Reply All - #172 The Test Kitchen, Chapter 1

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

Chapter 1, “Original Sin”: In the summer of 2020, Bon Appétit faced an online reckoning. It imploded, seemingly overnight, former employees calling it a racist and toxic workplace. But the story of what actually happened there started ten years earlier. Here are some recipes to try from the people featured in this week’s story: Yewande Komolafe’s yam and plantain curry with crispy shallots and sheet-pan gochujang chicken.  Sue Li’s caramelized onion galette and creamy turmeric pasta. Rick Martinez’s mole sencillo. Eleanore Park’s ginger-scallion meatballs with lemony farro. Also, you can read Rachel Premack’s breaking story on Bon Appétit from last summer here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Alex Goldman. I'm one of the hosts of the show. I'm speaking to you on behalf of the entire reply-all staff. We wanted to give you an apology and a bit more context about the story you're about to hear. This episode is part of a series called The Test Kitchen, which was reported by Shreuthy Pinnaminani, and is about the structural racism and toxic work environment at the Food Magazine, Bon Appetit. Days after the publication of the second episode in what was supposed to be a four-part series, former colleagues of ours at Gimlet publicly described multiple instances of troubling behavior

from both Shruthy and my longtime co-host PJ Vote. These accounts prompted a reckoning on our team about the work culture at Reply All and they also left us asking whether we could continue to air this story without interrogating ourselves and what has unfolded at Gimlet.

We now understand that we should not have published this series as reported and the fact that we did was a systemic editorial failure. We are not going to be continuing the series, and PJ and Shruthy have both decided to leave the Reply All team. I and the entire team know that making Reply All, getting to tell people's stories for a living,

is a huge privilege. We also know that we let a lot of people down and made a lot of mistakes. We are very sorry for our many failings. We're sorry to our colleagues and our former colleagues we hurt. We're sorry to you, our listeners. and of course, we're sorry to the people who spoke to us for the Bon Appetit's story. We plan to find a way to get to the bottom of what went wrong here, both with the series and with our show.

And once we fully understand it ourselves, we also want to tell you as best we can what happened. As we contend with everything, we are placing the show on pause. Thank you for listening, and here's the episode. From Gimlet, this is Rplai-L, I'm PJ Vote. And we have something different for you this week. actually over the next several weeks. It's a story told over a few chapters by our reporter Shruti Pidimanini. She'll be taking over the show for a bit.

It's about Bon Appetit, a food magazine that I'm sure some of you saw explode in scandal last summer. This, though, is all the parts of that story that you didn't hear. We've been working on it for months now, and we're very glad to finally get to share it with you. Here's Shruti. So the first time someone in my life used the phrase, person of color, to describe me, that was about six years ago. I was at the small gathering, and a friend of mine, who's Asian, referred to both of us as women of color. And I said to her, no or not, I'm Indian, you're Asian.

But I say it all the time now, person of color. You're going to hear me saying it many, many times in today's story. But know that every time I say it, I kind of wince. It feels wrong, like I'm telling people that I, as a brown woman, have experienced a racism that is as constant and as oppressive as, say, a black person. which, of course, I have not. Here's the person of color that I am. I was born in India in Hyderabad, and I lived there until I came to the United States for college. So I'm an immigrant.

I studied math, and so I guess I'm a woman of science. I'm also a straight woman. I'm also a mom. And if you'd asked me before last summer, so before June of 2020, if you'd ask, like, for you, personally, Shrith, what does it mean to be an Indian woman in the workplace? I would have said it's mostly fine. Because back then, I didn't really want to think of my race as a disadvantage. Like, I preferred to focus on how it actually helped me. You know, I've definitely benefited from the ways that I fit into American stereotypes of Indian people.

I do work hard. I am pretty good at math. And I'm very good at fitting in. I'm sure you can tell from my excellent American accent. If you had asked me that same question, though, after June of last year, what does it mean to be Indian woman in the workplace. I think my answer would have been a long pause. I found myself replaying moments from my career, moments that went back years, things that

had happened that hadn't even qualified as stories in my brain at the time. This kind of negotiation with the past, it was happening inside the heads of a lot of people all over the country. And this story is about a specific group of those people. They were all people of color, black, brown, Asian, Latino. And they'd all worked in New York at this one food magazine, Bon Appetit. It was early June of 2020, days after the murder of George Floyd. Everyone was protesting, angry about racial injustice.

And that week, this photo circulated online, a photo of the man in charge of Bon Appetit in a very offensive Halloween costume. And the first thing we're going to talk about today, easily one of the most requested stories today, and that is all this news surrounding Bon Appetit and its editor-in-chief, Adam Replit. Bon Appetit Magazine's editor-in-chief has resigned following the reemergence of a photo of him, dressed in a caricature-ish Puerto Rican white people are calling it brownface. Here's the tweet.

It was a story that we've grown used to hearing, the story of a bad workplace, told over the internet. After that first offensive photo, more details started pouring out. Like, there was a business insider article about how the culture there was toxic. The people of color who'd starred in Bon Appetit's videos started coming forward and saying they were being paid less than than their white colleagues. People on the internet started digging through old tweets from the staff and found all kinds of stuff, sexist tweets, homophobic tweets, more disturbing photos.

It was an ugly snapshot of an ugly place. Since I saw that snapshot, I've spent months talking to all the people of color who worked there, like almost all of them, going back 10 years ago to the moment when the modern version of Bon Appetit was first launch. And I feel like now I have seen a whole movie of everything that led up to that one snapshot. And once you hear that whole story, that snapshot itself feels quite different.

