（重招）Inside the NBA Bubble: Food scandal was overblown, though not all made up由asjkfj 发表在翻译团招工部 https://bbs.hupu.com/fyt-store
On the night the world ended, I had dinner with ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.
We were in Milwaukee ahead of a good Celtics-Bucks tilt set for March 12, a game of course we didn’t get to cover because the novel coronavirus had by then brought the NBA (and very soon after, much of American life) to a halt.
Just after President Donald Trump addressed the nation on the 11th, Tim and I met at the Milwaukee ChopHouse to watch the Mavericks and Nuggets and get a bite to eat. As we watched on the mounted TV inside the empty bar, and as our phones buzzed with calls from editors and colleagues and sources because of the positive test for Rudy Gobert that effectively set the shutdown of all major sports in motion, I ordered a 14-ounce strip steak, bloody, with a chopped salad, baked potato, and a Trivento Malbec.
The food was served by a waiter, sans mask or gloves. It came, dressed with garnish, on sturdy, traditional plates. We cut our steaks with steel forks and knives. Cloth napkins and table coverings were there for the crumbs.
That was the last meal I’ve eaten at a restaurant. Four months later, as I stared down at my dinner Tuesday inside the NBA Bubble at Disney World, looking disappointedly at the few strips of steamed beef I was sure I wouldn’t eat…well, I can tell you I knew I was pret-tay, pret-tay far away from that delicious steak in Milwaukee.
Quite simply, “the food,” as it’s referred to around these parts, caused the first big stir of Bubble life. As the NBA’s 22 teams of players, coaches, trainers and executives arrived on campus last week, they were escorted to their hotel rooms for a 36-hour quarantine. And while they were locked in their hotel rooms, they posted jarring pictures to social media of seemingly dried, supposed-to-be-hot, but-definitely-not pieces of chicken parmesan, tiny, prepackaged salads, flattened, greasy sandwiches wrapped in foil or plastic, and so on.
There were groans, and complaints, and distortions.
The Lakers’ Kyle Kuzma, seeing the carnage on his phone from colleagues who’d reached the Bubble before his team, bought a panini machine for the trip. “I just wanted to eat comfortably here,” he said. The Thunder’s Steve Adams said his wife baked a couple batches of lasagna for him to take “because I’d seen a photo of the food they were giving us online.”
“Little rough the first night, but after that it (the food) started getting a lot better,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said.
“The food has been a great help for me trying to cut a few (pounds), it’s been fitting right in with that plan, so all good, all good,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse joked.
Based on my description of my last dinner out, and how you’d probably guess NBA players eat when they are staying in hotels on the road all season long, you might understand that our eating experiences are similar. If things ever return to normal on Earth, head up to Toronto some night during the playoffs and walk into Sotto Sotto, a famous Italian restaurant. You’re as likely to see my fellow writers and I there as you are, say, Kyle Lowry, for example.
Eating in the Disney Bubble is quite similar for the players and the media covering them, with one exception. Players, and maybe they don’t even realize this, have access to personal chefs. At any rate, I’m here to report the scandal of the drab-looking food was indeed overblown, though not all together made up. The food here doesn’t photograph well, and there are two reasons for that. And while memories of the ChopHouse are never invoked each time I take a bite out of my saran wrapped focaccia bread, sprinkled with mushrooms, the grub tastes better than it looks. When my seven-day isolation ends Monday, my options will improve dramatically, as it did for the players and coaches over the weekend.
“If you’re talking about it being a five-star restaurant, no, but if you talk about it being good food that you can eat and enjoy, I think it is,” Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry said. “We’re not eating off of the fine China, but we’re also eating out of biodegradable containers, which is very smart to do. Obviously we’re not eating with silverware because that poses a threat as far as spreading the virus. So, everything they’ve done here with Disney and everything the NBA has done is try to be as safe and as healthy as they can possibly be.”
What Gentry referenced was the essence of the Disney food’s aesthetics problem. The Bubble exists only because of a global pandemic, transmittable from person to person. Quarantines and daily testing are required to ensure that anyone who goes into Bubble life is not, in fact, sick. The Disney service workers delivering the food do not operate under some of the same protections, so the food being served must be carried in packaging that ensures sterility.
