center to remove President Donald Trump’s name from its building by the end of Friday.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a last-minute effort by the center to freeze the judge’s ruling so that it wouldn’t need to comply while more court proceedings play out.CNN

Both claims are now in the Congressional Record. That contradiction is the whole story, and it is worth three minutes of your evening.

The thing they cut

The bill is H.R. 8646, the agriculture and FDA spending measure for the coming year. It funds farm research, food-safety inspectors, rural broadband, and the whole pantry. Inside it sits WIC, the program for Women, Infants, and Children, and inside WIC sits a small, flexible voucher that does exactly one job: it buys produce. Apples. Carrots. The bag of grapes a toddler will eat in one sitting.

In 2021, on the recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, that voucher was raised, because researchers looked at what a small child actually needs and found the old amount wanting. Thursday’s bill walks most of that back — a cut of roughly 10 percent. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities puts the damage at $141 million in produce benefits, stripped from nearly 5.4 million participants. Of every line in a $26 billion bill, the one the majority reached for was the fruit.

The slogan stamped on this administration’s health agenda is Make America Healthy Again. The vote on Thursday was to make it healthy again with less spinach.

What the floor sounded like

Here is where it gets strange. Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the agriculture subcommittee, rose to defend the bill and told the chamber, in plain words, “No woman or their children will lose or be denied coverage.” His reasoning: WIC enrollment has dipped from its pandemic high, the program is sitting on carryover funds, and $8 billion will therefore stretch to cover everyone who walks in the door. Tom Cole, the full-committee chairman, framed the whole package in the key of national strength — “when American agriculture is strong, America is strong.” Fiscal discipline in a season of two trillion-dollar deficits. A bill, in Harris’s telling, that takes nothing from anyone.

Rosa DeLauro, the Connecticut Democrat who runs point for the minority on Appropriations, did the arithmetic differently. The bill funds WIC at $200 million below the current year. It does not fully fund the produce voucher. And the participation argument, she has said repeatedly, is a magic trick: enrollment ran only about 1.2 percent below last year through February — during a 43-day government shutdown that scrambled everything — while the administration’s own budget projects 7.2 million participants in 2027, well above today. Cut the money against a rising line of need, and someone, eventually, gets turned away. Her sharpest cut was aimed straight at the slogan: denying women and children fruits and vegetables, she said, is “hardly a way to make America healthy again.”

So which is it? Does the bill take nothing, or does it take produce from five million kids? They cannot both be true, and the gap between them is the entire fight.

The fine print nobody chants about

There is a quieter casualty. A pandemic-era waiver lets families enroll and recertify for WIC remotely, by phone and video, without taking a morning off work and dragging a four-year-old across a rural county to a clinic. That waiver expires September 30. The bill did not extend it. Even if you accept every word of the majority’s funding math, a working mother in a county with no nearby clinic now has one more reason to give up before she starts. Nutrition policy, it turns out, is also transportation policy.

The part that should hold your attention

We are, as a country, exhausting on the subject of vegetables. We put them on cereal boxes, on the sides of buses, in the mouth of every official who has ever stood near the word wellness. We built a slogan around it. And then, on a Thursday night, with grocery prices climbing in every aisle, the House voted to make produce a little harder to reach for the families with the least margin to begin with.

It was close. Four Democrats crossed over to vote yes; five Republicans broke ranks to vote no. Three votes the other way, and the produce stays. The Senate, whose own version of this bill leaves the voucher intact, takes it up next, which means none of this is settled and all of it is still arguable.

But the shape of the argument is already clear, and it is not really about money. It is about whether a child whose mother is doing every single thing the program asks of her gets to eat the one food every doctor in America agrees she should.

The Senate gets it next. Somewhere tonight, a toddler is waiting for an apple.

The American Table covers food, politics, and the table where the two meet. Vote, floor remarks, and funding figures from House floor action on H.R. 8646, June 4, 2026; participant and benefit estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the offices of the House Appropriations Committee.

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Two years before the first Covid outbreak in 2019, I began volunteering at The Felix Project. Based in London, it collects high-quality surplus food from suppliers and farms, and also from supermarkets where, as it approaches its Best Before date, it is rejected by privileged shoppers. The still-nutritious food is then redistributed to charities, community organizations, primary schools, and vulnerable individuals.

Back then, for fund-raising purposes, we would quote the statistic that we were moving enough food to create 6 million meals a year, from ingredients that would otherwise go to landfills where it rots and releases methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

Just 9 years later, The Felix Project creates and redistributes the equivalent of 44 million meals a year, to more than 1200 organizations. Yet it only serves Greater London, an area with a population of just over 9 million. You do the math.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. Successive British governments have abandoned social services and those people, many of whom hold down more than one job in order to feed their families, to the care of the charity sector.