It feels like the view of an office that is strangely familiar, like a place you might have worked in. I have certainly recognized my own experiences in it. So I'm going to tell you that story in four parts. It'll start a decade ago when the man in charge would build this whole place with a fundamental flaw. A flaw whose magnitude wouldn't be obvious to anyone. Least of all, the excited employees of color coming to work there. I would have done anything to just be there. So, like, even if she told me every day, like, hey, just a reminder, you don't belong, I would have still taken the job.

It's a story of how waves of people of color will show up and one by one run through the gauntlet that is Bon Appetit. I was like, she doesn't believe my work is good enough. Maybe I'm not doing good work. Like, I'm not brilliant in the way that the people and staff are. And so this makes sense, is what I told myself. It was so cutting. It was so, it made me feel so bad. And I was like, okay, understood.

So I put in my notice, and I left. It's also a story about the power of appearances, how Condi Nast and Bonapetit held onto power in the midst of a decline that should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Like, these people have no idea what they're doing. It's a mirage. Say mirage. I would tell anyone who would listen, like, it's not what it seems. It's like, what if your ex became incredibly famous and beloved right after they broke up with you?

And, like, everyone's like, oh, my God, he's such a nice guy. And you're like, yeah, to you. And it's about how, in the course of just one decade, different generations of people of color will learn to fight back. I went to a protest on the 6th, which was a Saturday. And then I came home and just felt like, you know, maybe I could get Adamapur fired. I mean, I think that's really it. Really?

Yeah. For this story, we talked to nearly 40 people from Bonamette and Condon Nost. I've talked to much of the white leadership, but over the next few episodes, you'll only hear from the people of color. Because this is a story of how they survived in this system and how they finally took it apart. We are not going to put up with the shit, accept the shit that we have for years put up with and accepted. All of those tradeoffs, I am never going to do again.

I am never, ever going to do that again. So after the break, chapter one of that story from the people who experienced it. Chapter 1. Original sin. The story begins with a man who I have spoken to, but who you are not actually going to hear from. Because the story, even though he is very much central to it, it is not a story about him. And that man is Adam Rappaport, who in 2010 was tasked with bringing Bon Appetit, this very sleepy, irrelevant magazine owned by Condé Nast, into a more glamorous future. Adam was in ways an unconventional pick for the job. Like, he was not a recipe expert.

He was this mid-level GQ editor, which meant what he was an expert on was the things that, a men's magazine considered cool in the early aughts. So Japanese denim, skinny ties, the national. If he was going to tell you how to make food, it was the perfect omelet or a chicken salad, like the food made by a svelt, probably white man. But the fact that he didn't come from a food magazine, that did not matter to Condé Nast.

They were looking for someone exactly like him who could take Bon Appetit and make it hip and cool the way that GQ was hip and cool. And Condi Nass would give him something, a rare opportunity for a new editor-in-chief. They told Adam he would be able to hire an entirely new staff, top to bottom, which for Adam was perfect, full control to reinvent Bon Appetit.

So the first issue of Adam's new Bon Appetit came out in May of 2011. In less than five months, Adam had managed to pull together a whole team that had made what felt like a new Bon Appetit. Actually, Bonap. That's what the cool kids would call it. And this Bonap was younger and snarkier and irreverent. Like, an early cover instead of a stack of cupcakes or whatever, it had Gwyneth Paltrow, in a tight blue dress, eating a bowl of spaghetti.

A celebrity on a food magazine cover? Unheard of. Adam Rappaport shrugged this off in his editor's note. He said, I realize that putting a movie star on the cover of a food magazine isn't typical. But the thing is, food is never. just about food. It's about catching up with your friends over a good bottle of Nuis-San-Chorge. His new Bon Appetit, sure, it would have recipes and cooking techniques, but you weren't really reading it for the articles. You were picking it up to gawk at the photos, the photos of the food. They had been shot in this sharp, high-contrast, cool style, like an American Apparel ad,

except instead of a half-naked woman, you'd be looking at this decadent poached egg. And this new look, it seemed to be working. Like, there was buzz around the magazine. They were selling ads to luxury brands like Hermes and Chanel. And it's not just that the magazine was making money. It was taken seriously by actual food people, like the people who worked in restaurants. And I'm curious, like, when the first issues started coming out, what did you think of the writing and their approach to, like, food? I think I was like, ooh, how do they make it look so beautiful?

Back in 2010, Yawande Kamalafe was a pastry cook at this cool restaurant in New York City. And she said that in the kitchen of that cool restaurant, they would often just look at these food magazines. Like amongst ourselves. Like, oh my God, did you see how they plated the biscuits with, like, blueberry jam? Like, that's really cool. At the time, they were making the most beautiful images and also, like, recipes that were very aspirational. That was Sue Lee, who was another very impressive restaurant. world person. She worked as a line cook at 11 Madison Park, which is like the Harvard of fancy restaurants. And both of those people, Yuanda and Sue, are people of color, immigrants. Sue was born in

Taiwan. She came here when she was six. And Yawande is black, originally from Nigeria. And both of these women were done working in restaurants. It was backbreaking work. And they figured, coming to a food magazine, they could still keep working with the thing that they actually loved, which was food. And so they would both come to this new bon appetit as temps. So below entry level. But that was fine because this was going to be the start of a better life. I was like, this is it. This is like my way in. This is going to be my career. Like I've already been established. I've worked many years. I've done a lot. But I was willing to be freelance. I had to fill out a timesheet. I was willing to do all those things because I was just so happy to be there.

