Joe Rosenthal, Food Antagonist
How pizza, politics, and toxic restaurant culture made a mathematician Instagram’s unlikely crusader
By Molly Each
Photos by Bill Phelps
This story was originally published in Meal Magazine Vol. 2, No. 1.
To help us create more stories like this, please support Meal by ordering an issue, or subscribing via Patreon.
When mold attacks food, it latches onto the surface, producing the green fuzz or black spots that announce its destructive presence. But it doesn’t stop there: mold also contains thin, thread-like roots that crawl well below the surface, spreading toxins and creating a poisonous situation that can rarely be solved with the swift slice of a knife.
A similar reaction occurred when Joe Rosenthal started digging into Sqirl, L.A.’s James Beard Award-winning hipster haven. Initially exposing the growing issue (ahem) of mold being allowed to fester on the restaurant’s bulk batches of coveted house-made jam, Rosenthal ended up uncovering something far more toxic. Current and former employees told him that chef/owner Jessica Koslow had instructed them to scrape the mold off and use the jam anyway—and, in doing so, she disregarded the health risks both to customers eating it, and to employees working in a mold-filled environment. Sources also told Rosenthal that Koslow took credit for recipes developed by her kitchen co-workers, and that she intentionally mislabeled food as gluten-free, even when it wasn’t. But most surprisingly, Rosenthal’s inquiries turned up a secret kitchen prep space at Sqirl—Koslow had hidden it from health inspectors for nearly a decade, allowing her to subvert proper storage techniques, food handling protocols, and other regulations designed to keep diners safe.
“To me, mold points to a LOT of stuff going wrong,” says Rosenthal. “So I started branching out and talking to employees and [saying], ‘What the hell is going on [here]? Tell me the story.’”
Rosenthal may seem an unlikely superhero. By day, he’s a mathematician who builds systems to improve cancer diagnostics. These days, his work has branched into COVID-19 research. But by night, the 32-year-old scientist swoops into the dark, dusty corners of the online food world, bringing to light abuses, injustices, and other unsavory behavior perpetrated by the restaurant industry’s power brokers.
“It’s this common problem in computer science, you go where the data is,” Rosenthal says of his investigations. “That’s what I’m doing; I’m going where the information is.”
His outlets are non-traditional—he posts his findings on Instagram and in longer articles on his personal website—but he adheres to journalistic conventions and ethics. He fact-checks and confirms the legitimacy of his sources, his conversations are explicitly denoted as on or off the record, and he painstakingly protects his sources’ privacy with input from his spouse, Dr. Abby Marsh, a data privacy researcher. (Marsh makes frequent cameos on Rosenthal’s Instagram stories, adding whip-smart commentary to his slides—which are text-only, free of any personal photos that aren’t his own homemade pizzas.) And when the situation demands, he not infrequently serves as a conduit, connecting sources with trusted traditional media outlets like the New York Times. But when the rest of the media world has moved on, Rosenthal remains on the story, continuing to catalog his subjects’ official statements, non-apologies, and further misdeeds in his Instagram stories.
Sqirl is arguably the highest-profile scandal Rosenthal’s exposed thus far—he gained almost 15,000 Instagram followers as he documented his findings over the span of a couple weeks—yet it isn’t his first, and it is hardly his last. A scroll through Rosenthal’s Instagram story highlights, where he archives all of his slides by subject, is like a stroll through the greatest hits of recent restaurant scandals.
There’s Matt Hyland, the chef/owner of pizza restaurants including Emily and Emmy Squared in New York City, who vindictively outed an anonymous restaurant critic after a negative review.
There’s Bon Appétit—and associated parties, from corporate heads to Test Kitchen chefs—where then-editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport’s appearance in brownface turned out to be just the tip of an iceberg anchored by non-white exclusion and cultural appropriation.
There’s Alison Roman, the high-profile cookbook author and former New York Times columnist who denigrated Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen in an interview, among other controversies.
