Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news. Last week we covered Hillary Duff's Diet Coke conspiracy theories.
Running a restaurant can do some weird things to your head. To be clear, I've never run a restaurant, but I have to assume it messes up your entire brain. Why else would these chefs be doing such terrible things? What else could make Redzepi scream at, punch, and prod his employees with kitchen tools? How else do you explain David Chang's over the top screaming and yelling? Or the decision to serve your customers jam with mold on it?
And that's the only way I was able to make sense of the drama that exploded out of LA’s Horses in 2023 (don't worry, we'll get into it). Now, after three years of rumors and hearsay, we have an account from the accused, Will Aghajanian, as reported by Kelly Loudenberg at AirMail. Finally, an answer to the question that's been percolating in the back of my head for years: Did he really murder the cats?
Also this week, we're talking about the investigation into all the fruit and vegetable AI slop that's been plaguing the timeline; we simply need to discuss Zohran Mamdani's mukbang; and we've found perhaps the most unexpected place for great wine in Southern California. Read on to find out where.
We’re closing the book on Horses
For the uninitiated, Horses was one of those buzzy, impossible-to-get-into, celebrity-magnet restaurants in LA. Until the allegations went public. I remember the day in late May 2023 that the news of Horses broke. It started with a few mentions in group chats, then some chatter around the office…then some more intense chatter around the office. The tea was as follows: Johnson and Aghajanian, the formerly married co-owners, filed restraining orders against each other, each alleging that the other was emotionally and physically abusive, and that they'd killed several of their pet cats.
“It was like they'd get a kitten and then like two weeks later that kitten would die. And then they adopted another kitten two weeks after that. And then that one died. And then after the third cat. We were kind of like, why are all the cats dying?” [sic] reads a quote from someone who used to work with the pair, in Ezra Marcus' bombshell report from 2023.
Now we're witnessing the epilogue. In this week's Airmail article, for which Johnson refused interview requests, Loudenberg says her reporting did not uncover any cat torture or killing. Johnson did, reportedly, resort to witchcraft—a protection spell over the restaurant, and a curse on Aghajanian. The piece chronicles allegations of years of terrible behavior (restaurants lead to broken brains, see above).
Zohran's being medium weird online again
Perhaps I'm the rube for thinking that the man who ran a campaign based around posting (and, yes, policy, don't yell at me!) would stop posting when he got into office. Obviously, I was wrong. Just this week he livestreamed the first-ever mukbang in New York City's City Hall. The stream was the Mayor's Office's way of celebrating a settlement with a few retailers that will give “$2 million back to workers, mostly fast-food workers, more than 800 of them across New York City,” according to commissioner Sam Levine, who accompanied Mamdani in the video.
The pair dove headfirst into a couple of Crunchwrap Supremes and two big cups of electric cyan Baja Blast. Satisfying as it was to watch our mayor eat Taco Bell, I did learn one disturbing tidbit: Mamdani has some messed up ideas about steak. “I even like sour cream with steak,” he said mid-mukbang. Diabolical.
If you also take your steak with sour cream, please DM. I want to argue with you about it. And if you, like me, are craving a Crunchwrap, not to worry, we have a recipe for that.
Why so much AI fruit and veg slop?
Have you seen it? In the miasma of AI-made videos, short-form mini-dramas centering around fruit and vegetables have, for some odd reason, rocketed to popularity. Now every third video on Reels and TikTok is, like, a banana emotionally manipulating a kiwi to lend him money that he's using for drugs or whatever. The plots are more unhinged than you can imagine; a clementine family is ripped apart when the clementine father slaps his effeminate, makeup-wearing clementine son for being gay. Lemon twins have a difficult time at school because one is hotter than the other one. The plots are bizarre—and often oddly racist, homophobic, transphobic, or misogynist.
That kind of controversy is part of what's making these videos so popular: They play on the extremes of emotion. We see mothers abandoning their fruit children, citrus fathers threatening to slap the zest out of their homosexual clementine sons. That's pathos, baby. Our brains are trained to engage, and the videos, well, there's no end in sight.
Disneyland has great wine now
When I think of sophisticated wines, I do not think of Disneyland—but maybe that's a blind spot for me! Disneyland Resort in Anaheim reopened its restaurant Napa Rose after a lengthy refresh, and its wine list is its crowning jewel. Don't take my word for it. According to writer Annemarie Dooling, there's “a cellar stocked with 1,500 labels and a staff able to highlight every single bottle in their library.” Read on to find out more BTS details of the newest hotspot for wine-heads.
And if that's not enough for you, we've got the most exciting new restaurant openings you should know about.