Entertainment
Eric Wareheim wants to feed you steak
For three years, Eric Wareheim ate a lot of steak.
We’re talking three steakhouse meals a day, complete with sides and sauces. Towers of onion rings stacked high, bone-in rib-eyes, bubbling pots of lobster mac and cheese, fries and meats drowning in au poivre. His mission in traversing the country was, in part, figuring out how to define the “uniquely American” institution at the center of his new cookbook, “Steak House: The People, The Places, The Recipes.”
The comedian and director who made his name with the TV series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” has, in recent years, dipped into the wine trade as a co-founder of Las Jaras and launched a plant-art business. But of all his enterprises and hobbies, “Steak House” proved the most demanding — and one of the most rewarding.
“I went deep and I don’t regret it,” he said from a red leather booth at the Smoke House in Burbank.
Eric Wareheim’s new cookbook, “Steak House,” surrounded by a classic spread from Smoke House.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Times)
Wareheim, co-author Gabe Ulla and photographer Marcus Nilsson originally set out to document the country’s 10 “best” steakhouses, but ended up visiting more than 70 restaurants — and went so far over budget that Wareheim began financing their research himself. It‘s been a long time, he said, since he’s felt that deep passion and conviction for a project.
“I could honestly say this project was more work-intensive and longer than any project I’ve done, any film or TV show I wrote,” Wareheim said. “Because I really care about the people, it was bigger than just vanity. It was important that I did it right.”
Making of a steak maven
Through Wareheim’s travels in entertainment, wine and food, he’s dined at some of the finest restaurants in the world. But he‘s never forgotten the steakhouse of his childhood, which wasn’t so much a classic interpretation but a place called Seafood Shanty, located in the largest mall in Pennsylvania. He fell in love with the large booths, the AC cranked up high, the seafood and the steak.
While Wareheim loves a martini (gin, stirred and garnished with blue cheese olives, ideally), “Steak House” devotes a chapter to pairing wines with steak. His winery, Las Jaras, just released a Steak House Cabernet Sauvignon for the occasion.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Times)
Later, he learned his way around eating rib-eye in a tuxedo as co-host of the long-running Beefsteak — an annual steak-centered fundraiser at Neal Fraser’s Vibiana in the spirit of the 1930s-era utensil-less meat feasts described in a classic Joseph Mitchell story.
But it’s not just the steak that Wareheim loves. The comfort and gravitas of a carpeted, worn dining room and a menu that rarely changes are also essential to Seafood Shanty and steakhouses across the country.
“I think that’s the bigger story of this book: the giving of joy that these places do,” he said. “It is their job. It isn’t their job to get a Michelin star. It isn’t their job to get on a blog or make some new dish to wow some hipster. It’s to make the same consistent food for a person that’s been coming here for 50 years.”
And in a time when the country feels more fragmented than ever, Wareheim sees it as a kind of connective tissue. “Everyone,” he said, “loves a steakhouse.”
The son of a German immigrant, Wareheim set out to understand the web of cultural influences that contribute to the modern American steakhouse: There are spotlights on David Chang’s interpretation at L.A.’s Majordomo, where flatbread — or bing — replace traditional dinner rolls and the prime rib features a shio koji rub. Did a fully Vietnamese version of the steakhouse exist? What about a Mexican iteration?
“There are parts of this country that still feel like the Wild West, in a good way,” Wareheim said. “You can experiment, you can be anyone and open up a steakhouse. You can just do your own thing.”
Los Angeles and Las Vegas steakhouses, he believes, lean into the Rat Pack era of red leather booths and massive shrimp cocktails. But by no means do steakhouses need to follow that path, or any other.
Prime cuts
“Steak House” is 200 pages of sheer Americana, and a slice of quick-disappearing history.
Places “were closing, literally, a week after we were there, or bought up by restaurant groups,” Wareheim said. By the time he’d made it to Cattlemen’s, in Dallas, half of it was already demolished to make way for more modern renovations. “Steak House” arrived right on time to capture some of the country’s best mom-and-pop operations.
He’d been searching for inspiration, unsure how to follow his 2021 bestselling cookbook, “Foodheim.”
While shooting a commercial with his longtime creative partner Tim Heidecker, surrounded by large corporate chains in North Carolina, Wareheim took to researching nearby restaurants: a pastime while on the road for every gig.