Even just the physical building of Condonast felt full of promise. The place was just absurdly glamorous, a skyscraper in Times Square with a Frank Uri-designed cafeteria. Publisher, Sign Newhouse, had his own table there where he would lunch once a week with Anna Wintour. It was definitely exciting to, like, walk into the Times Square building and think of that as work, as opposed to walking into like the basement of a kitchen

where you're working underground, literally, not seeing the sunlight. That's so interesting. And so it's like just walking into the Times Square office, you were like, oh, this is where I'm going to be put kind of like more in front of people. In front, yeah, yeah. I think that aspect of it was exciting to me. And to walk into the office of Condé Nast, you were just like, you know, these are all things that if you were just even conscious,

of what happens in New York City, you knew that they were important and that you wanted to be a part of it if you have a chance to be a part of it. And I think that's why like interns will work for free at a place like Ande Nass, because why not? All of the work that Sue and Yuwanda had been drawn to, like all of those little editorial choices that made Bonap, Bonap, those decisions were happening upstairs on the fifth floor, the editorial offices of Bon Appet. That floor is where Adam Rappaport and his top editor sat. And that's where Yuwanda and Sue wanted to get to. But something that both of them didn't know yet is that already, here, in the beginning, Adam had made this huge choice that would make getting into that room almost impossible. What he'd done is, when Condé Nast had given him a chance to hire whoever he wanted,

he had filled the very top spots like executive editor, creative director, with only white people. And not just any white people. White people who were kind of like him. Like, they didn't come from food magazines. And they were people whose style he really liked. Like, people he'd want to sit next to at a dinner party. Which, again, makes sense at a place like Condon asked.

Their magazines, whatever topic they cover, they're really about selling this fantasy of stylish white wealth. Adam's choice, though, it would be the original sin of Bon Appetit. But at the time, it didn't seem like a mistake. Seemed like a dream. All of these top-tier editors would gather in this large open space in the center of the office where the art department was, and they would look at photo lineups posted on the wall. Debate the design of the magazine, like do we shoot the pasta from the side or overhead?

Definitely overhead. Do we blur the focus like they did at Gourmet? No, fuck Gourmet. Upstairs is where they would close the magazine the weeks before sending it out to print, with open cans of Budweiser and Corona and Japanese whiskey, free swag. It's where the pitch meetings would happen, where editors would pitch stories like APC designer Jean Tuytou cooks at his not-so-simple chateau near Paris. That floor, editorial, that is not where Yuante and Sue are headed. They would start at the bottom, literally, one floor below editorial, in the magazine's kitchen.

It was called the test kitchen. What was the test kitchen? Like, how did it actually look when you walked in? It was like a bunch of bays. So you walk in and go around a corner into this hallway-looking thing. And on either side of the hallway, there were kitchens, like a kitchen that you would have in your home. It was a drab space, no windows, no actual sunlight, not the glamorous Test Kitchen that would become famous years later in the YouTube videos. And this would be the place where the newbies would try out the recipes before they went into the magazine.

It's called cross-testing. The Test Kitchen editors would develop the recipes and make it. and then I would come in as like a second set of testing assurance that it works. And my job was to catch any mistakes, essentially, in the testing process. Yawande was cross-testing things like chocolate cake with biscuits or pancakes, simple stuff compared to what she'd been making at restaurants. But growing up in Lagos, Yawande's mother had run a test kitchen there for Cadbury, the chocolate company. And Yawande felt like she had developed this almost natural enjoyment of, something as tedious as recipe testing.

Like, she liked thinking about food in this scientific, methodical way. So she'd come in once a week, work alone in her siloed bay, and she could imagine the frenetic energy upstairs, people bringing forth an entire magazine. But she was just underneath it all. Except most days, at 2 p.m., there was this one big event where it was almost like this portal would open up between the two worlds, the infamous 2 p.m. tasting. So like at 2 o'clock every day, there was a tasting of recipes that were being developed or that were going to end up in the magazine that had already been pitched.

So what would happen is the mostly white junior editors would come from upstairs. They had to actually make the recipes that they'd pitched so that their bosses, the senior editors, could taste and critique them. Yawanda and the other temps, their job would be to assist or just stay out of the way while the contestants were frantically trying to prepare. Everything else before 2 p.m. did not matter. It was just like, you're in the oven, I need the oven, get out. Or like, I need this timer.

I need an offset spatula. It was just like racing around. It felt very restaurant energy. And at 2 p.m., it was spatelized down, food plated, and set on a long table. Here's Eleanor Park, another temp at the Tusk Kitchen. It was just, like, such a spectacle, very formal where, like, Brad put down, like, silverware. and like different plates. So the senior editors would sit at that formally set table.

And one by one, as if at a restaurant, the junior person who had made the dish, would come and serve them and give a little speech where they explained the dish, like how they'd come up with it, how bold the flavors are. What's the twist that made it be a? It did just feel like a very double-wheres Prada moment when like Miranda Priestley in the movie

is like being shown a different like carousal of clothing and she would purse her lips for approval or not. It was like the equivalent of that for food. And some top editors had this kind of Simon Cowell-Shick, where they would treat people's ideas with disdain, almost a show of power. One editor, known for her refined palate, would periodically just spit out the food that offended her.

And after 2 p.m., like the kitchen would be a mess, and they're cleaning up, but it would feel like, oh, okay, we got through today. And then they would go upstairs to do their computer work. It sounds a little bit like white people competing with white people and being judged by white people. And that's exactly what it was. Yawande was left wondering how she could be one of those people. She also wanted to compete, have stories in the magazine.