And the situation is about to get worse.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 20 to 45 percent of agricultural and food production depends on free access through the Strait of Hormuz sea passage. If the conflict in the Middle East lasts beyond June 2026, it calculates around 45 million people will be added to the 318 million individuals already suffering acute food insecurity. Include diminishing supplies and the effects of climate change on farmers’ yields, and soaring food prices globally are on their way. “The good old days are gone,” says Christopher Tang, a professor of global supply chain management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “When the prices go up, they rarely come back down.”

Few would disagree that the world produces more than enough food to feed its entire population. The crisis of global hunger is not driven by agricultural output but by inequalities in its distribution, along with local conflicts and the extreme poverty caused by them, and by climate change.

Meanwhile, shoppers in my high-end supermarket complain when supplies of out-of-season strawberries, asparagus and other exotic produce have run out. They turn a blind eye to stories of fish farms contaminating the sea bed with faeces and the fish with the antibiotics necessary to keep healthy the hundreds of fish kept crammed into pens unable to swim. They quickly swipe left past photographs of cattle chained over metal troughs standing packed tightly together on concrete flooring in miles of feedlot.

Arguments that we should stop eating red meat not only don’t go down well, they are not necessary. Intensively farmed beef is inevitably significantly cheaper than pasture-fed beef, as is farmed fish cheaper than line-caught. But hormone- and antibiotic-free meat and fish would be so much less challenging to our own health. Treating a steak as a treat and expecting one less often would demonstrate we are a responsible and concerned part of a society that is global, not just a self-serving one existing in the space between our refrigerators and our front doors.

If we were to become more curious about how what we eat is produced for our benefit, we might decide to take effective steps to protect the welfare of those creatures we eat. We might fight against the use of fertilizers applied to produce to encourage abundant crops and which deplete the health of the soil and are so dangerous to our bodies. We might vote for policies that would spread the share and excess of what we grow broadly enough to reach those who desperately need it.

There will always be those who point out that relying on surplus food to feed the hungry is no more than a band-aid solution that distracts local governments from solving the structural causes of poverty and inequality. Meanwhile, in our own developed world, huge swathes of society struggling to put food on the table have no choice but to turn to the processed products that the industrial food complex sells cheaply to fill empty stomachs with empty calories and low nutrition. What an accumulation over years of such food will do to our health will be reflected in the soaring costs of medical services. But perhaps western governments are also unmoved by inequality and the plight of the poor in our own societies.

Legumes and pulses are excellent protein alternatives to meat and fish, providing fiber and less fat. In Southeast Asian cuisine, meat is used sparingly, only as a flavoring. In the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the wider Middle East, cultures that were successfully in existence long before modern processing techniques were invented, meals depend more on legumes and pulses than they do on meat and fish. If we adopted more of their cuisines, we might become healthier, our animals more content, and we could even succeed in feeding the whole world.

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Everywhere you turned in London this week, there were Americans. Not tourists. Americans who came and stayed — working in its restaurants, pouring its wine, redistributing its food, writing about its tables. A quiet migration that doesn’t make the wealth pages but says something true about where we are right now.

Marylebone. 8 am.

The high street before the city gets loud. Jammy eggs, espresso, a café that doesn’t try too hard. The morning happening through the window — deliveries, school runs, a woman walking a dog the size of a coffee table.

Back-to-back meetings from nine. Americans living in London. London money looking at Washington. People who move between both cities the way other people move between zip codes.

Somewhere in the night, Somerville — the film about the Grove family’s Virginia farm, four generations on the same land since 1914 — had been nominated for two Capitol Emmy Awards. Societal Concerns, Long Form Content. Audio Recording.

The news came at three in the morning—some things you carry quietly through the day.

St. Alban’s, Kensington. Before Lunch.

A candle lit in a quiet church before the afternoon began.

Not everything worth noting makes it into a newsletter. Some things are just between you and whatever you believe in. The Emmy news. The Groves. Bobby’s handshake after the private screening last fall. A film about people who stayed when leaving would have been easier.

Gratitude has to go somewhere. A candlelit church in Kensington is as good a place as any.

On The Felix Project

Before the trip, Julia Watson had been talking about this at length.

The Felix Project — London’s largest food redistribution charity, founded in 2016 by Justin Byam Shaw in memory of his teenage son Felix, who died suddenly from meningitis. The project rescues surplus food from supermarkets, restaurants, and farms and delivers it free to over 1,200 charities and schools across the city. Felix’s Kitchen in Poplar turns donated produce into roughly 4,000 ready meals a day. Last year: 38 million meals.

A father’s grief turned into something that feeds people. That’s the whole story.

Julia is doing work that matters in London. She won’t be the last one mentioned here.

The UK’s sugar tax — in place since 2018 — has cut sugar in beverages by 44 percent. Not by asking nicely. By making the industry reformulate or pay. The menus across this city have followed. What a society decides to pay attention to shows up eventually on the plate. London figured that out.

