Semafor’s Max Tani’s Grub Street Diet

Max Tani breaks news about the people who break news. As the media editor at Semafor, he has reported on internal editorial decisions at places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, covered newsroom turmoil at Condé Nast, and announced many, many layoffs. That means his eating habits often include work lunches, breakfast meetings, and, in the old-school media tradition, lavish dinners. “A big part of my job is constantly going out and hanging out with people and exchanging information,” he says. “I do feel like a natural consequence of that is being exposed to great bars and restaurants in New York.” This week, among other things, he spotted Bradley Cooper at Wild Cherry and ordered several cornichon martinis at Le Chêne. “Half of the time, it’s kind of like, Is this work? Are we just hanging out?” he says. “I don’t really know. I enjoy that it’s a little bit of both.”

Wednesday, January 7
I’m up around eight and make myself coffee while catching up on email and stuff I missed from colleagues and a few sources who have been up a lot earlier than me. I inherited an elite pour-over station from my girlfriend, Lilly, when we moved in together earlier this year, which has helped me transition from the cup-of-coffee-on-the-way-to-work lifestyle to an enjoy-a-cup-of-coffee-at-home-and-be-late-to-work lifestyle.

I live in South Slope near Green-Wood Cemetery, and normally I’d pop outside for a loop in Prospect Park or go to the gym, but I’m crunched for time and recently hurt my knee, so I’m on a self-imposed hiatus. I’m forced to settle for 45 mediocre minutes on my home exercise bike.

I publish a Sunday-evening newsletter, so Wednesday is the spiritual beginning of the workweek for me; it’s when I start the process of freaking out about what I don’t have for Sunday’s newsletter.

But I’m too busy this morning to start panicking. I’ve got a quick hit at 11 a.m. on the BBC “Media Show” to talk about my reporting about major media outlets holding off on publishing details they knew about the operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. It’s one of my favorite shows to do appearances on.

I have only about a half an hour between my hit and our podcast recording, so I’m forced to scramble a bit for lunch. I don’t believe in bringing lunch to work (way too sad), and I don’t believe in ordering lunch to the office; it’s important to leave and walk to get lunch in New York, even if it’s just for a minute. Making things more complicated, Semafor’s offices are in a weird part of the city between Tribeca, Chinatown, and Soho with scarce lunch options of the nutritious-slop-bowl variety.

The closest slop-bowl-adjacent lunch spot in the neighborhood is Smile To Go, which is a few minutes’ walk from the office. I get half a Manouri Cheese — a pear-and-arugula sandwich on sourdough bread — and two sides: tomatoey chickpeas and kale salad with some little raisins. I eat most of it quickly at my desk while reviewing my questions for our guest, which I prepared earlier.

The interview goes fairly smoothly, though the process for recording Mixed Signals always ends up taking several hours and more energy than I’d like. By 4 p.m., it’s already dark and I’m resisting the urge to get another coffee. I power through, making some exploratory calls about potential stories for the newsletter and sending emails to invite guests to appear onstage at our upcoming event in Washington focused on trust in the media business.

Around seven, I walk up to the West Village to meet my friend and fellow reporter Emma Goldberg. Emma was keen on trying Wild Cherry out after hearing rave reviews from her colleague Jess Testa. The plan was to try to slip in at Wild Cherry, which did not have any reservations available online, or fall back on the Commerce Inn if we were turned away.

Wild Cherry doesn’t have any tables or room at the bar, but the host dangles a table that may open up, leaving Emma and I in a loitering purgatory in the lobby of the Cherry Lane Theatre. Lunch is very much in the rearview at this point, and I kept it light so I could go off at this dinner, which was a plan formed on the assumption that I would be eating sooner rather than later. But the lobby has a few interesting West Village characters: Bradley Cooper walks out of the restaurant, and Emma and I talk to a woman waiting for a table who claims her dog is an influencer that is known and beloved by Cooper’s children (though when we check out the dog’s account, it has only 10,000 followers; not sure if that qualifies as an influencer).

About an hour later, they seat us in the back of the restaurant in a booth adjacent to the dog-influencer mom. I follow up the dirty vodka martini I had while waiting in the lobby with another one — both are pretty excellent with just the right amount of brine — and Emma has a cherry highball. We largely order from the recommendations of the servers: seafood cocktail with crackers and scungilli, which we’re told is some snail meat that comes served in its shell. The server returns several minutes later to pour some gin into the conch with the rest of the brine. It tastes slightly like getting a gulp of salt water from the ocean, but the server says they don’t give it to everyone, so I’m flattered. We split a Caesar salad, kielbasa with sauerkraut, and, eventually, a very large slice of Instagram-friendly coconut cake before they politely ask us to leave at 11; apparently the Cherry Lane Theatre has a strict code that requires them to have everyone out by then.

