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View on web September 25, 2026 Wow, an especially good week for food-adjacent discourse! Here’s a taste of the goss that had everyone hooting and hollering. Bettina Makalintal Photo credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Here’s what you might have missed A lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts relaxed its mask mandate and all hell broke loose: According to a buzzy new story by Annalisa Quinn story for the Boston Globe, Last Ditch, a Greenfield bar that had attracted a clientele very passionate about masking, announced that it would start a mask-optional night to bring in more customers as the bar floundered financially. Its 26-year-old owner is now living in her car and working four jobs to pay off a $50,000 loan as the bar faces aggressive backlash from its own community, including comments like “I hope your venue gets firebombed.” The TL;DR doesn’t do it justice in the slightest, because it’s the details that really make it — e.g., one of the bar’s owners stepped back to go to literal clown school. The discussion has spun out into conversations about bad behavior in the leftist community, the double standards for lesbian bars versus gay bars, the limits of “third space” framing around businesses, the mental health effects of the pandemic on vulnerable people, and so, so much more. It’s “by far” the Globe’s best performing story of the year. Is iced coffee unprofessional? That was the question of the week after a TikTok video from a corporate recruiter made the rounds. Her argument, calling out Gen Z in particular, was that it looks “too casual,” as though interviewees are treating the appointment like a Target run. This, of course, spawned conversations about the nature of hiring, what constitutes reasonable workplace accommodations, and generational divides over what behaviors are considered appropriate at work and how office culture even functions. All things considered, we must ponder: Credit: X/@VeryBadLlama DoorDash reached a landmark million settlement with New York City over delivery workers’ pay: In the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, the delivery company will pay more than $115 million directly to delivery workers who it had previously underpaid, paid late, or not paid at all. (Another $16 million will go towards civil penalties.) “DoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 workers, and today we are getting that money back,” said Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The settlement continues the new administration’s efforts to advocate for delivery workers. Earlier this year, NYC regulators released a report showing that Uber and DoorDash had used “design tricks” that made it harder for app users to tip, which resulted in tips falling by more than $550 million. Meanwhile, in Austin, a DoorDash driver was shot by ICE: Protests kicked off in Texas after an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agent shot a man from Venezuela, who was working as a DoorDash driver, during a traffic stop, as ABC has reported. As of Wednesday, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was being held in a detention center, still with a bullet in his back, and a judge has temporarily blocked his deportation, according to BBC. For the price of a pretty nice car, you, too, can cop Ballerina Farm’s stove: The Strategist got some heat from commenters for featuring Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm in their celebrity shopping series. (Neelman’s currently pushing her new “bone broth hot cocoa.”) Among Neeleman’s picks was her 40-year-old cream-colored Aga range, which retails for a cool $37,099. Here’s an entirely new combination of words: “Nerds Gummy Cluster Brie grilled cheese.” UBS Arena announced this, plus an “uncrustable pulled pork tostada” and “Mister Softee nachos” (lowkey genius), as part of the venue’s new menu for NY Islanders hockey games. Alison Roman launched a shoe line with Margaux: Finally, clogs for clop-clopping to Paisanos and ballet flats for bopping over to First Bloom when it opens (just don’t call it a “shoppy shop”). This is what Ta