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Welcome to Deep Dish, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news. Last week we discussed how restaurants are helping with the SNAP benefits crisis.
Martha Stewart has stayed staunchly on the front line of culture for the past few decades, certainly in the food sphere but most impressively outside of it. Her side quests have been shockingly frequent and entirely unpredictable—she’s quite frankly never letting us know her next move. In her recent reissue of her first cookbook from 1982, Entertaining, she serves up a reminder to her fans, and perhaps our culture at large, that she’s a cook first and foremost.
Also this week, a former paralegal was acquitted after hurling a sandwich at a federal agent in August; Sabzi, a deli in Cornwall, England, is alleging that author Yasmin Khan’s new cookbook with the same name is trademark infringement; and more.
If Throwing Sandwiches is Illegal, Then Lock Me Up
This week marked the start of a second trial for Sean C. Dunn, a former paralegal at the Department of Justice who threw a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent in August. The projectile sandwich was part of his confrontation with a group of officers who were patrolling a neighborhood in Washington, DC. Viral coverage has made him something of a folk hero. The Department of Justice attempted to secure a felony indictment, and after that failed, charged him with misdemeanor assault.
“I could feel it through my ballistic vest,” Gregory Lairmore, the agent-turned-sandwich-attack-victim testified, adding that he “smelled the onions and the mustard.” Is there a law against throwing sandwiches? “You’re not going to be asked if you feel bad for the agent who took a sandwich to the chest,” Julia Gatto, the defense lawyer, said in her opening statement. “You’re going to be asked whether what happened that night is a federal crime.”
John Parron, a government lawyer, took a more obvious tact in his opening statement. “You can’t just go around throwing stuff at people because you’re mad,” he said. While he is technically correct (toddlers worldwide would disagree), in the end, the jury acquitted Dunn, and justice was served. —Sam Stone, staff writer
The Case of Sabzi v. Sabzi
Briton Kate Atlee launched Sabzi, her deli in Cornwall, in 2019 and trademarked the name in 2022. This year writer Yasmin Khan published her fourth cookbook, also called Sabzi. Now Atlee is calling on Khan and her publisher, Bloomsday, to change the name and cover design of the book, which the shop owner says has confused her customers. Sabzi, the name in question, is a commonly used term for vegetable dishes in Urdu and Farsi.
Khan and her publisher have responded, saying that Khan started work on her book in 2017—two years before Atlee started her business—and said in a statement that “it is widely accepted that the use of a descriptive term as the title of a book in order to denote the book’s subject matter—as Ms Khan has done—does not function as trademark use.”
Which Sabzi will come out on top? —S.S.
Martha Stewart’s First Cookbook Gets Reissued
Our society in recent years has come to associate food legend Martha Stewart with many things decidedly not related to food. For one, insider trading. For another, her uncanny (and maybe also endearing?) friendship with Snoop Dogg. There’s also her idiosyncratic finsta, her brand deal with Gen Z seltzer brand Liquid Death, and her Sports Illustrated cover. The woman has range!
Martha’s latest venture, though, sees her revisiting her culinary roots with the reissue of her very first cookbook, Entertaining. The New Yorker’s Hannah Goldfield reports that original copies had run scarce in the wake of a couple documentaries about Martha in 2024, prompting Clarkson Potter, the book’s publisher, to order a one-to-one facsimile reprint “with not a word changed—not even ‘Oriental,’ which recurs in reference to Asian cooking, or the dedication to Stewart’s now ex-husband, Andy, whom she divorced in 1990,” Goldfield writes. She characterizes the book as a time capsule for a highly specific ’80s hosting aesthetic: polished and scrupulous, embodied by fussy canapés served on silver platters—a counterpoint to the more laissez-faire entertaining sensibilities of today, popularized by the likes of Alison Roman. —Li Goldstein, associate newsletter editor
For Zohran Mamdani, Food Is Personal and Political
This Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani made history in becoming New York City’s first Muslim, South Asian mayor. The former state assemblyman, now mayor-elect, spoke to Bon Appétit in June just before the Democratic primary about food’s intrinsic role in his politics, particularly as it relates to a central tenet of his platform: New York’s affordability crisis. “When I speak to New Yorkers about what you need to live a dignified life in this city, food is nonnegotiable,” he told us. “Yet there are so many who are priced out of it, whether it’s when they’re buying their produce or whether it’s trying to find a place that they can sit down and eat with their family.” Reread his interview to find out Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s favorite restaurants in Queens, what he cooks at home, and his personal relationship to food as a self-described “foodie.” —L.G.