“That’s all that matters,” he said. “The job doesn’t matter. It’s like, ‘Where are we eating?’”
Wareheim’s restaurant-curator reputation was on the line: Beef ’N Bottle, which he’d found on Google, was an hour from their hotel and he was the only one who wanted to make the drive.
“We get there, and it’s just perfection,” he said. “It was like a William Eggleston photo. And then we met Jerome [Williams], and he greeted us with open arms and said, ‘You guys have a great time tonight, I’m your server and your bartender, what kind of martini do you want?’ And those three things? I get goosebumps just telling you.”
Williams and the other faces and roles that provide the charm and hospitality of a steakhouse are featured throughout, adding context and personality to a tome that provides recipes and history as well as a glimpse behind the curtain. There’s the “cellar rat” turned sommelier who worked at Tampa’s Bern’s for over three decades. There’s Chicago’s Durpetti family, who’ve been serving Italian and steakhouse classics and employ a valet who might even offer you cigarettes from his own stash. There’s the “legend” Katrina, a dancer and bartender at Portland’s famous strip club-cum-steakhouse, Acropolis.
“Meeting the people who make these places run was a joy, and how passionate they were is as passionate as I am,” Wareheim said.
Wareheim’s new cookbook, “Steak House,” dives deeper than recipes, with portraits and profiles of the chefs, servers and cleaning staff who make steakhouses run.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Times)
To find these places and people, Wareheim researched restaurants online and asked chef and entertainment friends their personal favorites. (The resounding winner? The Golden Steer in Las Vegas.)
He received rare, full access to Peter Luger in New York City and recipe guidance from the likes of Sean Brock, Jon Shook, Vinny Dotolo and Fraser. When restaurants couldn’t divulge their secret recipes, some attempts required a full reverse-engineering to figure them out — a specialty of L.A.-based recipe developer and food stylist Jasmyn Crawford. A lot of their own recipes, Wareheim said, turned out better than the originators.
He and his team accumulated so much material that they had to cut dozens of profiles and recipes from the final product, a process that Wareheim called excruciating.
“It was brutal,” he said. “It was harder than any film I’ve cut, any video, any piece of writing.”
What remained in “Steak House” were Wareheim’s prime cuts. T-Pain shows off his favorite haunt in Atlanta. In L.A., At Taylor’s in L.A., Wareheim sits down with Bob Odenkirk, Heidecker and John C. Reilly, and they discuss past jobs working in restaurants. (Notably omitted from the book is the fact that as a teen, Wareheim used to flip burgers and would make six for himself, then eat them while hiding in the bathroom; a co-worker narced and he was fired.)
Wareheim is just as interested in rumination as recipe.
What makes a steakhouse? Does it require attention to marbling and dry aging? Must it serve creamed spinach? Can it be Seafood Shanty, tucked into a sprawling mall in Southeast Pennsylvania? The train of thought derails as soon as the server at Smoke House presents a large silver tray, its display slices of cakes layered and its pies adorned with ice cream.
An enthusiastic “Oh wow!” escapes Wareheim’s lips before he orders the coconut cake. Why bother classifying the steakhouse at all when you can simply be wowed by it?
Lots of disturbing movies take place at summer camps. “Friday the 13th,” “Sleepaway Camp,” “Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation,” the list goes on, and it just keeps going because shoving dozens of kids into an emotional pressure cooker at the edge of civilization with minimal supervision and no escape is usually a bad idea. And that’s before you give them all bows and arrows.
Avalon Fast’s sophomore feature isn’t a typical summer camp horror movie. It’s a trippy, melancholic tragedy about healing psychic wounds, and finding out they’re already infected. Try to imagine an angsty, indie teen drama that’s parasitically burrowing its way into a Florence + The Machine music video. Now imagine it’s in theaters now and it’s called “Camp.”
“Truth or Dare” is a crappy game, even on “Love Island,” but it’s even crappier at the start of “Camp.” The halfhearted young friends of Emily (Zola Grimmer) can barely muster enough gusto to come up with a dare, and when they give up, their fallback “truth” is just asking her for her biggest regret. It may have been a haircut. It may have been the time she ran over a four-year-old with her car. Either way it’s a lousy icebreaker.
