top of page
Search

Intersection: Colonialism + Cocktails

  • Writer: boxton9
    boxton9
  • Aug 10, 2023
  • 1 min read

Updated: Nov 10, 2023

Tiki's Dark Side and One Bar Heading Toward the Light


Edible Manhattan/Edible Brooklyn, Summer 2023


By Julia Sexton


During our 2022 redesign, I instituted several new departments. This story comes from Intersection, the department that explores the intersection of food and something else. This story appeared in both editions of our magazine: Edible Brooklyn/Edible Manhattan and Edible Hudson Valley/Edible Westchester.


This was one of those stories where I spent a week falling down a research rabbit hole, growing steadily more horrified by the flippant racism of mid-century tiki culture. The painting below says it all.






Comments

About Me

​

I Was Supposed to Go to Grad School

Growing up in a large, loud family of 7, they use to call me “Pass Me The, Pass Me The” for the way that I’d try to doctor my dinner with whatever condiments were on hand. At about 8 or 9, I gave up on condiments and took control of dinner entirely, cooking out of a beat-up copy of The New York Times Cookbook that I still own, my little penciled-in annotations intact. I cooked for 7 people nightly, all throughout high school. By the time I was winding up college, I’d become a damn fine cook.

 

My father was a professor of American History. I figured I’d follow in those footsteps, teaching Dickens to 18-year-olds who were not at all interested. I gathered applications to doctorate programs, meanwhile, I took a job as a waiter in a busy catering company. The kitchen where I worked was perpetually understaffed—my cooking skills were quickly identified and I was press-ganged onto their crew. I LOVED it—the excitement, the creativity, the freedom, the trench humor, learning professional cooking techniques. There I stayed for several years while my graduate school applications gathered dust.

 

Cue me, later, a refugee from a crash-and-burn restaurant opening where I was not only the sous-chef, but also the loan application writer and babysitter for a chef/owner who had gone spectacularly off the rails. By then, I had a couple of herniated discs and no desire to stay in restaurants. I moved back to the world of words, and I’ve never looked back. 

 

Since then, I’ve been a restaurant critic, a national award-winning blogger, a food journalist, a travel writer, a columnist, a cookbook author, and the editor-in-chief of four Edible titles. I can’t wait to see what's next.

 

​

© 2035 by Going Places. Powered and secured by Wix

  • Instagram
bottom of page