Eating on tour with indie musicians

An interview with Luke Pyenson, food writer and former Frankie Cosmos drummer.

Sep 26, 2024

Luke Pyenson is the longtime drummer of Frankie Cosmos, founding drummer of the cult DIY band Krill—and a food writer/journalist whose been published in The Washington Post, Punch, and Saveur. Most recently wrote about the parallels between the restaurant pop-up flyer and concert poster for Taste. At every juncture in his life, Luke has tried to view things through the lens of food (he even taught a movies and food class to high school freshmen), and his latest book is a testament to that perspective as well.

An anthology collection co-written with Alex Bleeker of Real Estate, Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians is a thorough accounting on how musicians feed themselves, are fed by others, and find their identity through food. It perfectly encapsulates the intersection of food and culture, by using the former as an entry point into touring lives. For example, Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood reflects on eating alone on the road; Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes shares the woes of veganism; Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz conversely expounds on its joys. Phoebe Bridgers’s tour chef explains menu planning. And Luke pens a personal essay, devoid of any sentimentality, about missing the holidays and family. Mark Ibold of Pavement (!!!)1 even makes an appearance. It’s a book that any fan of this newsletter is sure to enjoy, with the kind of anthropological but accessible bent that I personally get behind.

Below, a wide-ranging conversation with Luke—who was so very gracious with his time—on the book, the road, underrated food cities, pasta snobbery, and more. ❥

MOVIEPUDDING: I’ve been trying to connect food and movies through this newsletter, which is harder than I thought. However thereare quite a few food + music-related publications, including in this book. Outside of the touring aspect, why do you think it is that music and food are so connected?

LUKE PYENSON: One throughline is the overlap between people in the hospitality industry and people who tour. I don't want to say everyone I've toured with, but a lot of people I've toured with, have worked in restaurants or were on a break from their restaurant job when they were out on tour. I worked back of house in restaurants when I was a teenager, in college, and after. Alex, my co-author, worked front of house at Pies and Thighs back in its heyday.

We set our book on tour because for me that's where the most organic overlap of food music happens. Tour is where everybody has to deal with feeding themselves, and the ways that that manifests is what I was really interested in. For generations people have been trying to figure out how to get food and music together. I don’t think we brought them together—they’re already together, on tour. We just nudged that connection forward into the spotlight.

It was important to include everyone’s perspective in the book—not just people who have a hospitality background or… I don't want to say foodies, let’s say gourmands. It’s more engaging than just waxing poetic about amazing meals in Barcelona during Primavera or whatever. You want a bit of that, too, but it has to go deeper.

Can you briefly give an overview of what a tour day looks like for a band of your size? More than once, the musicians mention after sound check and before the show that everyone’s scrambling to get a bite to eat.

In Frankie Cosmos we were two couples. We would get typically two hotel rooms. We're talking Best Western, maybe Holiday Inn Express. Depending on the particular Best Western, you might go down and check out the breakfast. Get some plasticky scrambled eggs, a very well done slice of toast with hot sauce. A banana. Maybe some dry Cheerios. I was just looking back at my photos from that time and saw a lot of that. Or, you drive for a little bit and stop at a Starbucks or the nearest Whole Foods hot bar just for consistency sake. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to have woken up in the city that you played in the night before and have a little bit of time. But mostly it’s rare to find third wave coffee place, or a special breakfast, and savor it.

An international tour is much more exciting obviously than a standard domestic travel day. We really didn't do lunch, at least in our band. Lunch was a potpourri from different rest stops and gas stations during the day. My wife, who is also my bandmate, would often read menus from places we might try in the evening’s destination. It’s kind of nostalgic to think about now actually.