Thursday, January 8
Buying a car seemed like a decent idea until I realized that in addition to not using my car much during the winter, I had to move my car fairly regularly to avoid getting a ticket, which I do most Thursday mornings. I grab a coffee at Southside, the small coffee and breakfast-sandwich shop at the end of my block.

I dial into a company meeting. Semafor announced on Wednesday that it was profitable and had raised $30 million at a $330 million valuation, and the company’s leadership agreed to take questions from employees about the fundraise. While this is fairly interesting to me both as a media reporter and someone who has equity in the company, I am paying particularly close attention because I need to think of what to ask our CEO, Justin Smith, next week when he appears on our podcast for a bonus episode about the fundraise.

I make myself my go-to, simple breakfast-style lunch around noon: two eggs on wheat toast, half an avocado that my girlfriend left for me this morning, a mandarin, and the dregs of the coffee from Southside. I eat this meal several times a week — it is quick, un-fuck-up-able, and feels healthy enough.

Most of the afternoon is spent soliciting comments in response to people mentioned in an earlier interview, which is not exactly what I want to be doing. Our guest was critical of a number of media figures and publications that I now have to seek comment from. This is a fairly tedious process at a moment in the week when I usually like to be thinking about the stories and items that are going to be in our Sunday media newsletter.

I sneak in a very brief workout in the afternoon. I aim to work out six days a week, but I don’t like working out in the morning and I’m usually busy in the evenings with dinners and events. So my workouts generally happen in the moments between everything else on the calendar. I manage to get an hour in before hopping in an Uber to Williamsburg for a haircut from Jennipher, who has been cutting my hair for ten years. I’ve followed her to various spots around the neighborhood, even though I no longer live close by.

I take the train into the city for dinner. I’m meeting up with our new comms chief, Rachel, and one of our finance reporters, Rohan, for a late-ish meal at Le Chêne to celebrate the fundraising announcement that Rachel placed in The Wall Street Journal. Rohan is friendly with the chef and owner and takes the wheel on ordering. Several cornichon martinis arrive, followed by a shrimp tartlet; leeks; scallops; French fries; a lamb chop; Pithiviers, a delicious puff pastry with meat; and a red Burgundy to wash it down. The chefs send over some elaborate dessert and dessert wine poured from a magnum; I’m not much of a leftovers guy and generally have a finish-everything mind-set, but it’s proving challenging.

As I’m in the Uber on the way home after two very rich French dinners in a row, I’m reminded that at some point in middle age, my dad developed gout …

Friday, January 9
Fridays are my favorite day to go into Manhattan. The five-day return-to-office policies you read about seem to be fairly loosely enforced, and the city feels like it does on a weekend. I’m in the city for a reason: breakfast with Trace Henderson, a comms and sales guy for the media-production company Smuggler. We meet at Sant Ambroeus, which, between the Noho and Brookfield Place locations, has probably the default downtown location for a media breakfast or lunch, though I’m not sure why. It feels like a Disneyland version of a French restaurant — the food isn’t that great, it’s not particularly comfortable, and their prices border on ridiculous.

I have a black coffee, cheese omelet, small salad, tiny potatoes, orange juice, and toast with a side of avocado. I’m enjoying the conversation and still feeling last night’s heavy meal, so I finish only about half the spread, which is a bit embarrassing because Trace just got yogurt.

No one is in the Semafor offices, which allows me to focus on finishing the newsletter. It’s a bit light this week with a few items about Trump allies planning big Super Bowl ad buys and a huge Blackstone investment in an influential marketing-tech firm. Not our sexiest edition but a decent mix.

Around midday, I start to get hungry again. I usually skip breakfast, so my cadence is off. I weave through the vendors on Canal Street near our offices to the Broadway Food Court. It’s a collection of Japanese and Chinese stalls that opened up last year at the end of the retail stretch on Broadway. It’s generally fairly empty; it’s too far down Broadway for retail-tourist foot traffic and too far away from Chinatown for food-tourist foot traffic. I get a mini poke bowl with salad and a shrimp-tempura onigiri.

Working alone at the office has morphed from inspiring to depressing as it’s gotten darker outside, so I head back to my apartment and go to the gym. Not being able to run has forced me to focus more on strength training and alternative forms of cardio that I hate, which is fine.

My girlfriend is home before me and made dinner: Alison Roman’s vinegar chicken (thighs only) with crushed olives; arugula salad with cucumbers and a quick dressing of olive oil, lime juice, and olive brine; rice; and mini dirty gin martinis with tiny glasses we keep in the freezer. Chicken in the pan is our go-to when we need to feel a little comforted — we’ve cooked our way through a large percentage of the NYT baked-chicken-thighs recipes. It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t gotten to see her much since she got back from a ski trip with her college friends in Lake Tahoe over New Year’s, so we catch up a bit while we eat and I clean up.

