What to Read Now: Eating Bugs in The New Yorker

Anne Fishbein

Donaji

If you have not yet picked up the latest issue of The New Yorker, you may want to. Turn to page 38, dear reader, and you will find a Dept. of Gastronomy piece by Dana Goodyear on bugs. You will also find happy mention of John Sedlar (Rivera, Playa), Bricia Lopez (Guelaguetza), Jose Andres (The Bazaar), Laurent Quenioux (LQ at Starry Kitchen) and a Montana State University entomologist named Florence Dunkel, called by her grandson Beetle Oma, who likes to make Tollhouse cookies with grasshoppers ("I'm not even sure I'll take the head off").

Go read the piece, after which you can whip up your own version of Rivera's Donaji, the drink Sedlar and Julian Cox famously make with chapulínas salt. Here's the recipe.

While you're reading the story, check out the photo (grasshopper, raspberry) by Hans Gissinger, a glorious photographer who has lately been gracing the pages of the magazine and whose photos you can also see on the walls of Mark Gold's restaurant Eva. Even more of Gissinger's stunning photos line the walls now, since Gold recently remodeled the place. Sorry, no photos of bugs, which it seems we'll all be eating more of soon.

And be sure to read to the end of Goodyear's story, for the lovely bit about Quenioux scoring smuggled escamoles in a strip mall near the Tujuana border so that the French chef can bring them back here and put them on his menu. "She returned a minute later with a plastic shopping bag containing a large ziplock filled with half a kilo of frozen product. Quenioux handed her a hundred dollar bill." When you can read about this sort of behavior from our chefs, you don't much miss reading the Michelin.