Welcome to Deep Dish, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news.
Amid the glitz and glam of New York Fashion Week, a surprising talking point sizzled to the surface: chicken fingers. Fast-food chain Raising Cane’s hosted an entire show designed by TikTok-famous fashion designer Joe Ando-Hirsh and inspired by breaded chicken. Bon Appétit talked to Ando-Hirsh about how he approached the task and how he’s receiving the ensuing discourse.
Also this week, Trader Joe’s is back with pumpkin-spiced Chardonnay—a logical marketing move for the grocery store chain. Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s announced he’s leaving the company, citing disagreement with its parent company’s politics. Lastly, Samin Nosrat, of the famed cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is back with an encore.
Read more about chicken finger fashion and other food news around the internet below.
How does one approach designing a chicken-finger-themed fashion show?
Fashion week typically challenges designers to predict and interpret future trends, tapping into street style, pop culture, and analytics to build a coherent and novel collection. Joe Ando-Hirsh, a popular fashion designer with a large following on TikTok, found himself faced with a task that was at once more circumscribed and entirely more open-ended than that of his peers: design a set of dresses inspired by…chicken fingers.
The ask came from Raising Cane’s, the chicken-focused fast-food chain, which hosted a show for New York Fashion Week. More accustomed to designing out of his small studio in Brooklyn, Ando-Hirsh was hesitant the direction would make sense with his brand, he shared with Bon Appétit. But Raising Cane’s gave him total freedom to run with the concept, encouraging him to weave in family backstory (“I can’t lie: I’m a sucker for that,” he says). Over a short (and “exhausting”) two months, he turned out a collection of five dresses, each calling on the breaded chicken in different ways. One was designed to look like Louisiana’s state flower, the magnolia. Another was crafted in the likeness of an actual chicken finger, hued golden to appear fried, with a [shimmering] hand-beaded crust. Another, draped in buttery yellow fabric, matched the chain’s canine mascot, Cane III, who was supposed to walk in the show before falling sick. The premise of the fashion show drew plenty of social media chatter, the trolls emerged from their dens like clockwork to critique, and, by the metrics of engagement, Raising Cane’s came out on top, with plenty of precious Fashion Week headlines. “I’m happy that the overall reception was positive,” Ando-Hirsh says—not too shabby for his first Fashion Week foray. —Li Goldstein, associate newsletter editor
Elsewhere on the internet
The Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Spice Chardonnay turns two
For a second year in a row, Trader Joe’s is rounding out its autumn arsenal with a pumpkin-spiced wine. We would imagine that there’s significant overlap in the Venn diagram between the pumpkin spice enthusiasts and Trader Joe’s fanatics of America,