And the first part of the process was obviously to pitch an idea, but Yawande had no clue. Like, who should she even pitch to? Like I understood that certain people had stories that would appear in the, the magazines. As far as how that process went, I had no idea. Yawande would find herself, like, leafing through the pages of the magazine that she was working in the kitchen of. And it was almost like reading tea leaves. Like, how had this particular story gotten there? I would say, oh, cool, they did a story on Southern cuisine. That's cool. That makes sense because Hunter's from the South. So I would, like, draw those lines in my own head. But, like, it didn't feel like a

place where I could say, so how do recipes get pitched? How can I pitch my own recipes? Juanda had come here to Bonavit to learn, but nobody here was seeing her as a person that they were trying to bring into the fold. Like nobody was going to reach out and help her. Adam Rappaport, editor-in-chief, style expert, had created this culture at the office where people's success there felt pegged to whether or not they were considered cool. And because cool is subject, objective and fleeting. It meant that most people were just spending all their energy worrying about their own status. They weren't paying attention to the people at the bottom. I've talked to dozens of people who've worked in that test kitchen, senior, junior, white,

non-white, almost universally. The phrase that was used to describe that kitchen was high school. It was clickish, it was backbitey, the kind of place where one person's success was another person's loss. Sue said that when she started there, the people who were there before, for her, seemed to almost view her as the enemy. In the beginning, they definitely treated me with condescension, with weariness. People are territorial there, and I understand because it's a competitive, it's a super competitive environment. The attention from the bosses is scarce, and bylines are scarce.

Everyone's fighting for any type of recognition. You know, the editors will come down and, like, hang out in the kitchen. but never really speak to you if you were a freelancer. It was a kind of environment where you just go and do your work, put your head down, and leave. You know, and like, don't make a mistake. Don't fuck up. Yawande and Sue both struggled with their self-doubt in almost total isolation. I need to tell you about a choice I've made in telling this story. While I've put the voices of these women of color together,

the truth is, these women were rarely in the same room at the same time. They were temps. They almost never overlapped. The main thing they had in common was that they were almost always alone in a sea of white. Yawande, the only black person, sue often the only Asian one. They spent years stuck in the test kitchen, permanent freshmen at the Bon Appetit High School. They blamed themselves. They saw themselves as failing. Thinking back on all this now, years later, they have a lot of questions.

One hard one. How are they supposed to feel now about their colleagues who did succeed? Those people, almost all white, who started a long long as well. alongside them in those bays, but who made it out? And when they puzzle over this, there's one name that comes up pretty consistently. Who did you see succeeding at the time, like, on the days that you were there? Who were you, like, that person is rising up in the ranks? And, like, could you tell why? Allison, for sure.

Allison, as an Alison Roman, who, for a lot of people, needs no introduction. But if you don't know who she is, she's an internet. famous recipe writer, and early in the pandemic, she was semi-canceled when she attacked two other celebrities out of nowhere, both Asian women. Full disclosure, I actually know Allison in real life. We met through some common friends who are all crazy about cooking, and I would see her at dinners from time to time. But back to the test kitchen. It was 2011, and Allison Roman had just arrived. She started out, like the others, a lowly recipe tester. But it was as if the gravity that held everybody else down, it just didn't apply to her.

Here's Rick Martinez, another temp who got there after her. Allison was the queen of the kitchen. She was the star of that show. Like, she got all the good recipe assignments. If anyone had the ability to pitch a story and get it through, it would have been Allison. Like, I felt that she had a rapport with everybody that would come down and not talk to me. It was like almost immediate for her. So it wasn't about like being there longer. It was just like she looked like everybody else in the test kitchen and at the magazine. You know, like Adam would

come into the kitchen every morning and make breakfast for himself. He used, in the old building, he used her station, he used her cutting board, her knives, and when we got to the new place, he did the same thing. So it was very clear that he had a particular comfort with her that he didn't have with the rest of us. If this is starting to sound straightforward, you should know that the people I talk to, they are still a decade later, puzzling out how to feel about Allison.

Because, yes, she was the boss's favorite. But those same people say she also worked super hard and her food was really good. Sue, who was her friend, says, back then, Allison's success just didn't feel unfair. You know, it's like we were competing against each other, but also had full respect for each other. You know, Allison's a strong cook, and I think I'm a very strong cook,

and so that's when we became friends. The thing that Sue sometimes struggles with now is that back then, it seems like Allison was getting all the opportunities, like the one plant in the test kitchen that was getting water. And Allison at the time did not question that. But for Sue, it's hard to blame her because Sue didn't question it either. The whole thing is even harder for Yuwanda because she and Allison were actually closer. They had had these eerily similar resumes.

Like step for step, they'd worked at the same restaurants in New York. Yawande was always their first. And she had been freelancing at Bon Appetit for a full year when Allison had arrived. And a year after that, Yawande was still a freelancer and Allison was the one being offered a full-time job. I'm wondering what you were saying to yourself, like why some people like Allison were even, immediately comfortable with the bosses, and you seemed to be, like, the perennial outsider? I felt like it was because I was shy. I felt like I wasn't really outgoing. So, like, I told myself that I had all these, like, I'm not from here, so I don't really understand American cuisine,

or, you know, like, it was all these things that I was telling myself. And did you ever, like, confide in Allison about it? Like, if you guys were even sort of friends back then, did you say, like, do you think I'm too shy? Not no. Despite their proximity, there was a lot that Yawande couldn't share. Like, how years ago her visa had lapsed and she'd become undocumented. She felt like as of her life was so far from anything that the people in this kitchen would ever understand.