Lunch at The Ivy

Lunch with Alex, who runs Sotheby’s UK. Old friends, no agenda required.

The Ivy at noon is a civic event. Amber lights, arched windows, the bar occupied before most people have finished their coffee. Old money and new money and money you can’t quite place, all eating together with the ease of people who’ve decided this is where they belong.

The conversation covered the market, London, Washington. A lot of ground without arriving at any particular conclusion. That’s the best kind.

West Hampstead. Late Afternoon.

A friend named Cathy — her flat in West Hampstead, and one stop first.

Her favorite butcher in the neighborhood. The kind of shop that still knows its customers by name, still cuts to order, still treats the work as something worth doing carefully. Twenty minutes at the counter just talking about what was good this week. London runs on these places. The restaurants get the attention. The high streets do the actual work.

Then wine at Tannin and Oak. A wine bar on the high street, unhurried, the kind of room that rewards staying longer than you planned. The wine steward was from New York. She’d been in London long enough to know the list cold and recommend without hesitation. Another American who found something here worth staying for.

Evening. The Ned.

Back to the bar. Midland Bank once — Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1924. Arched windows two stories up, brass fittings, a hundred years of transactions in the walls.

Campari. Ice. Orange. Soda water on the side.

Through the window the Underground roundel glowing red. London telling you it’s still here. Still running.

A full day. Good meetings. A church in Kensington. Lunch with a friend. A butcher in West Hampstead. Wine poured by a New Yorker who stayed. Two Emmy nominations carried quietly since three in the morning.

The bartender didn’t ask questions. London lets you have your moment.

Dinner at St. John

Twenty years of coming back to this room.

Fergus Henderson opened it in 1994 with a philosophy that was radical then and obvious now — nose to tail, nothing wasted, the whole animal respected. The menu printed fresh every day. Wednesday 13th May 2026. The pig on the masthead never changes.

The server was Michael. From DC.

He brought the Roe and Radishes without ceremony and checked back once. That’s the St. John way — the room doesn’t perform, the food doesn’t explain itself, the service doesn’t intrude. Michael understood this perfectly. He’d learned it here, in this room, in this city, three thousand miles from home.

The Lancashire Cheese was on the menu. Ordered without hesitation.

It was late when the night ended. The city quiet in the way London gets quiet — not empty, just settled. The Groves on the mind. A film nominated for two Emmys while dinner was being eaten three thousand miles from Virginia. Michael clearing the next table. A long way from DC. Right where he needed to be.

Some things take twenty years. Some things happen overnight. Both are true at the same time.

Breakfast at The Wolseley. Friday Morning.

Josh Spero of the Financial Times is across the table.

The Wolseley is the right room for this conversation — grand, unhurried, the kind of place that takes breakfast seriously. Wealth migration was on the table. Journalism. Americans in London. Opera and the arts. The particular question of what brings people across the Atlantic and what keeps them here.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t simple. It never is.

Some come for the property. Some come for the work. Some come for a posting and discover they’ve stopped counting the years. Julia writing about food in a city she now knows better than the one she left. A New Yorker pouring wine in West Hampstead on a Wednesday afternoon. Michael from DC bringing the Roe and Radishes at St. John like he was born to it.

London in 2026 is absorbing a quiet but significant American presence. Not all of it shows up in the wealth migration numbers. Some of it shows up in who’s working the room, pouring the glass, redistributing the food.

The American Table has been watching this from both sides of the conversation for nearly a decade.

That’s why this trip matters. That’s why this letter exists.

The scrambled eggs and toast were the best on the planet. That’s not a throwaway line. That’s a fact about that room. The coffee was excellent. The company was better.

The American Table covers food, politics, and culture from Washington and beyond. This dispatch was filed from London.

• One Hyde Park

• The Felix Project

• Julia Watson — Tabled

• The Ivy

• Tannin and Oak

• The Ned

• St. John

• The Wolseley

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— Societal Concerns, Long Form Content

— Audio Recording

This is the Groves’ story before it’s anything else. The nominations are theirs.

The film follows the Grove family — four generations on the same Virginia land since 1914 — and what it takes to keep a farm like that going now.

It premiered at WorldFest-Houston in April. Produced by Inertia Films.

In August, chef Hamilton Johnson will mark the two-year anniversary of Mallard, his homey Southern restaurant with an unlikely Nordic twist. And he is just a teeny bit anxious.

After all, Honeysuckle, Johnson’s first Washington venture, lasted little more than two years before he reluctantly pulled the plug. “It was in a basement and there was not enough traffic. It was like a death, devastating, and you think, ‘this was my restaurant, and it wasn’t good enough for people.’”

Honeysuckle had replaced the long-running Vidalia, DC’s high-end temple of modern Southern cuisine, founded by Jeffrey Buben, who won the 1999 James Beard award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic, and Sallie Buben, his wife and business partner. Johnson’s first job in Washington was at Vidalia, starting as a line cook and rising to chef de cuisine over eight years

“Hamilton wanted to become a leader and be able to practice his craft,” says Buben. “I was a little bit of a mentor, a father figure to him.”

