BonAppetit.com Writer Sam Dean's Best Stories Ever

Today is a very sad day at BonAppetit.com. No, we haven't run out of bourbon. or Bugles. The various street carts, burger joints, and chopped-salad purveyors around our Times Square HQ are all still operational, as far as we know. We are sad, rather, because today marks the departure of Sam Dean, our staff writer for the past two years.

When he joined us, El Blanco—as he's known around the office—was but a newbie. "Food?" he was rumored to have said during his initial job interview. "Sure, I eat food." Though he didn't know much about the intricacies of the food-obsessed world then, he knew many other things of which we only gradually became aware. For one, despite being in his early 20s, he had the cultural reference points (music, movies, ad jingles) of someone two decades older. Perhaps relatedly, he was a master of the obscure and the esoteric: history, linguistics, forgotten science—"nerdery," as it was dubbed on our Website. Who else could summarize the history of the car cup holder, or delve so deeply into the etymology of mayonnaise, or recount every food moment in all of Quentin Tarantino's movies?

Finally, he was—and is—a damn fine writer, one who could, in a brief article about Chocolate-Dipped Coffee Ice Cream Glazed Doughnut Sandwiches, reference Elizabethan theater, Flaubert, and Paula Deen in the span of a couple of sentences, and make it all seem entirely effortless—natural, in fact. Because how could you not look at those doughnuts and not think of them as the art-historical "apotheosis" of the glazed-doughnut-as-bun golden age?

Now, however, he's giving up his cushy life here at BonAppetit.com to go live on his grandmother's farm in Colorado and research his grandfather's 1950s-era Las Vegas TV show—or something like that. As with all things Sam Dean, it's a little hard to believe, but so overwhelmingly entertaining that we have no choice but to accept his word—his inventive, well-crafted words—for it. And so, in honor of his contributions to BonAppetit.com, we've collected El Blanco's greatest hits for your enjoyment and edification, and for ours.