Then you get to the venue at 3 or 4 PM. During this time I'm really stressed because I want the soundcheck to be over as fast as possible so I can go have dinner and walk around wherever I am. Then there’s this beautiful golden hour you referenced that occurs between soundcheck and doors. if it's a longer tour and you see the opener every night, you don't feel pressure to necessarily stick around. you might have as long as between 5 and 8PM, a pretty luxurious amount of time to go get dinner. Sometimes my band would eat all together. Sometimes we would break off into couples. If we had local friends, we'd go meet them. But honestly the easiest and best thing to do is just go off on your own and take the time to chill. Everyone has a different relationship to that golden hour.

My husband and I were long-distance for a little bit and I would ask him to read something to me, and he would end up reading menus of places he’d been missing or wanting to go to.

There was a scene in The Taste of Things I wanted to take a photo of but I couldn’t: When the guy who runs the shah's kitchen narrates the menu, someone says something like ”What a joy to hear a menu read out loud.”

You and Alex were the resident food-person in each of your respective bands. How did you research and decide where to eat?

When I started touring in about 2010, I didn't have a smartphone yet. I had a host of web sources. At that time it was mostly early Yelp and Chowhound. Local alt weeklies were still really valuable, probably the best resources. Diners, drive-ins and dives are very good because Guy goes everywhere and ends up in places that you're actually gonna be. I try to read as many local newspapers and critics as I can. Eater became very useful around 2015 to 2018. They've got the country covered pretty well. Instagram started becoming more of my go-to after that.

But, I’m also a part of this community of musicians who circulated a spreadsheet, which is mentioned in the book. It was just called The Spreadsheet. It was just an intel sharing document for that person in many bands. Like I said, we don't usually have time to stop for lunch, but if there's somewhere exceptional along the way that's how I tended to find out about it. A couple of friends and I turned it into a clunky website called tourfood.us. You can enter your route and a map populates places along the way that other musicians have vetted.

In Europe, it’s checking in with

David Lebovitz

or Alexander Lobrano or other experts and do even more obsessive and extensive research.

The spreadsheet is nice because it has this DIY ethos whereas every list these days feels like it’s been optimized for SEO, especially with platforms for critical voices falling by the wayside.

The way that we tried design the website, we didn’t even want it to look that good. We just wanted it to be useful and democratic, open to everybody. No gatekeeping.

Backtracking a bit, when did your gourmand journey start?

I grew up in a family that valued food deeply. When I was around 10 or 11, my mom, who had previously worked as a tech copywriter, took a food writing course in the nineties and shifted her focus to food writing. By 2000, she was working as a food journalist, primarily for the Boston Globe and other local publications. Having that example and seeing that it was a viable career path was pretty big for me.

When I was 13, I started apprenticing in an Italian restaurant in Boston. I learned a ton about cooking and restaurant culture. I would go in once a week and just assist whoever in the kitchen wanted an extra set of hands. This was in 2004 at what was like the fine dining Italian spot in Boston at the time.

It’s funny; it was a little bit of a “rockstar”—with a huge asterisk next to it— hang-out. Billy Joel and Mick Jagger would come when they were in town. The frontman of The J. Geils Band, kind of one-hit wonders with the song “Centerfold,” lived in the luxury condos above the restaurant, and he would come down in leather pants and order directly from the pass. Even as a 13-year-old, I didn't think that was cool, and that experience helped inform this project in the sense that I really didn't want any of that energy present in the book—because that's where your mind goes when you think of what or how rock stars eat. It's that guy in the leather pants ordering aglio e olio pomodoro directly from the people cooking it.

In college, I had an interdisciplinary major that—I feel you would vibe with this—requires choosing two kinds of cultures and languages that go back to then, and either a film track or a visual studies track. I did French, Arabic, and visual studies, but I had to take some film classes as well.

I need to know where this was so I can go back and redo undergrad.

Tufts University. For my thesis I made a cookbook and prepared a meal for my jury. Every step of the way I've tried to view everything through the lens of food. Even back in sixth grade, I remember having to write about the Roman empire for history class. it was pretty open ended, so I chose to write about garum and fish sauce. In grad school I studied tourism anthropology and wrote my dissertation on culinary tourism in the West Bank.