Our friend Tatum, who covers tech for the Washington Post, is at Sunny’s in Red Hook, which is a fairly quick Uber from our apartment and one of my favorite bars. It’s one of everyone’s favorite bars, which is why you can’t go there without seeing someone you know. When we arrive, I immediately run into Adam Friedland. I drink one Vliet pilsner and smoke a cigarette on the patio. Sunny’s is one of the bars in New York that seems to inspire people who don’t really smoke to grant themselves permission to have a cigarette.

By 1 a.m., we’re back home on the couch. I eat one bite of the lemony cheesecake Lilly brought home a few days ago. Too lemony for my taste.

Saturday, January 10
I wake up a bit before Lilly and make us some coffee. We’re going to see a screening of Lost Highway at noon at Nitehawk, so I assemble a quick, uninspired breakfast of what we have left in the kitchen: two fried eggs, wheat toast, a mandarin, one leftover breakfast taco, and some of last night’s dinner. It’s not my best work, which Lilly telegraphs with some seasoning adjustments.

We’re having dinner with a group of friends later at Al Badawi, which remains gloriously BYOB, and we’re tasked with picking up wine. The staff at Slope Cellars were once slightly rude to Lilly’s mom, so after the movie we go to Big Nose Full Body.

After picking up wine, I have one sip of some sweet Vietnamese coffee Lilly ordered from Larry’s Ca Phe in Park Slope. It’s incredible but not the kind of thing I can drink if I want to feel normal the rest of the day.

I hunker down in the office for some last-minute emails for tomorrow’s newsletter and get in a quick bike ride.

There had been discussion of getting a drink before dinner across the street at Henry Public in Carroll Gardens, but when we arrive, it’s too crowded. We relocate to Long Island Bar, where my friends Clara and Eli are at the bar. I order the A Martini, which comes in a hefty coupe glass and for a long time was one of Brooklyn’s more expensive martinis, though the prices have largely caught up.

At 9 p.m., we head over to Al Badawi. The dinner is a semi-regular gathering of a nice group of friends who mostly know each other from the previous era of digital media when media organizations that mostly no longer exist were hiring lots of young people. One of our friends, Mia de Graaf, is about to give birth, and this is the last time we’ll be able to dine together in the near future. Pretty much everybody I know and am close to works in media, and a big part of my job is lunches, dinners, and drinks with people in media, and generally just being around them, so that when stuff happens, I’m in a good position to receive information.

The group has a few expert orderers, but the strangely clubby atmosphere and volume of music require an ordering dictator. I take it upon myself and get two meze platters, mansaf, fattat lahma, fattat jaj, a pistachio pizza, an ouzi lamb and chicken, a date salad, a large chicken kebab, and an appetizer mixed plate with what appear to be fried cheeses. We pour several wines we brought, including a dry Tokaji, a Spanish white blend, and a splurgier Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains that Austin, that the owner of Big Nose Full Body, recommended heartily.

A lot of people are around this evening in this corridor of Brooklyn: Poking my head into Montero, I run into some friends from college. It’s too crowded and not really the vibe, so we stop in at Elsa for a quiet nightcap and bump into a popular podcaster who seems to be hoping to get a quiet drink and isn’t particularly thrilled to run into a media reporter.

Sunday, January 11
Sunday is a workday for me, so I’m up fairly early writing up what we have for the newsletter.

I make some coffee for Lilly, who returns the favor by going across the street to Baya Bar for some açai bowls. The açai places in New York are not operating at the same level as the spots in Orange County, California, where I grew up, but today it feels fairly restorative.

I go through edits left by Ben Smith and our newsletter producer and make sure we’ve heard back from everyone we’re writing about so we get the story right and I don’t get yelled at after we publish. I talk to our White House reporter, Shelby Talcott, to make sure the White House, Treasury Department, and Trump’s outside organization all know that we’re publishing a story on the upcoming Super Bowl push around Trump investment accounts.

Everything is buttoned up by six, and we’re ready to press “Send.” I hand off the newsletter to our producer, and I’m extremely hungry.

Lilly and I debate making soup, a regular Sunday-evening winter activity, but we both are craving pasta from one of the many local Italian places in Park Slope that seem to do largely the same thing. We walk down Fifth Avenue to Terre. We order an escarole salad, a venison ragù, and a spaghettone (which we discover is another way of saying spaghetti) with stracciatella.

Lilly gets a glass of red wine. I’m skeptical of Terre’s new experimental way of offering wine by the glass in which they solicit an emotion from patrons to gauge which wine they’d like to drink and instead settle on a vermouth. By the time the apple tart arrives on the table for dessert, I check my phone and see our newsletter has published and my workweek is officially over.

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