Eater weekly food news digest

View on web October 16, 2026 There’s too much to digest out there. Here’s a taste of what happened in the food world this week. Bettina Makalintal Getty Images Here’s what you might have missed The service is so good because the restaurant is spying on you: The San Francisco Chronicle’s Tara Duggan reported on the use of cameras at very high-end restaurants in the Bay Area. At Enclos, which earned three Michelin stars this summer, executive chef Brian Limoges installed two cameras that allow him to watch diners from an iPad to see exactly when servers place food on each table. At Californios, which also has three Michelin stars, the chef-owner monitors nine cameras throughout its space to make service “more seamless.” As Duggan notes, California allows businesses to record video in areas where customers don’t expect privacy (i.e., not in bathrooms); it’s only if audio is included that they need to ask for permission. D Magazine alleges that the Michelin Guide used AI on its new entries for Texas: This week, the organization announced its new selections for Texas, giving one star to Fabrik and Kappo Kappo in Austin and Goldee’s in Forth Worth. A new report by dining critic Brian Reinhart claims that the organization used AI. Reinhart ran the text from the guide’s new write-ups through Pangram, an AI detector, which “identified AI’s work in 25 out of 31 sentences (80 percent).” Further analysis by two researchers (one of whom is Reinhart’s brother) identified the text as having telltale signs of GPT-4o, a model that has since been phased out. Michelin declined an interview with Reinhart and denied having used AI in its reviews. The guide’s continued presence in Texas remains unclear: Its contract with the organizations that brought it to Texas recently ended. Kelly Clarkson picked a fight with the author of a children’s book about tacos: Perhaps you’ve heard about the ongoing messy situation between the singer and the Brooklyn store Art of Play, which sells games. Basically, the shop has an animatronic bird on its wall that apparently features in its magic shows. The singer tried to buy the bird, which was not for sale, and was turned down, leading her to crash out on X, where she compared the situation to Pretty Woman. Well, it turns out that the store’s owner, Adam Rubin, is also behind Dragons Love Tacos, an extremely successful children’s book franchise about dragons having a taco party. Book Riot called it one of the “best children’s books of the century (so far),” but the reviews among Eater parents are mixed. The writer Emily Gould called it “evil.” A fire destroyed the oldest covered food market in Paris: Nothing remains of Marché des Enfants Rouges, which opened in 1615, following a huge fire on Monday, according to the New York Times. Frequently appearing in travel guides, the market was a “center of Marais life,” where both tourists and locals shopped from a wide variety of vendors. France24 described the market as offering a “small taste of what the historic Les Halles, the city’s sprawling central market, was like before it was gutted and turned into a giant mall in the 1970s.” In the 1990s, the market was saved from demolition by a local campaign to preserve it, thus also making it a “symbol of resistance,” as one local told the news network. More “best restaurant” lists dropped, but they’re more personalized this time: Grub Street’s Matthew Schneier and the Washington Post’s Elazar Sontag shared their annual selections this week. Borgo, the esteemed Brooklyn restaurateur Andrew Tarlow’s new-ish Manhattan debut, earns Schneier’s endorsement as New York City’s “best all-around restaurant” right now, but Schneier’s list is otherwise unranked, instead classifying his 43 picks by use-case, like “Penny is where I go on my own dime.” Sontag, a former Eater staffer, meanwhile, goes all-in on rankings in his latest assessment of the D.C. scene, with 40 selections in all. His #1? Albi, the fine-dining Palestinian