Even someone like Allison, who saw herself as a friend. Like, I would share with her, but I could see that there was only a certain point to which I could share with her. because I didn't want to explain. So there, and I feel so conflicted about her friendship because even in that space of a friendship, like, was it my job to point out like, hey, Allison, like, I came here first, but like, dude, you're getting five days a week. And I'm just called in like once every two weeks, once every month.

you know, like was it my job to point that out? I think to a lot of people listening now in 2021, including me, the answer to this question is obvious. No, it was not Yawande's job to point it out. But if I'm being honest with myself, and I think back to how I felt like just 10 years ago, I didn't expect my white colleagues to question what part of their success was earned and what part was their white privilege. that felt like an impossible math problem. But now, Allison's old colleagues find themselves trying to answer it.

Not just with Allison, but with the other breakout white stars like Claire Safitz or Brad Leone. How much of what they got did they really deserve? And how much were they responsible for helping the people around them? It's hard to judge old behavior by new standards. But if the people of color in the test kitchen feel ambivalent about how their peers behaved, There's not much ambivalence about what they think about the behavior of their bosses, the top editors. Those were the people who decided who got hired and who didn't, who got to make the recipes and who had to test them. The people upstairs.

We're going to get to them right after this. Welcome back to the show. The more I have talked to people at Bon Appetit about the top editors and the choices that those editors were making, like what kind of assignments they gave out and to whom. the more bizarre I found it all. And to help you see what I'm talking about, I want to start with the story of Sue Lee, who's the Taiwanese-American chef. When Sue was in her 20s,

she figured out she wanted a career in food, because it's quite simple, really. She loved eating. The love of eating and also looking for foods with flavor. Like I moved to Queens, for example, because I wanted to be closer to the 7 train, because I knew that you can just get off at any stop and you can eat something delicious.

Hey, that's like commitment. I like that. If you don't live in Queens or off the seven train, the foods with flavor that Sue is talking about, it's Chinese food, Indian food. In her mind, foods with complex, bold flavors. That is the kind of food that Sue loves. And when she started working at 11 Madison Park,

that Harvard of fancy restaurants, Sue was making, like, magical Willy Wonka level food, like tomato water clouds or green apple snow, or a foie gras, milfoam. with Bing Cherries and pistachio. But then Sue left all of that to learn how to come up with her own ideas, to create our own recipes at Bon Appetit. And what she wanted more than anything was for some dish that she had dreamed up, accompanied

by a decadent photo and a byline, Sue Lee. So it was 2012. And back in her early months in the test kitchen, Sue, like Yawande, spent most of her time testing just other people's recipes, essentially fact-checking their work. But eventually, her boss began every now and then to give her an assignment. Like Sue would be allowed to develop a recipe. And what kind of stuff were they having you develop? Oh my gosh.

It was the whitest food. Okay. I remember very clear it was like fish sticks, no-cooked pasta, salad or some kind of ham pies. I was willing to do anything. So I was like, yeah, give it to me. Was there ever a point where they were like, okay, you're Asian, you can make the Asian food? No, because at the time the white people were making the Asian food. This is true. I've checked it.

At Bon Appetit, but really across food journalism back then, almost all the bylines on recipes for Asian food were from white people, which was a surprise to Sue. Because before she started working there, she had assumed that her Taiwanese background would be an asset, like a thing that would help her stand apart from her white colleagues. But it started to become clear that neither her boss. nor the colleagues, were really interested in where she came from or what she had to say about it. It's almost funny. It's almost like they were telling me how to make a smash cucumber salad when I'm like, yeah, those are the things that I grew up eating. And were they telling it to you, like, you haven't heard of this or this is the correct and authentic way to make it? Or like, in what context? Like, they would tell me, like, well, this is how so-and-so at, for example, Pock, right, which is also owned by a white man.

they'd be like, oh, this is how so-and-so at Pock-Poc would make it. So obviously this is this person is the authority. And so obviously this is the way to make a smashed cucumber salad. And I'm like, okay, well, cool. Thanks. Back in 2012, Sue thought that she could succeed just by knowing her place, like keeping her head down and not making a fuss. If the editors didn't want to hear about what Asian people thought about Asian food, that was fine. A few years later, though, in 2015,

a very different temp recipe tester would figure out a loophole. He is a Mexican-American food writer who found a way to publish Mexican recipes at Bon Appetite without a ton of oversight. The key was just to put them on the Bon Appetite website, which the old guard of editors were not paying attention to. They just did not give a shit.

All they cared about was print. They also weren't willing to put up an effort to stop anyone. So we kind of had a blank check. Rick Martinez. He'd come to Bonap thinking that most of the Mexican recipes that they ran in the magazine were, in his words, idiotic. They were almost all created by white people. And so he wanted to introduce a vision of Mexican food that didn't just start with tacos and end with guacamole. Like this recipe for pork tamales, his take on a dish that his mother used to make.

It featured a red sauce with four different chilies in it. And he managed to put it on the Bon Appetit website. And I remember telling my dad how proud I was. Like, I was getting comments from, you know, Colombians, El Salvadorians, Aritanthenians, Brazilians that were all like, you did it. Like, you got this thing in there where, you know, where people of color didn't exist before. But sometimes a magazine editor would taste one of Rick's dishes, would love it, and tell him he should try to get this in the magazine.