When the Bubens declined to renew their lease, Johnson, now 44, grabbed the chance to be his own boss. He had Honeysuckle’s walls painted a screaming sexy red, hung photos of rock stars, then waited in vain for enough patrons to keep the lights on.

“It was an odd time in Washington in terms of where the puck was moving the energy of the city,” says Buben, 67. “You had the expansion of some of the largest restaurants in DC history. Downtown business lunch was winding down, shifting to The Wharf and City Center. At that time, it was very difficult for an owner-operator downtown,” but easier for a neighborhood small-concept, like the Michelin-starred Dabney in Shaw’s Blagden Alley, and Ris, in West End.

A heartbroken Johnson went home to tiny Inman, S.C., where he says he stayed drunk for quite some time while trying to get his life in order. He returned to Washington and worked at several restaurants but in late 2021, went back to Inman to help his widowed father, a retired textile worker and gifted duck decoy carver, who was battling pancreatic cancer. Two days after Mick Johnson’s final treatment, he died of Covid.

Hamilton Johnson came north once again, this time cooking at several spots around town, including chef Matt Baker’s Michelin-starred Gravitas. In 2024, he became a Neighborhood Restaurant Group partner and chef at the old Birch and Barley, which he renamed Mallard, in honor of his father. Nearly everything on the walls and shelves came out of his childhood home, including nature paintings by his late mother, Carolyn Fowler Johnson, who fulfilled her wish to live long enough to attend his 2003 Johnson and Wales University graduation in Charleston.

In her honor, his first tattoo were her monogram. Today, the six-foot-three Johnson estimates that 80 percent of his 280-pound corpus is tattooed head to foot. “I just really enjoy them. They make me happy.” The largest, most elaborate, and doubtless most painful, is the multi-hued face of Jesus, which occupies the whole of his massive back. (Full disclosure: Johnson is the first interview subject I have ever asked to semi-strip, so I could inspect the waist-up artwork.) There might have been more ink had Johnson not dropped 160 pounds through rigorous workouts, healthy eating and nearly three years of sobriety.

“It’s hard to be a dieting chef because you have to taste everything, right?” he asks with a smile. When preparing a large duck breast for a TV show--first seared in its own grease, then in added butter—he explains simply, “The more fat, the more flavor.”

Over the past 21 months, Johnson has made Mallard his personal sanctuary, and like the body art, its cozy decor evokes memory, loss and hope. “It’s like having my Dad and my Mom here,” he says softly.

But once in the kitchen, Chef--aka Ham or Hambone--is pure beast, as befits a man who honed his craft at Vidalia, Michelin-starred Gravitas and Charleston’s Maverick Southern Kitchens.

In the heart of the eatery-laden Logan Circle neighborhood, Mallard patrons tuck into Sea Island pea dip with duck fat saltines; shrimp and grits laced with pork, ham, scallions and sweet, heat-less Piquillo peppers. Think Chesapeake fried oysters atop creamy deviled-egg aioli, and a chicken-fried confit duck leg encased in a crust so hard it shatters audibly to reveal tender rich dark meat. Dessert, y’all? The Coffee and Cigarettes is a decadent mélange of espresso ice cream, cocoa crusted espresso beans, tobacco caramel, chocolate mousse, macadamia praline, and smoked olive oil, served in a vintage glass ashtray. It’s a tossup whether first to call the dentist, cardiologist or Ozempic prescriber.

Johnson’s love of Nordic food began 13 years ago, when he entered the first of seven Friends and Fun competitions in Finland and Iceland. Last month, Mallard hosted a Taste of Iceland pop-up with Chef Daníel Cochran Jónsson of Reykjavik’s Sushi Social. Three sold-out dinners included arctic char crudo, poached cod loin, grilled lamb fillet and berries with skyr, a tangy Icelandic yogurt-y cheese.

The Southern and Low Country traditions, however, are in Johnson’s DNA. “I grew up in a household where everything was centered around food. My mom was the kind of cook who got recipes from the New York Times and out of books, and always tried new things, whereas my dad was very rustic. For him it was the recipes his mom taught him. I was always around both of those worlds.” To this day, Johnson’s favorite meals draw on the countless variations of his father’s “breakfast for dinner” specialties.

In August, perhaps to celebrate Mallard’s second anniversary, he and Buben will host a Mid-Atlantic Coastal seafood dinner. “Hamilton’s roots are cooking from Charleston and the Low Country, me from Eastern North Carolina and the Outer Banks,” says Buben, who last year joined his protege at Mallard to prepare Vidalia’s greatest hits. In 2024, he and Sallie closed Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill and moved south, where he now helps his son, CIA-trained chef Mac Buben, run a large, casual seafood restaurant in Nags Head, N.C.