There’s Anthony Falco, a former chef at famed Brooklyn pizza spot Roberta’s, who Rosenthal has exposed as a racist, sexist, and abusive boss who allegedly lied about being a partner in the restaurant and claimed credit for various aspects of the institution’s success, including its recipes and frozen pizza business. (According to Rosenthal, credit goes to a variety of sources, from the founding partners to kitchen managers Angelo Womack, Ken Weinreich, and Lauren Calhoun.)
Suffice it to say, in this sprawling industry, Rosenthal’s not running out of material.
“Toxic has become this nebulous term, but I think generally it means anything from wage theft to being berated to not being paid well enough to being put in a situation where your physical health is at risk, be it in a mold-filled environment or interfacing with customers,” Rosenthal says. “Hearing about all these terrible things, it’s [often impacting] low-wage workers. Not [solely], but generally, it’s a lot.”
Rosenthal’s improbable entry into investigatory journalism started with pizza. Three years ago, Marsh was offered a tenure-track faculty position at Macalester College, which meant moving to the Twin Cities—as Rosenthal puts it, the couple found themselves “marooned in a pizza desert.”
“I knew that if I wanted to eat New York pizza, it would have to be made by me.” Ever the scientist, Rosenthal set out to craft the perfect New York-style dough through rigorous experimentation. “Coming up with any kind of recipe is a parameter search not unlike the parameter searches I do for my research,” he says. “I’ve built an understanding of dough over the years—what oil does, what salt does, what over-fermenting can do. So I keep iterating. I’ll change one variable, or if it’s really, really wrong, I’ll just do a reset. But as I’m iterating, I’ll change one thing. OK, this is too chewy, let’s drop the hydration down or bump it up or whatever.”
Documenting his doughy odyssey, Rosenthal built a social media following of pizza industry insiders, pizza lovers, and home pizza chefs. “I would post pictures and people would be like, ‘Is this a restaurant? How do I go here?’” He created a website for a fake restaurant called Richard Eaglespoon, where he posted articles ranging from a pathologically detailed gift guide to a how-to on cooking the perfect steak.
Through connections to fellow pizza obsessives, the budding journalist began learning about problematic people in the industry, like Hyland and Falco, and he wrote up his findings on their misdeeds at Richard Eaglespoon. (The stories continue to get strong traffic: Google Matt Hyland and the first hit that comes up is Rosenthal’s article.) From there, Rosenthal started to call out abuses in the food world at large—not just detailing the troublesome behavior, but also explaining why he thinks it’s wrong.
“To me, Bon Appétit is a prop to talk about systemic racism and toxic bro culture,” he says, noting that the problems go well beyond individuals like Rapoport. Acknowledging that there are often people “you can point to and be like, ‘they need to go,’” Rosenthal insists “it doesn’t start with them, and it doesn’t end with them. I think people want to see things tied up neatly. But that’s not the case.”
Rosenthal grew up with his parents and younger brother in Troy, New York, outside of Albany. He kept kosher until he was 15. “Even something like Jack Daniel’s shrimp at TGI Friday’s was this unknown world,” he remembers. But he felt drawn to the science behind replicating a dish. “We used to go to brunch at this hotel, and they made really good omelets. I was like, ‘Why are these different from the omelets at this diner?’” he says. “I started to realize that oh, they cook the vegetables first, and then they add the egg. It’s kind of diagnosing the methodology.”
His cooking ramped up when his mom underwent cancer treatments his sophomore year of college, just a year after his father had passed away from dementia, which Rosenthal says was part of what drove him to do his PhD on Alzheimer’s disease. In his spare time, under a pseudonym, he ran an online fashion forum, which is where he met Marsh.
“It was kind of an interrogation of consumerism, thoughts on fashion shows, thoughts on problematic events in the industry,” he says. “I had a lot of enemies. People fucking hated me. I was a lot more, I don’t know, outrageous. I don’t know that I’m a whole lot different than I was, but I don’t do it pseudonymously [like I used to]. My name is Joe Rosenthal.”