And that would be where Rick's troubles would start. Because once the recipe was being considered for the magazine, it had to make it past the top editors. And some of those editors would have some version of this same question. What would my mom or sister or my friend back home think of this recipe? Would they own these ingredients? Like Adam Rappaport, editor-in-chief, asked Rick, does your tamale's recipe really need that many chilies? Which frustrated, Rick.

Remember, these recipes had already been proven popular. They'd found an audience online. All this proving he had to do, it made him feel like there was a double standard. You teach people how to make things like a bullionese, which probably to most Americans is also foreign and is also complicated. And it takes a long time.

And there's a very specific technique that is employed to create it. We're okay doing that, right? Or Claire did a sourdough, which took, I don't know, fucking three days. And I was like, I don't want to make this. you know, and I had a cross-test it. It was delicious, and I'm glad I went through it,

but, like, it was very, very complicated. And that was the centerpiece of an issue in print. And that was okay. But, you know, we couldn't possibly expect anyone to make a tamal that had three, God forbid, four chilies in it. But Rick did. the extra work. He called a bunch of supermarkets to make sure those chilies were easily available. He made the watered down version of the tamal to prove that it was watered down. And this is actually

a battle, one battle, that he won. The pork tamales made it to print. And it seemed like in general, Rick was winning the game that he was trying to play. The magazine even started assigning all kinds of Latin American recipes to him. And then one day, Rick was sitting with his boss in her office. And the deputy editor, Adam's right-hand person, his name is Andrew Nolton, he came in. He just walked in and basically he said to me, you know, you're doing a lot of Mexican recipes, and, you know, it must be really easy for you because you're just taking your mom's recipes and you ate this food every day. And I, like, I was so flabbergasted.

One of the big bosses was telling Rick, you're not really good at your job. You just know this stuff because you're Mexican. Like, you know, it's also, it's one of those things where you know that this mindset exists, but you don't often encounter it in your face as blatantly as that and as articulately as that, right? And also, like, in front of a witness who happened to be my boss. And Carla said to him, you need to leave my office. And he did. And then he later came up to me again.

and it wasn't necessarily an apology. It was more like an explanation as to why he said what he said. And he's like, look, I know you're capable of doing other things. I want to see you cooking Asian food. I want to see you cooking other types of cuisine. And I was like, Andrew, you're the one that makes the assignments. Like, I have no power in this. So you or someone else is seeing this story and giving it to me the Mexican-American.

So that is on you. Deputy editor, Andrew Nilton. He's the kind of character that shows up in a lot of stories about bad workplaces, a talented visionary with a habit of saying things that are completely not okay. People describe him moving smoothly from upstairs to downstairs, often with a drink in hand, casually telling one person their lunch smelled funny or another person cooking in the kitchen, I wouldn't come to your house for dinner.

Often people brushed him off, like that was just another Andrew thing. But Andrew was important. Until 2018, he was. Adam's right-hand person at Bon Appetit. He was in charge of this very important list that Bon Appetit put out every year, the list of hot 10 restaurants. And in his reign, there had always been a white chef in the top spot. Eleanor Park, who's Korean-American, told me about this one year, where that list topped again by another white chef, this time from a sandwich joint. She said, number three on that same list was a Chinese restaurant, owned by a Chinese-American chef

whose work she's very familiar with. She said that Chinese-American chef would make every everything from scratch, the dumpling wrappers, the soy sauce. And I'm like, it is so crazy to me that this guy got beat by like a white bologna making chef, but whatever. And again, it's that moment where you're like, whatever, Eleanor, this is like just in your head. And then Andrew was talking to me and he told me that he had eaten at this Chinese American chef's restaurant. And I was like, how was it?

And he said, oh, it was really good, but I've got to tell you something. Andrew goes on to say something Eleanor found extremely inappropriate about the wife of the chef, how attractive she was and what she was wearing. And then he says this thing that completely shocks her. So just as a background, the chef's wife is white and the chef is Chinese American. And he was like, don't get me wrong. He did really well for a Chinese guy. And that just like blew, that floored me.

that floored me and I was just like, you know, like, I know that maybe in people's minds, like, there's no connection between like getting number three in the top best restaurants list. But there is. There is. Because if you are saying in your mind subconsciously things like he did good for a Chinese guy, then number three is just fine for you. That's the thing. Because you're not really seeing him as a chef.

You're seeing him as a Chinese chef. And you've just completely demonstrated that in your conversation with you. me. I talked to Andrew Nulton, who remembered both incidents with Rick and Eleanor. And he said in both instances, quote, what I said was deplorable and it was equally disgraceful that I didn't have the strength of character to immediately take responsibility. He says he's sorry. How do we all find a word we agree on? A word that describes a place like the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen, a label for that kind of work environment. A bunch of listeners, I'm sure, have decided many minutes ago the word is racist, and even

more racist than the usual racist workplace. Some listeners are still wondering, maybe there's a good reason for all this, like their audience is white, so maybe the editors are just catering to them. Maybe this is how a food magazine operates. So those listeners might use a word like unhealthy or dysfunctional. The people who actually worked there, they also struggled to find the right word. And something that surprised me was that many of the white people at the top of Ben Appetit did not actually think that things were okay.

But the words that they used to describe how bad it was, it just described how bad it was for them. So white men, they'd call the place Condi Nasty, a cutthroat, status-obsessed high school of a job. White women could call it Bro-Apetit, the misogynous workplace where men held all the power. Because the place made them all feel like victims, they rarely stopped to think about what they ought to do to protect the people with even less power than them. The people of color, the temps. Those people, the way they describe Bon Appetit now, is that it was racist.

