Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news. Last week we covered Hillary Duff’s Diet Coke conspiracy theories.
Running a restaurant can do some weird things to your head. To be clear, I’ve never run a restaurant, but I have to assume it messes up your entire brain. Why else would these chefs be doing such terrible things? What else could make Redzepi scream at, punch, and prod his employees with kitchen tools? How else do you explain David Chang’s over the top screaming and yelling? Or the decision to serve your customers jam with mold on it?
And that’s the only way I was able to make sense of the drama that exploded out of LA’s Horses in 2023 (don’t worry, we’ll get into it). Now, after three years of rumors and hearsay, we have an account from the accused, Will Aghajanian, as reported by Kelly Loudenberg at AirMail. Finally, an answer to the question that’s been percolating in the back of my head for years: Did he really murder the cats?
Also this week, we’re talking about the investigation into all the fruit and vegetable AI slop that’s been plaguing the timeline; we simply need to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s mukbang; and we’ve found perhaps the most unexpected place for great wine in Southern California. Read on to find out where.
For the uninitiated, Horses was one of those buzzy, impossible-to-get-into, celebrity-magnet restaurants in LA. Until the allegations went public. I remember the day in late May 2023 that the news of Horses broke. It started with a few mentions in group chats, then some chatter around the office…then some more intense chatter around the office. The tea was as follows: Johnson and Aghajanian, the formerly married co-owners, filed restraining orders against each other, each alleging that the other was emotionally and physically abusive, and that they’d killed several of their pet cats.
“It was like they’d get a kitten and then like two weeks later that kitten would die. And then they adopted another kitten two weeks after that. And then that one died. And then after the third cat. We were kind of like, why are all the cats dying?” [sic] reads a quote from someone who used to work with the pair, in Ezra Marcus’ bombshell report from 2023.
Now we’re witnessing the epilogue. In this week’s Airmail article, for which Johnson refused interview requests, Loudenberg says her reporting did not uncover any cat torture or killing. Johnson did, reportedly, resort to witchcraft—a protection spell over the restaurant, and a curse on Aghajanian. The piece chronicles allegations of years of terrible behavior (restaurants lead to broken brains, see above).
Perhaps I’m the rube for thinking that the man who ran a campaign based around posting (and, yes, policy, don’t yell at me!) would stop posting when he got into office. Obviously, I was wrong. Just this week he livestreamed the first-ever mukbang in New York City’s City Hall. The stream was the Mayor’s Office’s way of celebrating a settlement with a few retailers that will give “$2 million back to workers, mostly fast-food workers, more than 800 of them across New York City,” according to commissioner Sam Levine, who accompanied Mamdani in the video.
The pair dove headfirst into a couple of Crunchwrap Supremes and two big cups of electric cyan Baja Blast. Satisfying as it was to watch our mayor eat Taco Bell, I did learn one disturbing tidbit: Mamdani has some messed up ideas about steak. “I even like sour cream with steak,” he said mid-mukbang. Diabolical.
