STEVE GOLDSTEIN: It is a Friday, so time for something a little bit lighter, and that is food. So, Mark, you know, food can really bring you back to a place, like make you feel at home with memories.
MARK BRODIE: I sure do. Anytime you big, you bite into one of those big floppy, like, greasy style, New York style pizza slices, right back on the East Coast. Maybe a nice cup of clam chowder as well.
GOLDSTEIN: Wow. OK. You're mixing there. Good. Well, a lot of Philadelphia natives in the Valley felt the same way when they heard the Philly Pretzel Factory was reopening in Goodyear. And that includes Phoenix New Times's food critic and friend of The Show, Chris Malloy.
BRODIE: Yeah, I might have to make a visit out there. Those Philly pretzels are really tasty.
GOLDSTEIN: More salt. More salt, please. Yes. Here's our co-host, Lauren Gilger, talking with Malloy about not just Philly pretzels, but a lot of the ways in which food can bring us all some much needed comfort right now.
CHRIS MALLOY: So Philly pretzels in the Philly area are a pretty big deal. You know, it's a snack that people eat in the morning, at night, on the street, at football games, you know, with mustard, plain, any season. It's a popular thing, you know. Now that an outpost for finding them is opening here, it's pretty exciting for people from the Philly area and South Jersey, too, especially in these hard times when you're looking for a little taste of home.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So it sounds like you take a bite of a Philly pretzel and it makes you feel a little bit more, a little nostalgic, maybe brings you back.
MALLOY: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's something that, as a young kid, you know, when you're from that area, many people grow up eating. It's, it's doughy and, you know, it's warm, a little bit of salt and it's a comfort food. And not just because it has this starchy, doughy, carby goodness. I mean, it's something that connects you to your past. If you're a Philadelphian living somewhere else and, you know, in hard times, like when you're dealing with the pandemic and all this unrest and there's all these things going on in the world, you know, people, people want comfort foods.
GILGER: OK, so let's talk about, there are a lot of examples of this around the Valley, these kinds of regional foods that really kind of bring you back to where you're from. What are some of your favorites?
MALLOY: I mean, the regional foods that connect people with their homes. It's different for everybody. So if you're from Chicago, you might have that Italian beef sandwich, maybe some deep dish pizza. If you're from New York, you know, you might have that Bronx style pie that Chris Bianco rolled out, which I know, Lauren, you've been enjoying. Somebody who spent some time up there.
GILGER: Brings me right back to Arthur Ave.
MALLOY: Yeah. And then, people in Phoenix come from all kinds of different places, though. It's not just these big American cities where we're eating these like classically American or regionally American foods. You know, we have a Somali immigrant population here, and there's places where you can find, you know, goat prepared in the style that they prepared in, on the Horn of Africa. And that's comfort food for some people. You know, people from Southeast Asia might go to Reathrey Sekong for student noodles, and that might be a comfort food for some people that connects them to a place that they call home in a time like this. And we have plenty of people from Sonora in northern Mexico and maybe carne asada on a nice, warm flour tortilla brings people back to home. You know, it's not just some of those classic American foods, like, for Philly, the cheesesteak or the soft pretzel or whatever. I think there's this whole range of foods that bring people back to a whole range of different kinds of places, you know, all over the globe. And people seek those comfort foods wherever they're from in these difficult moments.
GILGER: What does this say, you think, Chris, about about the local Phoenix cuisine? Are we a true amalgamation?
MALLOY: Yeah. I mean, I don't think we'll ever be confused for, like, a Houston, where, you know, really incredibly diverse. But I mean, if you want food from Peru, from El Salvador, from Korea, from from Thailand, from from Africa, all kinds of global cuisines are represented here. And they're cooked very well. You just have to look a little bit hard for it.
GILGER: Yeah. So it sounds I mean, food, really, it can connect us to place, right? But it also really can bring us back home. There's a lot of home cooking going on right now during the pandemic. How does it connect us to family, to memory as well?
MALLOY: I think there's a lot of different elements here. I think right now with the home cooking, you're seeing a lot of people go back in time to some of these ancient cooking methods. For example, you know, you see a lot of people baking sourdough.
GILGER: Yep.
MALLOY: And sourdough was the first bread that people made, I mean, they didn't have packages of yeast 10,000 years ago when agriculture started and wheat was more widely available. You know, they naturally leavened their dough and they put it by a fire and that was bread. And that's kind of what sourdough is. And people are kind of craving that simplicity and that connection to simpler times in simpler places right now, especially where you have elements of our food system failing. Like, for example, the meat supply chain right now is in total disarray. Barbecue places across the valley are dealing with brisket prices that have doubled and even tripled in some instances. And you see that with milk and people dumping milk and the food system, it's just, before the pandemic, it was broken. And all of those little breaks have been exacerbated by the pandemic. And I think people are craving a way out of that. A way out of those, you know, long lines that we were seeing. And when you're baking a simple bread, or buying from the farmer's market more and supporting the local farmers, you're kind of opting out of that food system and you're returning to a simpler way of things, to simpler places. You're creating more of a connection to a simple past.
GILGER: It sounds like there might be a little bit of a silver lining there in this pandemic, even as our food systems, as you say, are disrupted. So.
MALLOY: Yeah, I think there's a lot of silver lining with this. I think that people are really starting to recognize the value that small local food systems bring. I mean, it's been a buzz word for 10, 15 years, but people are regularly going to farmers markets who never really shopped at them before and are supporting their local communities. For example, Arizona Grassroots Beef, which is a collective of ranchers, you know, they're seeing pretty good business and they have a smaller slaughterhouse. It's smaller ranchers based in Arizona. And people are demanding that kind of meat. I mean, we're seeing some of these bigger meat packing plants, thousands of people getting sick and these plants shutting down or reducing to 30% capacity. And there is just a renewed interest in response to all of that in these smaller local systems. And I think moving forward, if we can keep that interest going, that's going to be a great thing. It's better for the plants, better for people, better for the earth, better for everybody.
GILGER: Alright. That is Phoenix New Times' food critic Chris Malloy joining us. Chris, thanks so much, as always.
MALLOY: Thanks a lot, Lauren. I appreciate it.