But at the time, it was also hard for them to articulate this feeling that they were having. The people you've heard from in this story, they're slightly older or their immigrants, and listening to them negotiate out what happened, I heard some of the same biases I have. I don't want to focus on the big institutional problems at my workplace. That would make me feel powerless. I would rather focus on my own work. The problem with that strategy, though, is that these people at Bon Appetit ended up accidentally absorbing the value systems of this place. Day in and day out, it became a part of them, part of how they saw themselves as lesser.

Here's Sully talking about something that happened there seven years ago. I remember around the time I left Bon Appetite the first time. there was a column called The Project. And at the time I said, you know, we're pitching ideas, I was like, how about soup dumplings? So background, soup dumplings, very popular Chinese food, incredibly popular in Taiwan. That's definitely a project, and I want to make it. Sue pitched the soup dumpling column idea to the editor in charge of that column. And the editor, a white woman, told her she was not interested.

I was like, all right, cool. Like, whatever. I'll move on. And she was like, but you know what you can? make as a project lasagna bolognese. I was like, okay, sure, no problem. And then I left Bonap. And then like I see that someone else made the soup dumpling recipe. And when you see someone else like a white person? Yeah, who is again also a friend and it's not her fault. She was like, we talked about it recently and she was like, you know, I've always

wonder how that got assigned to me. Again, I don't think it was her fault. And I was like, and also, didn't you have a good time exploring how to make it? And she was like, yes, 100%. And it's still something that she enjoys making. And I was like, so if you enjoyed making it, then that's all that matters. You enjoy the journey. To me, that's really important. But when you say that, Sue, I can hear a little bit of the pain in your voice where it's not just like a thing that you had been excited about and wanted to do and suggested it. It also feels like it would have been fun even for you to explore it. Yes. Right? Like I don't know. I guess I hear that that that's not what you're saying. Let's pass. Okay. I'm sorry. Am I? No, it's fine. It makes me really sad, but I don't want to get emotional. I don't think you should feel embarrassed about crying. about soup dumplings. Like, they're worth crying about. Yeah, I know. Right. I know it's so silly,

but I guess, I mean, I guess you're right. It's something that the fact that I would even remember it and bring it up obviously means that it has stayed with me and it's something that I revisit. Yeah, it doesn't feel good and it doesn't feel good to also have to think about it again. Like when all this stuff that was happening on the internet, like during the protests. During the protest, I would just like read a lot, listen to audiobooks, anything that kept me from reading the news or looking at Instagram. I took everything off because it brought back the type of memories. It brought back so many bad memories. And it made me feel so bad inside that I couldn't really like handle it. So yes, you're right. Talking about this, it does matter more. or to me than I guess what I'm saying than I'm being honest about. But it's also been several years. And I've worked through it and I've worked hard.

And quite honestly, I've moved on. Sue's moved on, but she's never gotten a real answer for why that happened. Like, why had she not been allowed to make those soup dumplings? And this column is in from 2015. If you pitched it earlier, was it like, the world only wanted bolognais in 2014. and by 2015, they were craving soup dumplings. Is that like...

I mean, perhaps. Who knows if the world wasn't ready for it, but that woman certainly wasn't ready for it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Because this is the other thing. If it came from an Asian voice, then is it too ethnic?

This is the question that I've been asking. Like, if it was a white person doing it, then it is an approachable meal. Yeah. I don't know. But you suspect. Yes. I spoke to the white editor who first rejected Sue's soup dumplings, and she said she could not remember why she'd done that, but it wasn't because Sue is Asian.

And that it was a different white editor who assigned the soup dumplings to Sue's friend in 2015. Sue is left, though, with this lingering suspicion that in 2015, an Asian name on an Asian recipe was considered a bad thing. And if nothing else, it's just sort of a crazy. marker for how quickly what we consider acceptable has changed. Because obviously any food magazine today would be happy to have an Asian byline on an Asian recipe. They would even seek it out. So how recently did that change? Well, a bon Appetit. If I had to pick a time, it would be October of 2020. I say that because that is when, five years after the magazine had originally published the soup dumpling recipe. They quietly went back to the website and retroactively added a byline to it.

The name of a different Asian woman who had helped with the recipe, but never gotten a byline. Of course, this change in attitude came too late for Sue and Yawande. Back in their day, Bon Appetit seemed studiously uninterested in hiring any of the temps that would have made their staff less white. Even while those temps were hanging out, willing to keep running through the gauntlets that the magazine set up for them. Like, if they saw a full-time position open out, up some entry-level thing. Yawande, Sue, Eleanor, they would take a breath,

rehearse what they wanted to say, and they'd go up to whoever was in charge of the test kitchen at the time. And I was like, hi, I really would like to be considered for this position. I know you told me that the other woman you're bringing in would be the first in line and she already got her job. So may I be considered for the second job?

Mm-hmm. And she was basically like, no. Hmm. No, you're not good enough. Mm-hmm. I was like, I'm interested, like I see you're interviewing people. I'm also interested in this position. And she sort of looked at me and was like, hmm, okay.

And like, that was it. Did she give you a reason why? No. She didn't give me a reason why. She didn't say, we don't think you would be a good fit. She didn't say anything. She was just like, okay. When I was let go eventually, all I was told was you're not a good fit.