Similarly, in my middle school history class we had to write a paper and ended writing about the origins of wine. I had also just seen Sideways.

I should have taught Sideways in my class.

Is this all-angle approach to food what led to you dividing the book into these three parts? hospitality, self care, and identity.

I think both Alex and I were assuming that more of the stories that came to us would fit into that hospitality chapter. But people were more vulnerable than either of us were expecting so those chapters started to organize themselves. It was really cool that we had the opportunity to cover so much ground and depth thematically.

How did you enlist musicians? Did you put out a pitch call asking for their best food story or give them any kind constraints?

It was a mix. Some of them were friends. Some of them were friends of friends. Some people we just cold pitched with no personal relationship at all. We were really heartened to hear back from people like Mark Eibold, for example. He was one of the best people to work with in the whole book.

“Every step of the way I've tried to view things through the lens of food.”

Every piece in the book started with a call like this with me, Alex, and the contributor. These were all hour and a half long calls where we just talked about eating on the road. It flowed so organically and as we described the project about 30 minutes in would be light bulb moment where they'd say, I know what story I'm going to tell. There were a few instances where people would have a couple ideas and if it was in a thematic area that was already well represented, we might push them towards the other one. The joke is that I always pushed people towards darker and heavier subject matter, and Alex always pushed people towards the happier stuff. a good yin and yang.

There’s a good amount of cross cultural exchange that happens on tour and in that way this is like travel book.

I touch on this in the intro—how you watch those food travel shows and the hosts always have a fixer who's taking them around, opening these doors. What's so cool about touring at this tier, especially internationally, is that the promoters and the promoter's friends are real life manifestations of that figure. In the best cases they take you to great places to eat, you meet their wonderful friends, and you have these incredible experiences that you couldn't write for television.

This might come as a surprise to many readers as it did for me, but you and others note throughout the book that—the food you eat is more memorable than the shows you play. It seems for many touring musicians, the experience can feel like a job. And just like anyone else in their daily routine, they find solace in a meal at the end of a long day. Do you think these musicians would have had such a relationship with food if they never hit the road?

I think that's something Natalie from Weyes Blood talks about in her piece—with getting to travel so widely and being exposed to all these different cuisines opened up her palate a little bit more. Getting to a certain level of success, you have a little bit more disposable income to spend on better meals. She also writes about the DIY promoters really taking care of you, especially in Europe. They do here to an extent, but in Europe, they really make it their mission to share their local culture and make sure you're well taken care of.

What I really wanted to try to do with this book, and it seems like it came through, is that half the people on tour don't give a shit about traveling and might not have chosen to do it for fun. but they get out there and they meet incredible people, see amazing cities, and try amazing food. I was in the travel industry before tour, so I'm a bad example because the travel aspect was the best part for me. But there were people for whom it was a struggle, who would rather be at home—and it's always nice when food is the thing that proves to them it’s not all that bad.

A lot of food memories are contextual even more so when travelling, but did you find an underrated food city or a meal that would be worth traveling for?

I'm going to say Galway, Ireland There's a club there that indie bands play a lot called Róisín Dove, which means the “black rose” in Irish. Galway has a great little food scene, including this one restaurant called Kai, which if I'm not mistaken is Maori for “food” because the chef is from New Zealand. That's a destination cafe if I've ever been to one. We ate there both on tour and then later as tourists. I dream about some of their stuff. She's a really, really talented baker. You just get super good homemade Irish brown bread, local fish. Irish produce is fabulous. Not just Kerrygold, but like the real deal butter. Sensational.

Is there anything that you were most frequently homesick for while you were away?

Just being able to cook. On nights off we would sometimes try to get Airbnbs. It was always fun, especially in Europe, to go to local markets and put together these ad hoc meals for everybody.

It's not like I would get homesick for bagels or something though. People would always try to take us to bagel places. But it's not the same. I can be patient.