Rosenthal’s endgame isn’t to get people “cancelled,” or exiled from society—or even from industries like fashion and food service. “I reject the idea that this is cancel culture,” he says. “If the mold situation is cancel culture, then all investigative journalism is cancel culture. There needs to be accountability.” He cites Sqirl as an example. “A lot of restaurants have secret kitchens—fuck ‘em all! We have evidence of [Jessica Koslow] doing it, so let’s hold her accountable, and maybe everyone will stop doing it to that level. I reject the notion that cancel culture is a problem when it comes to celebrities. These are a lot of people punching up so far beyond their reach.”
Rosenthal believes these situations are born from a mix of celebrity chef culture, various privileges, and traditional restaurant hierarchies. But he also believes food media shoulders much of the blame. He points to Falco, the Brooklyn pizza chef taking credit for others’ work. “You see a Bon Appétit article that says [Falco] is the guy who put Roberta’s on the map. You find articles in the New York Times, Vox, all citing him as a foundational member of Roberta’s. All the while he was fired and sued by Roberta’s. There were people who played arguably more significant roles that were women, people of color, women of color, who were ignored just because Anthony Falco said he was the guy who put Roberta’s on the map.”
In the era of rapid news, clickbait articles, and writers concerned about losing access to big-name chefs, Rosenthal has come to see his exposés as essential. Referring to journalists, he says, “You have to do your homework on this stuff, and I worry there’s not funding and time for this to happen. There’s a ‘Hot 10’ list every month, and those are important to some extent, but writing these articles is taking people away from interrogating these situations and investigating what’s actually happening. You could call Roberta’s … you could find [the lawsuit against Falco] with a Google search, because I did. Maybe look into the guy a little more before you write about him. You don’t have to write a takedown piece, but maybe you just don’t write about him.”
Rosenthal’s goal is really quite simple: accountability. He tells me that “more Falco people are coming forward,” and he’s working on a follow-up article. “But I don’t want to work on part two. I want [Falco] to say ‘I fucked up’ and disappear for a while. But that’s not the world we live in.”
Rosenthal, like most of us during this unrelenting pandemic, is drained, physically and existentially. He hasn’t made a pizza in weeks. He doesn’t know when he’ll write his follow-up Falco article. But he’s still breaking and covering restaurant world news, from the innocuous—Alison Roman, no longer at the Times, purchased a restaurant in upstate New York—to the criminal, like the abuses in the kitchen at famed New York restaurant Mission Chinese. Lately, he’s revealed all sorts of dangerous COVID-related behavior, detailing instances of restaurants hiding COVID-19 cases, restaurateurs who are proudly anti-mask (Marc Vetri of Vetri Cucina in Philadelphia is a frequent target), and food media and chefs traveling despite pandemic risks and restrictions (Falco, again). “It’s my area of research to some extent, so I feel like I should say something.”
Unfortunately for Rosenthal— for all of us, really—his DMs are overflowing with food-world muck. He can’t chase down all or even most of the tips he receives. “Most of the stuff I get I can’t do anything about. It’s not actionable in any way. It’s like, these people are shitty, but I don’t know. I can’t handle everything.” Carrying the stories of so many victims, pulled by both enraged overwhelm and desensitized burnout, takes an emotional toll. “I think I’m continually shocked and not shocked,” he says. “I just find that the bottom is not where I thought.”
On a lighter note, Rosenthal remains the godfather of scientifically meticulous homemade pizza. For proof, just look to Instagram, where followers seek out his advice on dough-related conundrums, pass along screenshots of the latest pizza world scandals, and tag him in photos showcasing their own creations—many made using instructions from his stunningly exhaustive (and funny) guide, “How to Pizza: A New York-style Pizza Article with Extraneous Information” (available on the Richard Eaglespoon site).
“Almost everything I’m tagged in is impressive in some way,” he says of his fellow pizza innovators and Instagrammers. “They have the stretch down, they nailed the color, or all of the above. It’s a different thing to make pizza at home, but some pizzerias don’t even have the underlying skills to do it well.”
Rosenthal’s sentiments are sincere, yet he can’t resist a final dig. “Anthony Falco can’t make a pizza as good as the best people making this recipe.”