New and Old #274
The past wasn't better, grocery tourism, the decline of ice cream trucks, and the decline of Kitchen Nightmares
The immaculate conception of your neighborhood, City Observatory, Joe Cortright, September 24, 2015
[T]he “immaculate conception theory” of neighborhood development….is common all around the country, in communities of many ages—from colonial Boston to postwar Minneapolis—and sets powerful background assumptions about what affordable, friendly neighborhoods can and should look like that inform many of our debates about housing. These assumptions mostly revolve around the idea that older housing was built the right way: ethically, modestly, with an eye to community rather than profit. These older values, in turn, highlight the faults of modern buildings: gaudy and wasteful, disruptive to existing communities, and motivated only by money.
Those old bungalow neighborhoods, for example, were just lovely homes arranged in a perfect low-key urban form, right?
[M]any of the arbiters of taste at the Seattle Magazines of the bungalow era believed those new bungalow neighborhoods “ruined” the character of the places they were built, just as new apartment buildings are maligned today. They even had a snappy put-down for it: “bungalow disease.” “Tradition has broken down,” wrote the British planner Thomas Sharp, describing a proliferation of bungalows on both sides of the Atlantic, and “taste is utterly debased…. The old trees and hedgerows…have given place to concrete posts and avenues of telegraph poles, to hoardings and enamel advertising signs.” Closer to Berger’s home, Architectural Record reviewed Seattle’s building boom in 1912 and, in an otherwise positive article, pronounced the quality of its new homes “disappointing.”
This is one of the reasons housing/urbanism is challenging to a lot of regular people; it requires them (us) to accept that our perceptions are subjective, our narratives are just our own way of making sense of randomness, and nostalgia is basically useless if not almost a kind of vice. It feels a little like a demand to accept chaos and the absence of meaning. At least, there’s a part of me that feels this way and which I have to occasionally argue against with myself.
On the other hand, it’s obviously true that new things are controversial, but once they’ve been hallowed by time and rendered familiar, they just become background facts of life. This is why I think some kind of continuity in the built environment is a good thing, despite thinking we should allow places to grow and mature.
The Rise of Grocery Tourism, The Freeman, Golden Eye, July 2, 2026
Five days in New York and not a single trolley. I still consider this one of the great failures of my professional life.
Japan was different because come hell or highwater, I was finding a supermarket, and I did. Japan has KitKats in flavors that sound like haiku composed during a fever. There are soft drinks made of melon and sandwiches so neat they seem to have been assembled by watchmakers.
I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.
I also find supermarkets to be one of the most interesting things to visit in foreign countries, or even in different parts of the United States. (For example, in Montana a supermarket likely sells bison or elk meat of some sort, which is rarer out here on the East Coast.)
I suppose I understand this implicitly, but I’ve seen it put this way, and it’s rather insightful:
Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.
Museums tell you what a country wants to remember. Restaurants tell you what it wants photographed. Supermarkets tell you what it eats at 6:14 PM when everyone is tired and dinner has become a hostage negotiation. They tell you whether a nation believes in breakfast or whether its citizens require 12 flavors of mayonnaise or 87 yogurts. They disclose the private life of a destination complete with its anxieties and emergency snacks. They reveal the daily economic choices of consumers.
Read the whole thing.
How Britain went cold on ice cream vans, The Spectator, Zak Asgard, July 21, 2026
The Spectator is a mix of tabloidy conservative commentary, a little New York Post-like, and bits of back-of-the-book stuff like this. I love these little nostalgic essays on things that seem to be fading away. There’s reactionary sentiment here, or “the world is going to hell because [thing I liked as a kid] is not popular anymore.” It’s just a little melancholy but matter-of-fact meditation on delightful things from the past that had their day.
Everything changed on St Patrick’s Day, 1956, when Irish brothers William and James Conway took their pimped-out truck around the streets of West Philadelphia to sell a Hulk-green ice cream for the occasion. After a successful launch, the brothers decided to make the truck their full-time business. They called it ‘Mister Softee’.
Apparently this preceded the ice cream truck in England, which was directly inspired by Mister Softee. But:
the glory days were short-lived. By the mid-1980s, the impervious glacier of the ice cream van industry was beginning to melt (I apologise for the shoehorned pun). The rise of domestic freezers, supermarket supremacy and noise restrictions all facilitated the ice cream van’s decline.
That’s interesting, that supermarkets cut into the ice cream truck business. But it sounds right, because home freezers were not universal in the 1950s and the supermarket industry was growing rapidly, and the stores were getting bigger, with more products.
So much happened in just a few decades.
Why the revival series just isn’t working for me, r/KitchenNightmares, Reddit
I thought this was an insightful comment:
One of the things about the original run of Kitchen Nightmares that makes it feel as timeless as it does is that you can FEEL the recession hanging over every episode like a dark cloud. The late 2000s to early 2010s were a prime time for people to opportunistically “buy a restaurant on a whim” or open a restaurant with no experience because that was more or less the economic climate back then, and it was one of the leading causes of so many places being shut down. In a lot of those classic episodes, you can absolutely see the financial strain it’s putting on the owners and people who work there. The fact that a lot of them didn’t say open after the show is (albeit unintentionally) another reason a lot of them are as poignant as they are; in a lot of episodes it’s clear that a lot of the owners used the show as an excuse to get a free remodel, and later they’d pay for it the hard way. Really, the original run is a perfect storm: recession, overcrowded market, lack of experience from the people who own the restaurants, lack of respect for the people who work there, and Ramsay using his experience in the industry to help places that, for all intents and purposes probably should have just shut down stay open- it’s a perfect storm of aspects that makes for intriguing reality television.
Someone else notes that the Great Recession may not have been a time when lots of ordinary people were buying restaurants, and the show premiered in September 2007, meaning that the first episodes were probably filmed and produced before the recession hit. But I completely get what he means that the shadow of the recession loomed over those shows.
Despite the American version of Kitchen Nightmares playing up interpersonal drama between Ramsay and the restaurant people, or the restaurant staffs’ intra-staff disputes, I did always think those episodes actually taught something important. They showed the kind of despair people can themselves into, just by making mistakes; how a decision can just keep reverberating, such that cutting corners and serving frozen slop can be a little ripple that leads to the collapse of your finances or your marriage. You can blow up your life without ever having done anything wrong. There was always a loneliness and a sense of being trapped, and under the reality-TV drama those episodes were warnings and tragedies.
The new ones are fun—Gordon Ramsay is never not funny doing his incredulous “Wow” or dejected “F*ck me” or screaming “How old is this?”, but that undercurrent of the fragility of human endeavor is absent.
Related Reading:
Aw jeez, I've always loved going to grocery stores when I'm away from home. Does every normal thing have to become a social media trend?