What's your favorite bagel in the city? Absolute on the Upper West Side. [ed. approved] My wife was recently diagnosed with Celiac’s so our relationship to bagels has changed a little bit, but Modern Bread and Bagel, also in UWS, has unbelievably good gluten-free bagels. I've been eating them for the past few months and I don't miss the regular bagels at all.

You've worked in restaurants and are also a very big home cook. Do you think you would ever host a pop-ups? I’m just thinking about the essay you wrote for Taste.

I left this out of my gourmand journey earlier, but I used to do pop-ups out of my dorm and off-campus housing in college so I got that out of my system. I don't think I want to ever go back to cooking professionally, although I I'm very opinionated about dining out.

What are some things that especially bug you or that you want to more or less of?

This is a boring answer but I want an entree—a big plate. I'll still share, but I don't want to share a small plate. I'm sick of eating like that, especially with four or six people. It's impossible.

The other thing is that I'm much more conscious about is allergen friendliness now.I would love to see more places make explicit on their menus what has gluten—or any other allergen, too. Now that that's on my radar, it's so interesting how many places do it really well and how many don’t. They know all about it when you ask them, but the hardest part, at least for my wife, is having to have those conversations. It sucks and it'd be a lot easier if it were spelled out. And you can do it in a classy way. Your menu’s not going to look lame if you have “GF” in there. I don't think it has to be an aesthetic decision. It's about being hospitable at the end of the day.

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Now I have a few some quick questions. When you're cooking, what do you like to cheap out on versus splurge on?

My local grocery store is really expensive, so I think everything is a splurge. Eggs are a splurge, honestly. I don't pay that much close attention to olive oil, even though I love really good olive oil. It's just not worth it to me necessarily.

I used to be a pasta cook so Generally anything pasta related is what I'll splurge on. I get really really good pasta. And now that the gluten free thing is, how we do it. I go to Eataly and get high quality gluten free pasta from Italy. We're not doing Banza at our house. I've heard there's good fresh gluten free pasta around. I haven't tried it yet.

Is there a particular brand you like? I'm really into Setaro.

The one brand I really like at Eataly is called Massimo Zero. They have a lot of different shapes and we had a tagliatelle that had a fresh-pasta vibe that comes in a little nest. It was really impressive. For standard supermarket gluten free pasta, I think Rummo does the best job. Then there's this other one, that’s teff-based. I don't know if you've had Orchiette di Grano Arso, the burnt wheat orechiette, but the teff pasta has that smokiness. [ed. examples here and here.]

What is your favorite pasta shape?

I love orecchiette, specifically di grano arso. I love this shape called testaroli from Liguria. It's a pancake, kind of like injera, cut into oblong, uneven sizes and shapes. Traditionally it's flash boiled and served with pesto. But it's very rare to find it. sometimes I make it at home. Adelina’s in Greenpoint used to serve but now that it’s closed, I don't know where to get it anymore.

What's your preferred treat or pick me up?

Just whatever treat I see. Maybe an ice cream cone if it’s warm out or I'm near an ice cream place that I cherish.

Where’s that usually and what's your go-to flavor?

Grape-nut. My local spot is Island Pops in Crown Heights and they have a super good grape-nut ice cream. It's a popular Caribbean flavor—and also a popular New England dessert ingredient.

If your parents are in town, where do you take them?

My parents were just in town, actually. They came to my book launch, and I took them to Colonia Verde in Fort Greene, which they loved. That’s a a perfect real world example: a great restaurant, super good with allergens and stuff, and it's got the best backyard in Brooklyn. It's not the greatest restaurant in the borough, but it's really good, dependable, they're nice, and it has a nice atmosphere .

What is your perfect sandwich?

Eggplant parm sub with a lot of fresh basil on a super fresh semolina sesame roll.

What's the next restaurant that you're looking forward to eating at or trying?

My wife and I are going to Lyon this week. She has a work thing there and we're going to a place run by a young French Algerian woman, I always love North African food in France. It's called Söma. I've been reading about it. I'm psyched to go there.

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