On the Front Lines of the Advent Calendar Wars

Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly column covering the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last time we covered the mysterious hackers hitting refrigeration systems.I’m starting today’s Open Tab with my favorite thing in the world: a morsel of exclusive news. In chatting with BA alum Alison Roman about First Bloom, her soon-to-open NYC storefront (more on that from me very soon), she told me she’s releasing a new podcast that will be officially announced early next week.I’m mostly sworn to secrecy until Roman drops the trailer, but I can tell you there will be cooking, there will be guests, and there will be banter. But, she said, this project will be distinctly different from her earlier work. “I'm not going back to Home Movies. I'm just not,” she told me over the phone earlier this week.Also in today’s Open Tab: How much more ridiculous can advent calendars get? Was this NYC gay bar actually designed by AI? And, how is Andy Baraghani thinking about his first restaurant?Where do you stand in the advent calendar wars?Gone are the days when advent calendars were essentially manufactured cardboard inside of which you could find some of the most unfortunate-tasting chocolate ever produced. These days we’ve moved beyond chocolate. Some advent calendars open to reveal tinned fish, others jewelry, and still others skincare products. Google Trends data shows search interest for advent calendars has grown steadily for the past five years, and as writer Emily Bloch reported for Bon Appétit, the global advent calendar market is expected to grow to $2.47 billion by 2033.Part of the appeal, as Bloch mentions, is the little-treat-culture of it all. It’s nice to open up a little surprise each day. But another element, surely, is the content that’s made around advent calendars. There are the unboxings—tailormade for the short-form vertical video format which rewards reveals—and there are the scandals. Who could forget (everyone except me, realistically) the backlash against Chanel’s $825 advent calendar in 2021 when customers declared the included products decidedly lackluster? This year Skims faces a similar backlash for its $148 advent calendar for which it is now offering refunds.But drama and outrage gets attention, which in turn fuels more content. And as the Kardashian clan knows better than most, no matter what the public is saying, at the end of the day they’re still talking about you. Thus, the advent calendar cycle continues for another year, growing ever greater. Will we ever summit the peak of the advent calendar craze? So far, the data says no.Are we in the age of AI restaurant design?If you’ve read—or even skimmed—this column in the past, you’ve likely gleaned that I often point out the many fumblings of AI—one could argue I make a sport of it. That’s why, when I saw grumblings online that a new gay bar in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen looked like it had been designed by Chat-GPT, I felt a morbid curiosity begin to bubble. The bar, commenters said, was so deeply on-the-nose gay bar-coded it simply couldn’t have been made by a human brain. It was named Pride Bar x Lounge (a bit first thought, right?), and its decor is essentially just rainbow flags. It kind of looks like how they’d design a gay bar in a Netflix show, which is to say: almost impressively bland.In a report from the New York Times the two co-owners say that they did not in fact use any AI in designing the bar, which has cost about $5 million so far to come to fruition. The posters released to promote the bar which had also received some heat, on the other hand, were in fact made using AI.The saga is an interesting data point in the public’s perception of what is an appropriate way to use this tech: making a grocery list? Sure. Using it to help you figure out what exactly you like about your own child? Absolutely not. Asking AI to help you plan a trip? I guess. Using it to design a gay bar? Hard no.Inside Andy Baraghani’s new restaurant, DittoFormer Bon Appétit food editor Andy Baraghani is likely familiar to readers of this publication. But now, after years of cooking for others—on the line at Chez Panisse, here in the Test Kitchen—he’s opening his own restaurant, Ditto, in Union Square. “There’s an explicit confidence you’ll see,” he told Ella Quittner, who profiled him for BA. Read on to see how Baraghani’s vision comes to life at his first ever restaurant.