Posh grumbles, letting your business die, and how to hire a line cook
Hello and welcome to another edition of Substack Reads. This week, Substack writers share the human side of the story—from business owner Leah Tharin’s hard decision to close her company to Felicity Spector’s interview with a coffee-shop pioneer in Ukraine to chef Nick Curtola on what goes into hiring his next cook. Plus, John Paul Brammer on the latest superhero movie and journalist Sophia Money-Coutts’s take on the complaints of an English country-home owner. Enjoy!
COMMENT
The poshest game you’ve (n)ever heard of
Should we pity the owner of the stately home featured in the movie Saltburn, and his complaints about unwanted visitors? asks British journalist Sophia Money-Coutts
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Forget Charades. Forget Ibble-Dibble. Forget even Are You There, Moriarty?, which is currently enjoying a renaissance thanks to its appearance in Netflix’s One Day. The poshest game going, which you may never have heard of, is called Pass the Castle.
The rules are pretty simple. You inherit a castle (or a big house) and take your turn running it for 20 years until you gratefully hand the castle (or big house) on to the next generation.
I came across this meritocratic game a few years ago while interviewing a posh chap who owned a whopping house a few hours outside London. It’s a very beautiful house, but the maintenance costs are so high, and the pressure of running such a place so great, that the family decided some time ago that each generation would only have to be in charge for 20 years before passing it on to the next in line. Thus, Pass the Castle.
‘How long have you got until you can give it to your son?’ I asked this posh chap, and quick as a flash he replied something like, ‘Nine years, seven months, two weeks and three days…’ He couldn’t wait to shift it, in other words.
BUSINESS
To let a good thing die
In 2021, Leah Tharin started writing an open letter on LinkedIn about closing down her company. Today, she’s able to look back and share what she learned from getting burnt out on something that was supposed to bring her joy
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I never had big ambitions with this business, and it was supposed to be fun. My passion project. I love board games, and I love giving people the space to have a great time.
So in 2015, it was founded. First, I was on Shopify in a basement room, and after reaching a five-figure revenue after three months, I suddenly thought that this thing had legs to be an actual brick & mortar store with a café.
I started to look at store locations close to the train station and found one. I suddenly was the owner of a two-story retail location, running an online business, and had absolutely zero clue what running a board game café really meant.
CULTURE
Madame WebMD
We may be collectively sick of superhero movies, but one new flick might just be the cure, writes John Paul Brammer
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Madame Web is a Sony Pictures movie starring Dakota Johnson, but just barely. Sydney Sweeney, Adam Scott, and Emma Roberts are also in it. Its relationship to Spider-Man, the rights for which are currently on loan to Marvel, is incredibly fraught. Madame Web exists in the Spider-Verse but is forbidden from saying “Peter Parker” aloud, lest she violate the contract and end her meager, wretched existence. Madame Web is a Greek tragedy about copyright laws.
Well before opening weekend, there were signs this movie would be “bad.” Dakota Johnson wasn’t just phoning it in during her press junkets. She had an active disdain for the project. A trailer featuring a Billie Eilish song gave us Johnson’s deadpan line reading, “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died,” which was memed to hell and back. I couldn’t wait to see it.
FOOD & DRINK
Finding a good line cook
Chef Nick Curtola of The Four Horsemen in Brooklyn shares the behind-the-scenes process of bringing a new cook onto his team
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We’re a small kitchen, and there just isn’t room for cooks just looking to punch in and punch out while going through the robotic motions in between. It’s actually quite the opposite. I do my best to create a dynamic environment for growth, inquisitiveness and discovery. This 15-minute initial interview lets me know if a potential cook, no matter what their skill level, understands this and is excited about the potential to work in such a kitchen.
I hate to say it, but I barely read resumes these days. I find this initial step (the 15-minute meeting) in the hiring process to be so much more important. Some of my best cooks who’ve stayed with me the longest have had no experience or very little experience in some restaurant you may not have heard of in a town not known for a vibrant food scene. But they have passion and they really want to push themselves to be better each and every day. That’s something that’s inherent and hard to teach, and it’s our job to suss out these individuals as quickly as possible.