But even amidst the sold-out pop-up events, crowded brunches and dinners, something still niggles. “It’s always going to be in the back of my head here. What if this fails? What if Mallard doesn’t make it?”

Annie Groer was a Washington Post staff writer and columnist whose work has also appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, New Republic, and other print, digital, and broadcast outlets. She twice represented DC in the National Chicken Cooking Contest.

Upgrade to paid. Cartoons, columns, and satire in the tradition of the greats — only for PAID subscribers.

The American Table is proud to welcome Jeremy Nguyen as our first contributing cartoonist. His single-panel cartoon will be a regular feature of the publication — arriving at the intersection of food, politics, and the American table we all share.

Jeremy Nguyen is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 2017. His single-panel cartoons have earned him a devoted following for their sharp wit, precise observation, and the rare ability to make complex ideas land in a single image. Beyond The New Yorker, his work has appeared in Wired, Airmail Weekly, and The Atlantic, and he has created original cartoon campaigns for HBO’s The White Lotus and Netflix’s The Chair. His illustrations have been published by Penguin Random House and recognized by the Society of Illustrators. He is the author of Can I Pet Your Dog?

While the cameras are in the ballroom, we’ve been working on something new for The American Table. It launches tomorrow morning at 6am — and the timing, I promise you, is not a coincidence.

We’ve brought in a remarkable talent. More on that tomorrow.

See you at the table.

The American Table

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Juleanna Glover stands at the nexus of social and political Washington. As one of the city’s best-known conveners, she’s been a fixture at events around the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which during her 33 years working in Washington has evolved from a dinner to a weeklong cavalcade of networking, influence and money-making leavened by the occasional toast to a free press.

But this year, with the annual festivities back to their familiar frenetic pace, amidst a degree of back-to-normal excitement beyond anything in years, Glover is experiencing a distinctly unfamiliar feeling: Dread.

It has nothing to do with the virus or the war in Ukraine or even the superficiality that critics of the dinner have long denounced. Over the last few months, Glover has actually thrown book parties, hosted events, and otherwise gathered with the Washington village. Instead, it’s about politics itself and the whole idea that official Washington can get together and pretend that nothing’s changed.

Continue reading at Politico →Michael Schaffer is a senior editor at POLITICO. His Capital City column runs weekly in POLITICO Magazine.

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It discovered Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Ang Lee, Ridley Scott, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, and hundreds more — awarding them their first recognition before anyone outside a small circle knew their names.

Somerville has just been nominated there! That is the news. But the meaning of it runs a little deeper.

You don't have to wait for a screening. You can watch it right now. Paid subscribers to The American Table have access to the film today. One click. No film festival credential required.

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A festival that finds things first

WorldFest has a specific institutional gift: it sees work before the consensus does. Their own description of it is simple — “the winners this year will be the Spielbergs of tomorrow.” That’s not marketing. That’s a 65-year track record.

The award given is called the Remi, named after Frederic Remington, the painter and sculptor who documented the American West as it was disappearing. Somerville is doing the same work. Different terrain. Same urgency.

Somerville follows the Grove family farm in rural Virginia — 150 years of land, now under pressure from Dominion Energy, data center sprawl moving out from Northern Virginia, USPS cuts, and broadband gaps that leave rural communities competing at a structural disadvantage.

The film doesn’t take sides. It pays attention. It asks what it means — as a country — to let places like this go without noticing.

This is the moment to get on board

Rural America is chronically undercovered. When it gets attention, it tends toward exploitation or condescension. Somerville is neither. It is the view from inside, made by someone who has spent years earning the trust required to tell it honestly.

A nomination from a festival that has been right about independent film for six decades is a curatorial signal: this story belongs in the conversation.

The book is in development. The screenings are coming. The story isn’t finished — because the pressures on Somerville aren’t finished.

But a field in rural Virginia is now being seen by a festival that has seen some of the most consequential independent films ever made.

Become a paid subscriber. Watch the film. Be part of what comes next.

— Jim Bell is the publisher of The American Table and an Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker.

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In America, Sunday roast chicken is the closest thing we have to a collective deep breath — and this Sunday, the country needs one. By the time most of us reached for our phones this morning, history had already moved. I remember being a kid, watching the hostage crisis play out on the evening news, my parents quiet in a way that told you something was very wrong with the world. Fifty-two Americans were held in Tehran while President Carter aged in front of the country. That was the moment Iran became something dark and permanent in the American psyche — a wound that never quite closed, a grievance that outlasted presidencies, wars, and decades of uneasy standoffs. This morning, a chapter closed. The world shifted overnight, the way it sometimes does, without asking permission. And yet here we are, standing in our kitchens, pulling a bird from the refrigerator, turning on the oven. There is something stubbornly, beautifully American about that. Sunday dinner has always been the meal that holds its ground — the most deliberate, most human hour of the week, the moment families gathered after church or work to mark time and take stock of one another. Roast chicken, in particular, has become shorthand for comfort and continuity, the meal people reach for when the ground shifts beneath them, but they’re still hungry for connection. On a morning when the headlines are electric, and the world feels both more dangerous and more hopeful at once, putting a bird in the oven is not denial. It is a declaration. The table still has to be set.

