Latkes in the age of TikTok
Can traditional foods survive?
Chanukah has just finished, and I didn’t make any latkes. But for my Grandma’s on Christmas day, my latke experience has been confined to scrolling through Instagram. My failure to make some is in part due to a fatigue-inducing cold, but it’s only furthered my intention to go into 2025 with the intention of actually making latkes a perennial fixture, which is part of a larger goal to spend a lot more time in the kitchen. Having watched a lot of videos instead, what did I notice amongst the most influential online Jewish cooks? Not one family recipe for latkes with sour cream and applesauce, and a unanimous obsession with offering a twist.
There’s Carolina Gelen’s series “8 latke days,” which has brought us: the Mediterranean latke (made with slices of meyer lemon and fried in olive oil); the kugel latke (with cinnamon, sugar, and noodles); pickle latkes; ‘sushi’ latkes (spicy tuna); the schnitzel latke; dirty martini latkes (olives in the latkes, sour cream laced with olive brine); lox latkes; and miso mushroom latkes (filled with enoki, and served with apple ginger sauce). Gelen’s videos are strikingly soothing to the point that the latke purist in me was made to feel like all was okay on watching them.1
Adeena Sussman pushed my purist sensibilities further with s’mores latkes, sheet-pan latkes with sweet & savoury toppings, and then in two different collabs, smash latke burgers, and more tolerably, giant latke rosti mashup topped with labneh and zhug. With the opening disclaimer “these are not your grandma's latkes,” Zachary Newman’s offering was Bissli breadcrumb-laced latkes topped with harissa-spiced beef tartar and chive mayo. Whilst for plant-based food blogger Ben Rebuck, it was salt & pepper mini latkes, which was supposed to represent the New York Jewish practice of eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas day, but also served as an advert for Pip & Nut, who’s peanut butter featured in the accompanying satay sauce. “These are not your run-of-the-mill Hanukkah latkes,” the reel opens with.
This year on The Internet, latkes are thoroughly remixed.
A first explanation for this lies in the anything goes attitude of modern-Jewish cooking (a phenomena I covered in the Vittles guide to Jewish food in Manchester, through that city’s vernacular), but I don’t think that sufficiently explains it. What that explains is that Jewish food can be dynamic or unruly in practice, not that any indication of traditionalism must be radically altered. What it speaks to, I think, is a new form of unruliness taking shape in online food content. Something I’d call TikTok Fusion. TikTok Fusion is not the natural evolution of urban cohabitation, family inter-marriage, diverse restaurants kitchens, or other social processes that lead to the formation of new dishes or cuisines. It’s often a hodgepodge. You don’t need to be a Marxist to have an intuition that something is suspiciously loose, but as Frederic Jameson would argue, it’s the peculiar kind of Speed in late capitalism that tends to create endless waves of pastiche. The popularisation of short-form video content has propelled this process in the food world.
Latkes on the internet in 2024 may speak to wider cultural formations that are now on motion. A less parsimonious reading, however, would draw attention to the parallels between some of these examples and real-life hybridisation of latkes. In New York City, there’s okinomi-latkes at Shalom-Japan, a Brooklyn restaurant run by Japanese-Jewish couple Sawako Okochi and Aaron Israel, and if you need any more evidence that the burger is the ultimate slut, how about Orwasher’s onion roll schmeared with horseradish cream, with a burger patty and latke wedged between it? You can find that at Schnippers, and I'm entirely in two minds about whether it would be revolutionary or tragic. Naturally, latkes have been subject to upscale gourmetisation too – such as at Sungold, a hotel restaurant in Williamsburg that serves celery root latkes. These remakes, like some of the examples above, sound delicious, and I’m certainly not opposed to smart fusion. If anything, I’m enthusiastic about it. Still, there’s a notable disparity between Internet latkes and real-life latkes that can’t be ignored. In fact, if you look at the Eater guide to the best latkes in NYC, or influencer Jeremy Jacobowitz’s overview of his eight must-eat latkes in the city, the vast majority of included places stick to the traditional formula.
This brings me onto my favourite latke content of this festive season, from an account called oldjewishmen — a must-follow if you’re into the Brooklyn dialect, Larry David, and genuinely vernacular New York Jewish humour. On Christmas day, there was a post of an image of the Wikipedia page for ‘Jewish-American Chinese restaurant patronage’ with the caption, “Rejoice, fellow paradoxical assimilators: No lactaid required tonight. “merry Xmas.” For Chanukah, a video post documenting a geriatric latke-eating competition where the winner gets a roll of Tums, and a stunning post using latke and sauce combos as metaphors for different types of New York Jews.
That memes can in fact be heavily signed — a way of spreading in-jokes to an online community, and beyond it — seems to me to be another face of The Internet. On oldjewishmen, latkes are vehicles of cultural sustenance. My algorithm, like yours, rapidly oscillates between continuity and boundlessness.
How, then, are cuisines likely to evolve in this new TikTok era of food content? There’s a literal sense in which they are no longer contained: Time and Place are radically open concepts on The Internet, and this is what leads to a potpourri of new takes on classic dishes. But for all of the audacious outcomes, culinary cultures are resilient. This brings me to another Marxist theorist — one less tethered to economic determinism, and whose work still resonates with me in my post-Marxist days. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin explores the figure of the collector: a person who cherishes objects for their personal and historical significance, tends to them, and preserves their stories and contexts, thereby resisting their commodification. Through this lens, the aura of the latke may endure — even on The Internet.
I suspect it wasn’t intentional, but you could also read all eight versions as different modalities of contemporary American-Jewishness; or at least symbolic of the different excursions Jewish eating patterns have taken.