MEDIA
Girl blog
Terry Nguyen digs into the history of the personal essay, where we are headed, and the unstoppable rise of the “girlblogger”
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For a while, the personal essay was rumored to be dead in the rotting ditch of mid-2010s blog culture, felled by the profit-driven corporatization of digital media. Here, cause was mistaken for effect. When the first-generation blogs (xoJane, Gawker, The Awl, Buzzfeed Ideas) that fed the “first person industrial complex” shuttered, their failures were chalked up to a matter of strategy. The personal essay, by affiliation, was deemed passé, a relic of an optimistic period of online publishing. In pursuit of eternal virality, digital media sites pivoted from opinionated screeds to short-form video, podcasts, and clickbait-y listicles.
But the essay as a literary form has long preceded the internet. So has the debate over the aesthetic metrics of a good essay. Merve Emre cites Virginia Woolf’s 1905 screed “The Decay of Essay Writing,” where Woolf bemoans the “amazing and unclothed egoism” of a new class of writers. “If one can set aside [Woolf’s] disdain, there is a larger point,” Emre writes. “Too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.”
VIDEO PODCAST
Weirder Together and RAW Impressions
The duo pair with Lou and Adelle Barlow to cover their journey as a homestead Gen X content factory and Dinosaur Jr.’s tour of Australia (competing with Taylor Swift for ticket sales)
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Lou and I first met back in the ’90s when I supported Sebadoh on their Australian tour, and we bumped into each other on and off over the years, as musicians tend to do.
But we really got to know each other deeper the last couple of years when Lou and Adelle started releasing their RAW Impressions podcast on our Weirder Together network. It’s been such a joy to collaborate with another married couple of weirdos who are somehow making it work.
They make one of our favorite podcasts and are one of our favorite couples. Enjoy them and everything they have to offer.
NEWS
Keeping the coffee flowing
Kostya Tovstakoriy, known for innovation in coffee culture in Ukraine, explains how he managed to pay his baristas and serve homemade cakes and coffee through two years of war
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Kostya first opened I Love Coffee in Kherson back in 2015, one of the first third-wave coffee shops in the city: it proved very popular—after two years he opened a second shop and, a year later, a third. Business was good; they were well-respected and featured in all the coffee guides. But then came the day when, for all Ukrainians, everything changed, and life turned completely upside down. On 24th February 2022, Kostya closed the doors to his shops; there was no reason to be selling coffee when a war had begun. Russian forces swept into Kherson, occupying the city and the surrounding region, imposing a terrifying new reality on its residents. Kostya spent two months living under occupation, avoiding the main streets as much as he could. “I moved like this in the city, in small side streets, just hiding from the Russians because you never knew what they were going to do.”
Then he and his family managed to escape. “We were lucky. We made it out in just one day—we left at five in the morning, and by five in the evening we had got to Mykolaiv (just over 40 miles away), so it was really fast. I know that a couple of months later, some friends who tried to go the same way said they had to spend three days on the road.”
ILLUSTRATION
The time I went to church camp
Award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Ashlyn Anstee recalls the promise of hiking in the mountains, camp stoves, and little wooden cabins—and how differently it turned out
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I should have known it was going to be a tough trip, because the first night we were there, they had a milk-chugging contest at dinner. I’d never competed in a milk-chugging contest before (or since). You drink glasses of milk as fast as you can. Unfortunately, both Helen and I were pretty competitive people. We did win the contest, but we also both barfed. At what cost!
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Coming soon
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posts about the memoir of Rex Chapman, which he co-wrote and is published this week: shares news of her first book Do The Work, co-written with , published in June and available to preorder:
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Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
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Thanks so much for including my Substack map on your weekly roundup! My son was delighted to have his cartography doodle featured (and said if only he had known it would be shared, he would have added way more detail) :) Would love to see some creative Substack maps of other readers and writers!
What a lovely surprise, thank you so much for featuring me. Big moment for me to get noticed by the Substack gods.