That means tightly sealed plastic and wrapping, plastic cutlery, and packaged fruit. Entrees must come in cartons. The workers, wearing not only masks and gloves, but plastic shields over their masks, can deliver the food in paper bags, with thin handles pinched together, carrying the bags between two fingers with those handles. They stop at your door, drop the food on the ground, knock once or twice on the door, and then walk away.
The other issue is Disney’s commitment to being an environmentally friendly global corporate conglomerate. So these meals being zipped around three different Disney resorts, that can’t come on glass plates with iron covers, can’t come in styrofoam, either. Biodegradable cartons are flimsy.
When I opened my entree on Tuesday, and looked down at the drab, disappointing beef, the zucchini, red beans, and rice it came with was scattered all over the carton. The kale salad I stabbed with my plastic fork just didn’t have the same feel of that chop salad from many moons ago in Milwaukee, and the grapes that came inside what was supposed to be a cheese tray looked like they could use some air.
But it all tasted..fine.
Before we go any further here, there is something you should know. If I were to, for some reason, return to the ChopHouse, I wouldn’t order the strip again. Even though it was fantastic. I’m trying a new diet, one without animal protein (OK, fine, I’m kind of going vegan — there, I said it). These two country boys from central Ohio, who are friends of mine, talked me into it while we were all stuck in our homes during the first stages of the pandemic. Eat plants and whole grains. It’s actually kind of fun to do at home, I’ve witnessed the health benefits, and, you know, the environment and all of that. We’ll see how long it lasts.
The food Disney is serving includes options for vegans. Each night, save for Monday, when I admit, I caved and ate the boiled chicken breast, I’ve left the meat serving to the side and scarfed down the rice, sauteed or boiled vegetables, and fruit. It’s not as tasty as, say, the fresh zucchini and pepper and potato I slice up and throw in a skillet with olive oil at my house, but the food, in quarantine, given all of the hurdles and hoops the Disney people have to jump through to get it to me, tastes pretty good.
While I appreciate the options to stick to my diet (at least until I cave and order a whole cow my first night out of quarantine), there are players who are saying their options remain limited.
I asked the Rockets’ Tyson Chandler, 37, in his 19th NBA season, what his favorite meal was since arriving to Disney, and he said: “Uh, I haven’t had a favorite yet.”
Chandler said he has dairy restrictions in his diet, and his choices are limited. To that end, the NBA has flown executive chef Shawn Loving to Orlando to join the Bubble and consult on expanding the menu. Loving has served as chief chef for the Pistons, for Team USA basketball (still works with USAB), and worked as a kitchen leader at Disney World’s Epcot theme park, among other jobs. His purpose here will be to expand what Bubble dwellers can choose to eat. He arrived on campus Tuesday and is expected to make a difference quickly.
“For me, trying to navigate that was a little difficult at the beginning, but my hope is as things start to come together out here, it will be a little easier,” Chandler said.
The moment anyone, whether it’s LeBron or me, is released from quarantine, dining options improve. Hotels are still catering three meals per day for players at their hotels, that the players retrieve by walking into a team dining area. Or they can order room service, with an expansive menu, or, even better, they can order delivery from Morton’s Steakhouse, Joe’s (no relation) Crab Shack, Del Frisco’s, The Oceanaire, The Palm, and Saltgrass Steak House.
Next week, I’ll be able to do the same.
“I’d probably say Del Frisco’s is probably the best food I’ve had so far,” the Clippers’ Terance Mann said. “Chicken is pretty good. They have crab cakes, corn, macaroni and cheese, all that. The process is you have a list of food places to order from. You can order from there. Or the hotel makes us meals.”
The Rockets’ D’Antoni added: “We do more options. As a team, I think one night we ordered from Morton’s and one night we had Oceanaire. The food’s been good.”
A word of caution when it comes to ordering deliveries. The Sacramento Kings’ Richaun Holmes walked too far to meet a delivery guy, crossing a campus “line” at his hotel, and is now subject to 10 additional days of isolation in a hotel room.
If given the choice between that, or, a cup of rice and steamed green beans, wrapped in cellophane, delivered by the hotel…neither Holmes nor I would choose the former.
“They bring us food. We eat it. So I’m OK,” Wizards guard Ish Smith, succinctly.