As if her night couldn’t get any worse, Emily’s best friend overdoses in her car, sending her spiraling into grief and misery. Months go by and her father arranges to get her a camp counseling gig, looking after other troubled youths at a place called only “Camp.” (I’d say the least plausible part of Fast’s film is that the domain name “camp.net” wasn’t already taken, but shut my mouth, because it really isn’t.)
The kids are non-entities, a vague distraction from her worries, but her fellow counselors are badasses. They smoke. They drink. They say things like, “I feel like doing drugs” and look, you gotta give ‘em credit, when they say they’re going to do something they do it. I can’t even take the recycling downstairs most of the time and here these girls are, saying they feel like doing drugs and then doing the damn drugs, making me feel like a lazy jerk.
There’s just one problem. Or maybe there isn’t. Emily’s new cohort, led by the alluring and oddly motherly Clara (Alice Wordsworth), begins each summer with a ritual to make their wishes come true. Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis) wishes to have sex with their boss, Dan (Austyn Van De Camp), “really, really hard” and wouldn’t you know it, her wish was essentially a command.
Avalon Fast knows that’s wrong, but she knows her characters don’t care very much. Dan starts trudging across the camp grounds, confused and disturbed. He was saving himself for marriage, the poor guy, and looks like he’s on the verge of something terrible. But sacrificing Dan’s virginity gave Emily and her friends a taste of power, and it manifests in sparkly animated hand flourishes, which do nothing, it seems, except look cool. But it’s their power and they’re taking it, and they’ll take a lot more.
The problem with describing the plot of Fast’s “Camp” is that it places way, way too much emphasis on the plot. This movie doesn’t run from scene to scene, it gradually sinks into emotional rot. Emily thinks she’s getting better, finding friends and — in her own way — finding her spirituality. It’s just a selfish, detached spirituality and sees no value in anyone else’s feelings. Or anything else about them. What looks like a film about finding your way back from the darkness is, instead, a labyrinth that Emily probably can’t solve. She may not even want to.
“Camp” is a dreary, disturbing day dream of a movie, the kind you have when you’re all in your feels and close to getting heatstroke. It’s not about getting better, it’s about getting worse, and how that sometimes feels like getting better. You may not have worked through your baggage, you may not have processed your trauma, but at least everything looks simple. You can just while away your days with excess, abandoning all empathy, even for yourself.
It’s a sad film, “Camp,” and it’s a little tricky. Fast is working with familiar horror movie clichés, and falling into the old routine where witchcraft is initially empowering, then horrifying, and that probably doesn’t do real-life witches many favors. Then again, neither do a lot of the classic witch films — especially “The Craft,” the goth 1990s elephant in the room — and most of them aren’t as emotionally salient as Fast’s interpretation, although they’re typically more “fun.”
“Camp” isn’t a fun movie. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the way it is. Avalon Fast’s gloomy, lo-fi aesthetic occasionally segues into ornate, gorgeous imagery, proving the filmmaker — and cinematographer Eily Sprungman — are in total creative control. Fast wants us to feel Emily’s despair and the futile moral ambiguity of her distractions. It’s a cautionary tale, perhaps, about not hanging out with the wrong crowd, or taking solace in mind-altering experiences, but more than anything it’s a sympathetic mirror, and it’s pointed at anyone who ever got lost.
As La Cruz continues to break down barriers for the LGBTQ+ community in reggaeton, the rising Venezuelan star enjoys living out his gay fantasies in his music videos. Take the sultry video for his 2023 breakthrough single, “Quítate La Ropa,” which sees shirtless men perreando (twerking) before him in a locker room.
But at the same time, La Cruz has come to understand that his platform as a gay reggaeton artist coincides with a time when conservatism is sweeping the globe — and queer rights are receding.
“It fills me with happiness to represent a community that has been denigrated, treated badly and pushed into a corner for many years,” a bedheaded La Cruz says over Zoom from his New York City hotel room. (He had just performed at a Pride event the night before.)
“It’s a fact that [LGBTQ] rights are becoming progressive, but they’re rolled back even faster than they advance,” he adds. “This is very painful and concerning. This is happening in every country in different ways. During these difficult times, I’m going to keep putting my heart into my music more than ever.”
La Cruz is the stage name of Alfonso La Cruz. The native of La Guaira, a coastal city in Venezuela, pursued a music career after relocating to Spain in 2015. Following a brief stint on the singing competition “Operación Triunfo” three years later, La Cruz was closeted and found his momentum stifled. In 2022, he took the brave step of singing about his affection and lust for other men in his debut album, “Hawaira.”