And the fact that that is so vague, it stuck to my ribs for years. It was so cutting. It was so, it made me feel so bad. And I was like, okay, understood. So I put in my notice and I left. Because if you are being told by a white woman who's like second or third on the masthead, you're not a good fit, what does that say to you as a woman of color? I was like she doesn't believe my work is good enough.

Maybe I'm not doing good work. I'm not brilliant in the way that these people are. Like, I'm not brilliant in the way that the people and staff are. And so this makes sense, is what I told myself. Yawande would leave, though she would eventually get a call from Bon Appetit. It would come a few years later in 2016, by which point Yawande had 13 years of experience in food. She'd been at culinary school, worked at top restaurants, worked at the test kitchens of Sever, Bon Appetit, and had run an entire test kitchen at a food startup called Maple. When I was leaving Maple, I sent an email out to all my contacts in, like, food media.

I was like, hey, I'm leaving a full-time job. I'm going to be working on a cookbook. If you have any freelance gigs, if you have any styling that I could do, let me know. The person who ran the Bonap Test Kitchen at that point, Carla Lali Music, wrote back and said she might have something for her. So Juanda calls her. And I explained to Carla what I had been doing. And she's like, so we need an assistant to work with the food editors in the test kitchen. And I was like, oh, what do you mean? She's like, well, someone who can like prep their recipes and measure out their ingredients.

I was like, Carla, I just finished like running a test kitchen. And you worked at milk bar and other restaurants and already a proletude. And the people that were already food editors there, were like people that got hired with less experience than I had. And so essentially my job would be to like prep all their recipes and do the shopping for them or cleaning up after them. Yuanda turned her down. I asked Carla about this and she said she couldn't remember the exact position she had called Yuwanda about. But she was sure it would not have involved shopping or cleaning up.

She said she'd called Yuwanda because, quote, everyone in the kitchen loved working with, with her, including me, and I thought, maybe, maybe, there was a way we could make it work. I knew it was a long shot, and she was right to turn it down. For Yuande, though, turning Carla down was a big deal, a sign that something inside her was changing. She was starting to reject the ideas that she'd been absorbing from Bon Appetit about what jobs a black woman could or couldn't have. I had to remind myself of this. I grew up in a country, all black people.

My mom worked for Cadbury's chocolates, and I grew up, like, going to her test kitchen. I had to remind myself that, like, oh, wait, I have seen this before in another country with all black people. So I think that I, you know, I... And over there was all, everybody in the kitchen was black. It was black. And all the, all the researchers and all the food technologists and food engineers and scientists, all black. You know, and so I remember when I stopped going to the test kitchen, I stopped going because I was like, fuck this. Like if I want to work on cookbooks, I can work on cookbooks.

Like people can hire me to work on cookbooks and I can work in the comfort of my home and not have to go through like the intimidation and the negativity and nastiness that like the test kitchens that I had been in came lit. But I had to remind myself, oh my God, like my hands can appear in magazine photos. Or like when I take photos with my iPhone, I can put my hands in there. You know, like I'd been on set sometimes where they're like, all hands, we need hands. But like nobody asks, oh, Yawanda, can you put your hand? Because like I'm the only black person. Really? You know?

And it's like I had to, I had to see my. myself again and see that I belonged here. Yuanda had come to Bon Appetit to learn something, to learn to create recipes and make food look beautiful. But the real legacy of Bonap for her would be the things she had to unlearn from her time there. And that unlearning took years, both Yuanda and Sue. After the experiences they had here, they would for years take jobs working behind the scenes, things like food styling, things that didn't require fighting for bylines. But today, you can find them doing the work that they'd first dreamed of doing.

You can find them out front, developing their own recipes in the New York Times. And for anyone who's still wondering at this point, are they good? Just try their food. Suley's turmeric pasta or Ywanday's sheet pan go-choo-jang chicken. You can see for yourself. In the next episode, we're going to meet a new generation of people of color at Bon Appetit. And part of what makes the next chapter of this story so fascinating to me is that the People at the heart of it, they would be nothing like me or you one day or Sue.

And they will arrive at the Bonap of 2018, just as the brand is trying in a very Bonap way to become more diverse. I was kind of like, oh, we're like the only people of color. Like, oh, we were selected for a reason. And how these new people who they've brought in will try their damned us to hold a company to the promise that it's half making. Okay, it's a lot of white people who are all smiling and seem nice, but like, I'm from the South. I'm very used to nice white people. Everything was bullshit. We knew that.

How? Because we're black. Dead ass. But that is next week on Reply All. This series was reported by me, Shrithy, Panamanini. And it was edited by Damiano Mercetti, PJ Vote, with additional editing by Tim Howard. It was produced by Jessica Young and Lisa Wang. The rest of the repile team that has worked so hard for so many months to give us the space to report out this series is Beaubennon, Emmanuel Jochi, Anna Foley, and Alex Goldman.

We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Our show is fact-checked by Ben Phelan, music by Mariana Romano, Luke Williams, and Tim Howard. Rachel Premack is the Business Insider reporter who originally broke the story about the employees of color at Bon Appetit. We have a link to our articles. in our show notes. You should definitely read them. Special thanks this week to Amelia Ramp, Alex Lau, Elise Whitney, Luciana Lomboy, and many other people we cannot name who took so many hours of their life to talk to me about the early years of Bon Appetit. And thanks also to Samin Nasrat, Lydia Polgreen, Stephanie Fu, Kayama Glover, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Bethel Hoppe,

Neville Cholamput, Chris Crowley. And a huge thank you to Emily Wendon. You can listen to our show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you in a week.