—The Athletic’s Eric Koreen, Jovan Buha, Bill Oram, Fred Katz and Erik Horne contributed to this report. And the author appreciated it, greatly.
On the night the world ended, I had dinner with ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.
We were in Milwaukee ahead of a good Celtics-Bucks tilt set for March 12, a game of course we didn’t get to cover because the novel coronavirus had by then brought the NBA (and very soon after, much of American life) to a halt.
Just after President Donald Trump addressed the nation on the 11th, Tim and I met at the Milwaukee ChopHouse to watch the Mavericks and Nuggets and get a bite to eat. As we watched on the mounted TV inside the empty bar, and as our phones buzzed with calls from editors and colleagues and sources because of the positive test for Rudy Gobert that effectively set the shutdown of all major sports in motion, I ordered a 14-ounce strip steak, bloody, with a chopped salad, baked potato, and a Trivento Malbec.
The food was served by a waiter, sans mask or gloves. It came, dressed with garnish, on sturdy, traditional plates. We cut our steaks with steel forks and knives. Cloth napkins and table coverings were there for the crumbs.
That was the last meal I’ve eaten at a restaurant. Four months later, as I stared down at my dinner Tuesday inside the NBA Bubble at Disney World, looking disappointedly at the few strips of steamed beef I was sure I wouldn’t eat…well, I can tell you I knew I was pret-tay, pret-tay far away from that delicious steak in Milwaukee.
Quite simply, “the food,” as it’s referred to around these parts, caused the first big stir of Bubble life. As the NBA’s 22 teams of players, coaches, trainers and executives arrived on campus last week, they were escorted to their hotel rooms for a 36-hour quarantine. And while they were locked in their hotel rooms, they posted jarring pictures to social media of seemingly dried, supposed-to-be-hot, but-definitely-not pieces of chicken parmesan, tiny, prepackaged salads, flattened, greasy sandwiches wrapped in foil or plastic, and so on.
There were groans, and complaints, and distortions.
The Lakers’ Kyle Kuzma, seeing the carnage on his phone from colleagues who’d reached the Bubble before his team, bought a panini machine for the trip. “I just wanted to eat comfortably here,” he said. The Thunder’s Steve Adams said his wife baked a couple batches of lasagna for him to take “because I’d seen a photo of the food they were giving us online.”
“Little rough the first night, but after that it (the food) started getting a lot better,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said.
“The food has been a great help for me trying to cut a few (pounds), it’s been fitting right in with that plan, so all good, all good,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse joked.
Based on my description of my last dinner out, and how you’d probably guess NBA players eat when they are staying in hotels on the road all season long, you might understand that our eating experiences are similar. If things ever return to normal on Earth, head up to Toronto some night during the playoffs and walk into Sotto Sotto, a famous Italian restaurant. You’re as likely to see my fellow writers and I there as you are, say, Kyle Lowry, for example.
Eating in the Disney Bubble is quite similar for the players and the media covering them, with one exception. Players, and maybe they don’t even realize this, have access to personal chefs. At any rate, I’m here to report the scandal of the drab-looking food was indeed overblown, though not all together made up. The food here doesn’t photograph well, and there are two reasons for that. And while memories of the ChopHouse are never invoked each time I take a bite out of my saran wrapped focaccia bread, sprinkled with mushrooms, the grub tastes better than it looks. When my seven-day isolation ends Monday, my options will improve dramatically, as it did for the players and coaches over the weekend.
“If you’re talking about it being a five-star restaurant, no, but if you talk about it being good food that you can eat and enjoy, I think it is,” Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry said. “We’re not eating off of the fine China, but we’re also eating out of biodegradable containers, which is very smart to do. Obviously we’re not eating with silverware because that poses a threat as far as spreading the virus. So, everything they’ve done here with Disney and everything the NBA has done is try to be as safe and as healthy as they can possibly be.”
What Gentry referenced was the essence of the Disney food’s aesthetics problem. The Bubble exists only because of a global pandemic, transmittable from person to person. Quarantines and daily testing are required to ensure that anyone who goes into Bubble life is not, in fact, sick. The Disney service workers delivering the food do not operate under some of the same protections, so the food being served must be carried in packaging that ensures sterility.
