A New York Restaurant Critic Is Reduced To Eating Beans Like The Rest Of Us

Adam Platt is a gourmand, an epicure, a man who lives to eat and makes his living by eating. Now, like most of the rest of us, the New York food critic is stuck at home—in his case, a small apartment in Lower Manhattan—with his wife, two daughters, and a seemingly infinite supply of beans.

Why beans? That's a good goddamned question too. At some point early on in this calamitous chapter in the life of New York City, everybody we knew, in the digital food world and beyond, started hoarding beans, so in our haphazard way, we started hoarding them, too: black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, cannellini beans, great northern beans, and can after can of Mrs. Platt's favorite, the dreaded, though suddenly trendy, chickpea.

Over the course of several weeks—no one is sure how long, because time is an abstract concept these days—members of the Platt family took turns preparing bean dishes for one another and rating them on a star system. It sounds way more entertaining than any family quarantine in a small apartment has any right to be—and probably more than it really was. Still, Platt's account is delightful and maybe it will give you ideas for your own beans.

(Note: Platt concentrates only on the gastronomy of bean-eating, not the gastrointestinal effects. Proceed at your own risk.)