Recipe:

Active prep time: 15 minutes

Cooking time: 1 Hour

My Recipe:

1 Whole Chicken

1 Medium Yellow Onion

3/4 Medium Potatoes - Waxy like Yukon Gold

1 Clove of Crushed Garlic

Fresh Rosemary

1/4 Cup Olive Oil

Sea Salt and Fresh Ground Pepper to taste

Directions:

Pre Heat oven to 400’ F

Using a mandolin ( Be Careful!), thinly slice the onion. Place the slices with half of the olive oil in a Dutch Oven and saute over medium heat for 5 minutes.

Using a mandolin ( Be Careful!), slice the potatoes and place them on the onions. Remove from heat.

Add Rosemary and crushed garlic to the top of the potatoes

Coat the chicken with the remaining olive oil and add salt and pepper to taste. Place the chicken on top of the potatoes.

Add lid and cook the chicken in the 400’ oven for 40 minutes

Remove the lid after 40 minutes- continue cooking chicken for an additional 20 minutes, uncovered until golden brown. Total cooking time is 60 minutes, 1 hour.

Remove and let stand, uncovered for 15 min to cool

Serve!

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As temperatures plunge across the region, the Grove family of Somerville has announced the birth of sixteen healthy calves this week. Despite freezing conditions and ongoing political chill from Washington, America’s farmers continue their work seven days a week.

“We have babies!” might be the headline of the week — or perhaps, “Spring Has Come Early.” Either way, the heartland keeps moving forward.

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Like so many others, The Washington Post shaped the way I understood Washington itself. When I arrived in this city years ago, it was The Post that helped define its rhythm — the tension between power and principle, politics and people. The Sunday edition was a ritual. It didn’t pander or shout; it made you think. You could feel the integrity in its reporting, and the courage in its choice of what to print, no matter who it might unsettle.

I can’t help but wonder what happens to a democracy when institutions like The Post are forced to contract. Who tells the stories that still need to be told when newsroom lights go dark? We’ve reached a moment where economic models have overtaken editorial missions, where the quiet diligence of journalism struggles to survive the noise of content.

To the journalists packing up their desks tonight: your work has mattered. It still does. You’ve been the chroniclers of our history and the keepers of our collective accountability. The Post’s legacy isn’t diminished by this moment — it’s made even more vital.

And to the leadership in media — and I say this with deep respect — let’s remember that journalism isn’t just a business model. It’s a public trust. It’s the mirror in which a free society sees itself clearly, even when it doesn’t like the reflection.

There is still time to protect that mission. But only if we choose, collectively, to value truth over traffic and craft over clicks.

— James Bell

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Ingredients

3 pounds of Chuck Roast

Garlic slices

4 sprigs of Rosemary

1 and 1/2 pounds of small white potatoes

1 can (28 oz)  of whole Tomatoes

1 large Onion

Salt and Pepper

Olive oil

Directions

Make little slits in the pot roast and insert the garlic slices.  Salt and Pepper the roast.  Brown the roast in the olive oil.   Place in Dutch Oven.  I use my Le Creuset blue pot.

Add 1 and 1/2 pounds of small white potatoes.  Add 1 whole can (28 oz)  of whole tomatoes with the liquid. Break up the tomatoes with your hands.   Cut one large onion (at least 1 and 1/2 pounds) into wedges.  Mix in with tomatoes and potatoes.  Place 3 or 4 sprigs of Rosemary on top.  Cover.

Bake at 300 degrees for 3 hours.

Serve with romaine and radish salad.  

From Donna Hays

As I walked into Tosca on a recent visit, I was seated next to a person who, in a political and moral sense, represented everything I opposed. This person was the antithesis of my views, but here we were, breaking bread together. That's what makes this place work.

Strategically located within a few blocks of the White House and just off K Street, Tosca occupies a unique position at the intersection of public policy, lobbyists, and law firms. It's a culinary home that transcends personal preferences, catering to the powerful in America. The decisions likely made in this dining room have the potential to shape American policy and even global policy. The roster of patrons is a testament to the restaurant's ability to bring together individuals from diverse political backgrounds. It includes former and current Presidents of the United States, Vice Presidents, Senators, Members of Congress, White House staff, cabinet members, Governors, Supreme Court Justices, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Ambassadors, to name a few. While New York has The Grill and LA’s celebrity go-to’s Craigs and Dan Tana’s, DC is where true power presides, and Tosca is at the heart of it all.