That means tightly sealed plastic and wrapping, plastic cutlery, and packaged fruit. Entrees must come in cartons. The workers, wearing not only masks and gloves, but plastic shields over their masks, can deliver the food in paper bags, with thin handles pinched together, carrying the bags between two fingers with those handles. They stop at your door, drop the food on the ground, knock once or twice on the door, and then walk away.
The other issue is Disney’s commitment to being an environmentally friendly global corporate conglomerate. So these meals being zipped around three different Disney resorts, that can’t come on glass plates with iron covers, can’t come in styrofoam, either. Biodegradable cartons are flimsy.
When I opened my entree on Tuesday, and looked down at the drab, disappointing beef, the zucchini, red beans, and rice it came with was scattered all over the carton. The kale salad I stabbed with my plastic fork just didn’t have the same feel of that chop salad from many moons ago in Milwaukee, and the grapes that came inside what was supposed to be a cheese tray looked like they could use some air.
But it all tasted..fine.
Before we go any further here, there is something you should know. If I were to, for some reason, return to the ChopHouse, I wouldn’t order the strip again. Even though it was fantastic. I’m trying a new diet, one without animal protein (OK, fine, I’m kind of going vegan — there, I said it). These two country boys from central Ohio, who are friends of mine, talked me into it while we were all stuck in our homes during the first stages of the pandemic. Eat plants and whole grains. It’s actually kind of fun to do at home, I’ve witnessed the health benefits, and, you know, the environment and all of that. We’ll see how long it lasts.
The food Disney is serving includes options for vegans. Each night, save for Monday, when I admit, I caved and ate the boiled chicken breast, I’ve left the meat serving to the side and scarfed down the rice, sauteed or boiled vegetables, and fruit. It’s not as tasty as, say, the fresh zucchini and pepper and potato I slice up and throw in a skillet with olive oil at my house, but the food, in quarantine, given all of the hurdles and hoops the Disney people have to jump through to get it to me, tastes pretty good.
While I appreciate the options to stick to my diet (at least until I cave and order a whole cow my first night out of quarantine), there are players who are saying their options remain limited.
I asked the Rockets’ Tyson Chandler, 37, in his 19th NBA season, what his favorite meal was since arriving to Disney, and he said: “Uh, I haven’t had a favorite yet.”
Chandler said he has dairy restrictions in his diet, and his choices are limited. To that end, the NBA has flown executive chef Shawn Loving to Orlando to join the Bubble and consult on expanding the menu. Loving has served as chief chef for the Pistons, for Team USA basketball (still works with USAB), and worked as a kitchen leader at Disney World’s Epcot theme park, among other jobs. His purpose here will be to expand what Bubble dwellers can choose to eat. He arrived on campus Tuesday and is expected to make a difference quickly.
“For me, trying to navigate that was a little difficult at the beginning, but my hope is as things start to come together out here, it will be a little easier,” Chandler said.
The moment anyone, whether it’s LeBron or me, is released from quarantine, dining options improve. Hotels are still catering three meals per day for players at their hotels, that the players retrieve by walking into a team dining area. Or they can order room service, with an expansive menu, or, even better, they can order delivery from Morton’s Steakhouse, Joe’s (no relation) Crab Shack, Del Frisco’s, The Oceanaire, The Palm, and Saltgrass Steak House.
Next week, I’ll be able to do the same.
“I’d probably say Del Frisco’s is probably the best food I’ve had so far,” the Clippers’ Terance Mann said. “Chicken is pretty good. They have crab cakes, corn, macaroni and cheese, all that. The process is you have a list of food places to order from. You can order from there. Or the hotel makes us meals.”
The Rockets’ D’Antoni added: “We do more options. As a team, I think one night we ordered from Morton’s and one night we had Oceanaire. The food’s been good.”
A word of caution when it comes to ordering deliveries. The Sacramento Kings’ Richaun Holmes walked too far to meet a delivery guy, crossing a campus “line” at his hotel, and is now subject to 10 additional days of isolation in a hotel room.
If given the choice between that, or, a cup of rice and steamed green beans, wrapped in cellophane, delivered by the hotel…neither Holmes nor I would choose the former.
“They bring us food. We eat it. So I’m OK,” Wizards guard Ish Smith, succinctly.
—The Athletic’s Eric Koreen, Jovan Buha, Bill Oram, Fred Katz and Erik Horne contributed to this report. And the author appreciated it, greatly.
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