Quote of the day below the paywall: “You cannot say which one is better: they are two different things, like two beautiful women, one blonde and one brunette.”
Good afternoon, everyone,
Last night I hosted our final Monday Scaries screening at Cobble Hill Cinemas. The movie was Creep. When I checked my phone afterwards, the director, Patrick Brice, had DM’d me. Maybe we’ll screen Creep 2 with him for Feed Me’s holiday movie screening series.
Travis Hunter, the editor of The Carroll Gardens Times, came to the screening and brought me a few copies of the printed Halloween edition of the newsletter. It has a beautiful full-color illustration inside but you’ll have to find a copy for yourself to see it. I told him that for Christmas, they should do a printed edition called The Christmas Carroll. Introductions like that are exactly what I hoped would transpire from that screening series.
Today’s newsletter includes: a Substack office party with Molly Young, a historical guest moment on TBPN, some strong cases for going out to dinner for Thanksgiving, Jennifer Lawrence’s latest interview is a red flag for her hair care brand, I predict Sweetgreen will launch a burger 🔮, the moms transforming New York City closets into nurseries, and where I ate next to LeBron last week.
FOR YOUR CALENDAR
🍔 Shy’s Burgers and Uncle’s Thai Food are collaborating on a curry burger at The River on Wednesday, October 28.
🧟♂️ Clothing and home store Salter House is hosting a conversation about Frankenstein as female autobiography on Thursday, October 29.
📺 Molly Young and father_karine are hosting a conversation about reality TV at the Substack office in New York (which has been hosting more events recently) on Monday, November 2.
📖 Ace Hotel and Fashion Fiction Magazine are celebrating the publication of Saskia Wilson-Brown’s book, The Cultures of Perfume, with readings by Taylore Scarabelli, Brendon Holder, and others on Monday, November 9.
This week only: get an annual subscription to Feed Me for $80 $56.
The owners of the Italian restaurant I Sodi bought their whole building. Rita Sodi and Jody Williams (the owners of I Sodi, Via Carota, Buvette, The Commerce Inn, and Bar Pisellino) purchased the retail condo at 312–314 Bleecker Street (the building I Sodi is in) for $6.5 million. This is part of an existing but increasingly popular trend of hospitality operators buying the buildings their restaurants are in. Caprice Holdings, part of Abu Dhabi-based DIAFA, bought the Meatpacking building that will house the soon-to-open Annabel’s members’ club (DIAFA also has a majority stake in Annabel’s). Last year, the team behind Rosemary’s bought the $9.3 million building that houses the Greenwich Village restaurant. Sol Forman, the owner of Peter Luger, bought the building that houses the Brooklyn steakhouse for $35,000 in 1950; his family still owns it. So why would Sodi and Williams invest in real estate? “The big benefit is that you create value for yourself, not others, so you can determine your future,” one restaurateur told me this morning. I Sodi, which serves $27 lasagna and $42 branzino, is packed most nights of the week. But even the most popular and successful restaurants in New York can be undone by an untimely rent hike. The Real Deal makes the case that the upside to restaurants owning their spaces – especially West Village ones that have so much capital – is obvious: “No worrying about bad landlords or lease negotiations or, in the worst case, getting booted from a space. But it’s only the large and well-capitalized restaurant groups able to take over their own space.”
Moves ➡️ :
Former Poppi CMO Jenny Danzi is Liquid I.V.’s new CMO. Danzi spent 17 years at PepsiCo (which acquired Poppi for $2 billion in 2025) working in branding and marketing. Liquid I.V. was acquired by Unilever for $500 million in 2020. Last week, Poppi’s founder Allison Ellsworth announced a new hydration brand called Jetty. Responses to the launch have been rough.
Amy Weisenbach, former CMO of The New York Times, joined global learning platform Coursera as CMO. Unlike MasterClass (where users learn about grief from Prince Harry and Italian cooking from Massimo Bottura), Coursera offers more technical courses like Google Data Analytics and Excel Skills for business. Weisenbach wrote on LinkedIn, “When I joined in 2017, The Times had about 2 million subscribers. Today it has more than 13 million.”