Stepping into the kitchen to meet Chef Fortunato, I was greeted by a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie. Large stock pots simmered with bones and vegetables, preparing the 'liquid gold' for the evening's sauces. Chef Fortunato Nicotra's resume would make James Beard jealous. A culinary rock star, he earned Michelin stars at two restaurants in Sicily before his 30th birthday. Nicotra then made his mark in New York City, where he served as the Executive Chef of Lidia Bastianich’s award-winning Felidia for over two decades. The restaurant earned three stars from Ruth Reichl of the New York Times only three months after his arrival. In 2006, Frank Bruni wrote another raving review, awarding Felidia a three-star rating. Wine Spectator named Felidia one of the “Top Ten Italian Restaurants in the United States,” and USA Today ranked it number two in its year-round up of restaurants around the world. Nicotra has appeared on several television food segments, including Lidia’s Kitchen and Lidia’s Italy and the Food Network’s Iron Chef. He prepared meals for Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis I during their visits to New York.

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The team at Tosca serves everyone with precision and humility. Jonathan ten Hoopen, the genius-like, human Rolodex of the powerful and wealthy in Washington, also knows the first and last name of every cook, steward, waiter, and dishwasher in the restaurant. Here comes Johnathan with a canape or a small serving of fresh pasta with shaved black truffles, always complements of the chef. His constant warmth and welcome make the often-difficult discussions around the table just a bit easier to manage. John Neata, quiet and reserved, holds a wealth of knowledge as possibly the best sommelier in Washington. I am grateful for his friendship and advice about all things wine. Lisa Fotter, always with an eagle eye on the dining room, manages this sensitive group of patrons with the finesse of a seasoned conductor of a symphony.

I recently told managing member and owner Paulo Sacco, “You treat every single person who walks in the door like a head of state.” Paulo replied simply, “It's our hospitality; everyone is welcome here.” Tosca is more than just a restaurant; it is a testament to the power of food to bridge divides and foster connections. Whether it’s political adversaries sharing a meal or the meticulous hospitality that makes every guest feel like a head of state, Tosca embodies the true essence of dining. It’s not just about the food; it’s about the experience and the people who make it extraordinary. As I left, I couldn’t help but think that Tosca might just be the most powerful restaurant in America.

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Washington, D.C. — January 8, 2026
The Trump administration has introduced a new set of federal dietary guidelines that upend decades of conventional nutrition advice, putting red meat, full-fat dairy, and animal proteins back at the forefront of the American plate. This reordering of the familiar food pyramid marks a decisive philosophical shift — away from plant-based eating and calorie moderation toward what the administration describes as “nutritional freedom and metabolic resilience.”

The guidelines carry significant downstream influence, shaping food policies across schools, hospitals, military bases, prisons, and federal nutrition programs. Reissued every five years, they are rarely rewritten so boldly. Yet this year’s update represents both a cultural and economic statement — one reflecting the administration’s alignment with agricultural producers and a growing movement challenging decades of low-fat orthodoxy.

Critics may see politics at play in how science is being reframed; supporters will argue it restores balance to an overregulated national diet. Either way, the new plan underscores a broader realignment of health policy, personal autonomy, and the economics of what Americans eat.

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On Saturday morning, as Americans woke to news of airstrikes on Venezuela and a sitting president in U.S. custody, young Europeans were already three hours into their weekend ritual: dancing stone sober in Parisian bakeries, surrounded by baguettes and pain au chocolat, DJ spinning against a backdrop of rising dough.

The juxtaposition isn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be.

The bakery rave phenomenon—which began in Paris in 2019 and has since spread to Brisbane, Mumbai, and Toronto—tells us something about what a generation is choosing when they can choose anything. They’re choosing bread over bottles. Dawn over midnight. Carbs over cocktails. And increasingly, they’re choosing Europe over here.

Alexis Duvivier didn’t set out to create a sobriety movement when he launched the first bakery rave at The French Bastards in Paris’s 11th arrondissement. The French DJ and producer, who performs as Aazar, was solving a simpler problem: homesickness. After years working clubs in Miami and Los Angeles, what he missed most wasn’t the nightlife—he had plenty of that. He missed the Boulangerie.

“It was such a big part of my culture in my everyday life here in France,” Duvivier said in a recent interview. “It was the first thing I wanted to do when I went back. I was always on the lookout for the best baguette or the best pain au chocolat.”

So in 2019, to celebrate releasing his single “Diva,” he did what made sense to him: he threw a free early evening party at a bakery, spinning tracks while trays of pastries circulated through the crowd. The visuals were odd enough to go viral—DJs Bob Sinclair and Peggy Gou later played sets there, cementing The French Bastards as one of Paris’s most unlikely hot spots.

But Duvivier insists the concept wasn’t gimmicky. “I didn’t choose a bakery because I was looking for an unusual location, but because for me it represents France and represents what I love.”

What he loved was the thing itself, not the Instagram version of it. The actual butter. The actual crust. The actual gathering place where neighbors see each other daily, not the performative authenticity that passes for culture in algorithm-optimized America.

