Welcome to the latest edition of Food52 Founder Amanda Hesser’s weekly newsletter, Hey There, It’s Amanda, packed with food, travel, and shopping tips, Food52 doings, and other matters that catch her eye. Get inspired—sign up here for her emails.
Food52 started with community. Before we launched the site, we put out a call for people to upload videos of their kitchens, highlighting their favorite tools and design details—and the annoying parts, too, like a dishwasher door that obstructs access to the garbage or cake pans that don’t stack neatly. When we launched the site in September of 2009, we held weekly recipe contests around themes like “Your Best Chocolate Cake” or “Your Best Paella.” We’d read all the entries, test and photograph the most promising ones, and put the best two recipes up for a vote. This is how we built a curated recipe database—and, more importantly, how we got to know each other!
The comment sections were so chatty, opinionated, and helpful, that we decided to launch Hotline, so Food52ers would have a place to ask questions and share their knowledge. Later on, our community helped us design exceptional products for our product line Five Two.
I’m reminding you all of this community DNA because we’re launching a new and exciting way to feature our community. We’ve asked our creative community to pitch us cooking, home, and living social video series. As our team wrote, “we’re looking for ideas that teach, inspire, and feel rooted in real home life. You don’t need to be a full-time influencer (though we love those too!). Just bring a strong point of view, a camera presence, and a concept that feels true to you.”
If you’ve got an idea, send us a note—or if you know someone great, please nudge them in our general direction! Submit ideas here.
Some Recipes We're Making
• On It’s Fine with Tess Gigone, she conquers the seafood tower with scallops, crab, lobster, tuna tartare, shrimp cocktail, and mignonette sauce, ofc.
• Nea created a glistening and tidy Raspberry & Lemon Tart—here’s her video that has 13,000 likes and counting!
• This week’s Yes, Chef episode features Jonah Reider, chef and owner of The Spot. He showed us how to pull off Poached Fish With Potatoes, Greens & Beurre Monté without breaking a sweat.
Some Products We're Proud Of
Over the past year, we’ve been reissuing some Dansk classics: salad bowls, servers, and bar boards. We recently released a design that’s much rarer: Jens Quistgaard’s copper cookware for Dansk. Its elegance is a thrilling counterpoint to everything we know about the sturdy, husky copper cookware we’ve all seen in French restaurants, in cookware stores, and on shows like Downton Abbey. My fellow newsletter writer, Paul, did a deep dive on it here.
And this dinnerware is not a Dansk classic, but it’s a great seller at a very good price—I have a few sets! Dansk Kisco is back.
If you haven’t gotten it together for Mother’s Day—it's coming up fast!—we recently added some more Abigail Ahern Faux Floral Stems. Fake flowers give me the heebies-jeebies, but not these. Take a look.
Eagerly awaiting your social video series,
Amanda
English (US) · 