Venezuelan reggaeton singer La Cruz released his new EP, “El Nene, Vol. 2,” on June 11.
(Maria Camila Pinzon)
Backed by the beats of reggaeton, a genre that had historically excluded the LGBTQ+ community, La Cruz found both his groove and his tribe with hits like “Te Conocí Bailando” and “Quítate La Ropa.” Early supporters included Colombian superstar Karol G, as well as Mexican American R&B singer Omar Apollo.
Alongside Puerto Rican provocateurs like Young Miko and Villano Antillano, La Cruz has continued to queer the heteronormative urbano space. He has also pushed his sound to broader horizons in his new EP, “El Nene, Vol. 2,” which includes “Sírveme,” a Brazilian funk banger with drag pop star Gloria Groove — and “Te Perdí,” a touching tribute to the victims and survivors of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla.
La Cruz’s EP dropped on June 11, the day before the 10th anniversary of that tragedy, which largely impacted the queer Latino community. In an interview with The Times, he opened up about being a gay reggaetonero and “Te Perdi,” his tribute to the 49 people lost at Pulse.
It’s been three years since you first went viral with “Quítate La Ropa.” What have you learned about yourself during that time?
There are songs that have brought me a lot of love and I’m thankful to my fans that consider that song to be a classic. It’s brought me a lot of blessings. At this moment, I feel like I have the best opportunities in my life. However, I feel like the industry is a bit uncomfortable with an artist that’s openly gay and wants to be a part of this. That hasn’t stopped me at all. It’s the gasoline in my motor. It’s what pushes me to keep working hard. My fans are what’s building my career and I won’t let them down. I’m sticking with this until the end.
You connected with Karol G early in your career. Did she give you any advice when you met her?
I want to say publicly that I would love to open for her concerts on her Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour. I’m very close to her. I love her so much. She has always treated me with so much love. I hope that something between me and her can happen sometime. I know everything happens in due time. I told her that I love the way she is and how she connects with her fans. When I see her singing and performing, I feel like she’s a sister to me. A big piece of advice that she gave me and that I’ll always carry with me is to never lose the humility and closeness that I have with my fans. The key to success is humility. I never want to be out of reach. I want people to see me and say, “I want to achieve my dreams like he has.”
How did your collaboration “Sírveme” with Gloria Groove come together?
I love her so much! I’ve always been a big fan of hers. I’ve gotten close to a lot of artists in Brazil and Gloria has been one of them. We didn’t think twice about making this song. Gloria was coincidentally traveling to the amusement parks in Orlando. I told her: “Baby, let’s go! I’m ready for you in Miami.” She told me: “Baby, I’m going to Miami!” We met one afternoon to create this song. She paused her vacation to go to the studio with me. It was very beautiful. I love my Brazilian fans.
With “El Nene, Vol. 2,” why was it important for you to also shed a light on the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting?
In 2016, when I recently arrived in Spain and my brother recently arrived in the U.S., we had a call with our family. My brother said, “There was a shooting close to where I live and it was in a gay club.” My family has supported me since I first told them about my sexuality. I thought that that could’ve happened to me.
I’m following up on this tragedy because it shaped my life. As the years go on, information about this attack has faded away. Each day people are talking less about it. It’s a tragedy that’s super important to remember, like 9/11 and the [2017] Las Vegas shooting, because it’s one of the worst attacks in U.S. history. Why are we not talking about it anymore? We have to keep talking about things so that they don’t happen again.
What inspiration did you pull from the Pulse tragedy for your song “Te Perdí”?
On this path, I’ve gotten to know the stories of people that survived that shooting. For example, there was a boy with his mother that lost her life and he survived. There’s a lot of stories of love from that club that have [since] come out. When I went to the studio, I was inspired by loss, or a love that’s gone away, with respect and love for the community that supports me. It is my gift, to be a voice for this situation that should never be repeated. There are people that don’t know about this tragedy and I want to let the world know that this happened. I hope that the victims’ families and the people that survived are living lives of peace and calm.
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, Julia Broberg sits down with Hekla Petursson and Catori Ryan to talk about “Toy Story 5.”
The hosts gave their reviews and provided the following star ratings:
Catori: ★★★★
Hekla: ★★★★★
Julia: ★★★★.2
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
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