That distinction matters more this weekend than it did last weekend.

The bakery rave movement has found its biggest following among Gen Z and younger Millennials who are drinking less and prioritizing what previous generations might have called boring: sleep, health, wellness, showing up clearheaded. From a certain angle, it looks like retreat. From another, it looks like the sanest response available to people who’ve watched the world they inherited catch fire in real time, and decided the least they can do is not pour alcohol on it.

The kids dancing in Paris bakeries at 8 a.m. on a Saturday aren’t protesting. They’re not marching. They’re not posting manifestos or arguing on Twitter about what just happened in Caracas. They’re doing something both smaller and larger: they’re building the world they want to live in, one baguette and one sober dance floor at a time.

They’re also doing it over there, not here.

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Europe has become aspirational to Americans in a way it hasn’t been since before 9/11. Not the Europe of backpacking tourists or study abroad semesters, but the Europe of people who take August off and eat lunch for two hours and don’t think healthcare is a luxury good. The Europe where a bakery is a daily democratic ritual, not a $8 artisanal experience you Instagram. The Europe where young people can imagine a future that doesn’t require them to explain away their government’s foreign policy at dinner parties for the rest of their lives.

You can hear it in how Americans talk about Europe now—not with the old defensive superiority (”they don’t have free speech/air conditioning/ambition”), but with something closer to longing. We sound like Duvivier in Los Angeles, homesick for a boulangerie.

The bakery rave works because it’s performing authenticity by actually being authentic. Duvivier didn’t focus-group the concept or hire a brand consultant. He missed bread. He liked music. He put them together. The fact that it became a movement says less about his marketing savvy than about how starved people are for experiences that aren’t optimized, monetized, or weaponized.

In Washington, where I write this, we’ve spent two decades watching policymakers perform concern about foreign interventions while authorizing them. We’ve watched both parties promise to end forever wars while finding new forevers to war in. We’ve normalized a level of military involvement around the globe that would have been unthinkable to the generation that actually fought World War II, and we’ve done it while telling ourselves we’re the reluctant hegemon, the force for good, the grown-ups in the room.

The kids aren’t buying it anymore. They’re not even shopping in the same store.

When American twenty-somethings look at Europe now, they’re not seeing a museum of old cathedrals and socialist policies. They’re seeing a place where it’s possible to be young and hopeful without being naive. Where you can dance at 8 a.m. with a croissant in your hand and not feel like you’re fiddling while Rome burns, because you’re not the one who lit the match.

The French Bastards, the bakery that started all this, distinguishes itself with what it calls an “irreverent and innovative menu.” But the real irreverence isn’t in the food. It’s in the premise that young people might gather for joy rather than to numb themselves to the news. That morning might be better than midnight. That the smell of baking bread might be more nourishing than another round of drinks you don’t want to pay for and won’t remember.

That watching the sun come up might be better than staying up to see what fresh hell tomorrow brings.

As Duvivier’s concept spread—he now hosts Bakery Sessions across Europe—it stayed true to its origins. No sponsorships. No bottle service. No VIP section where you pay more to stand closer to the baguettes. Just music, pastries, and people who chose to be there clearheaded.

Meanwhile, back in America, we’re conducting operations to secure another country’s oil reserves while a military official quotes a president saying we’ll “run it for them for a period of time.” We’re doing this on a Saturday. We’re doing this in January. We’re doing this while half the country argues it’s justified and the other half argues about whether they’re allowed to say it’s not.

The kids dancing in Paris aren’t having that argument. They opted out. Not in the cynical Gen X way of the 1990s, where opting out meant you were too cool to care. In a way that suggests they care deeply, but they’ve decided caring doesn’t require participating in a system that will grind up their caring and use it as fuel.

They’re building something else instead. It’s smaller. It’s quieter. It happens at bakeries.

And for those of us who stayed, who are still here in America trying to write sense into senselessness and reason into rage, there’s something almost unbearably poignant about watching a generation choose bread and music and sobriety while we chose empire and oil and the certainty that this time, finally, we’ll get it right.

Duvivier says his bakery raves were never meant to become a social media trend. He was just trying to recreate the thing he loved about home. But maybe that’s exactly why it worked. Maybe the only authentic thing left is to stop trying to solve the world’s problems and start trying to solve your own homesickness.

Maybe the revolution isn’t a march or a manifesto. Maybe it’s just deciding that at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, you’d rather be dancing in a bakery than doom-scrolling the news from Caracas.

Maybe the kids who are dancing—sober, joyful, surrounded by bread—have figured out something we spent fifty years of foreign policy missing: that the thing people actually want isn’t democracy at gunpoint or oil secured by airstrikes.

It’s a good baguette and a place to gather.

And it turns out, you can’t export that at the end of a cruise missile.

James Bell writes The American Table from Washington, D.C., where he watches what we eat and what it means.

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