Kristen Hess - The Artful Gourmet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Something is shifting. You can feel it. People are pulling out vintage cameras and buying vinyl at record stores. They’re scrapbooking again — actually cutting things out, gluing them down, pressing ticket stubs and Polaroids and handwritten notes into books that nobody else will ever scroll through. They’re hosting dinners where the phones stay in a basket by the door. They’re choosing Saturday afternoon road trips over Saturday afternoon doom-scrolling. They’re texting their four closest friends instead of broadcasting to four hundred followers. Or getting together in real life to talk, laugh, eat and drink together for real moments that matter. They’re calling it “going analogue.” And honestly? I’ve been doing this my whole life — I just didn’t have a name for it until now. The Internet Feels Broken. And We Know It. Here’s what the cultural conversation is starting to catch up to: it’s not that technology is bad. It’s that the current version of the internet feels kind of broken. The algorithm is a treadmill. The pressure to post in real-time, to perform your life for the feed, to be “on” every waking hour — it’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to articulate but impossible to ignore. People are waking up to the fact that attention is finite. That how you feel after scrolling is directly tied to what you’re consuming. That the era of following everyone and engaging with everything on autopilot is giving way to something more intentional, more protective, and a whole lot more human. Younger audiences especially are deliberately re-introducing slower, more tactile practices into their hyper-digital lives. Film photography. Vinyl records. Handwritten journals. Phone-free dinners. Not as a rejection of the modern world, but as a correction to it. A way of saying: some things are worth actually experiencing instead of just documenting. And here’s the piece I find most beautiful: a like or a comment means more now, because people aren’t handing them out on autopilot. The ones who show up — the ones who read the whole post, who leave the thoughtful comment, who share the thing because it genuinely moved them — those people are your people. That’s community in the truest sense. People don’t want to be followers everywhere. They want to be regulars somewhere. Nostalgia Isn’t Escapism. It’s a Compass. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why nostalgia hits so hard right now — and I don’t think it’s because we want to escape the present. I think nostalgia is a compass. It points us toward the things that have always mattered most, the things the noise tends to drown out: friendship, family, food on the table, music playing in the background, and the particular feeling of being somewhere together with nowhere else you’d rather be. Growing up, food was never just food in my world. It was the thing that gathered people. It was Sunday dinners that lasted for hours. It was road trips with the windows down and the radio turned all the way up — a classic Fleetwood Mac song bleeding into an America song bleeding into Steely Dan or The Doobie Brothers — with a cooler of snacks in the back seat and absolutely no agenda except take in the sights and explore our magnificent country out West. It was my mom’s Pot Roast and Mashed Potatoes, her Chicken Divan. Or my Dad’s favorite - Beef Stroganoff, and my Grandma’s Beet Soup with Polish potato dumplings — comfort food recipes handed down from her mother, and her mother’s mother, or my Dad’s mother, all made with love and served with conversation. Those memories don’t live on a hard drive. They live in my soul. In the smell of Mom’s homemade Chicken Noodle Soup simmering on the stove. In the way a certain vintage photo, or 1970s song can drop me right back into a specific moment — a specific time and place, or a specific feeling of everything being exactly right. That is what I wanted to honor when I started Groovy Eats. Why I Started Groovy Eats Groovy Eats isn’t just a cooking series. It’s a love letter. It’s a love letter to the recipes and the road trips and the record players. To the era when you didn’t need a filter or a ring light to have a beautiful, meaningful meal. When you called your friends and said “come over” and they came over — and somebody put on a record and someone else opened a bottle of wine and somebody else chopped the onions and you just… were together. Fully present. Fully there. The series is built around a simple but deeply felt premise: food and music are the original time machines. Play the right song while you’re making the right dish, and you’re not in your kitchen anymore — you’re somewhere else entirely. You’re nineteen again, or twelve, or thirty-two, in a place and a moment that mattered. Every podcast episode, every blog post, every Substack essay, every YouTube video in this series is me chasing that feeling and inviting you to chase it with me. It’s retro recipes made with fresh, elevated ingredients — comfort food that honors the past while feeling relevant right now. It’s 70s, 80s, and 90s playlists that set the mood and tell a story. It’s the behind-the-scenes of my food styling and photography world, stripped back to something warm and human and real. It’s intentional. It’s personal. And it is, in every possible way, analogue in spirit — even when it lives online. What Groovy Eats Looks Like in Practice On The Artful Gourmet Podcast, I’ve been opening up about the stories behind the food — not just the what but the why. The episode where I talked about my food writers retreat in Pennsylvania, sitting around a table with a community of creative people who all found each other through their shared love of words and food and storytelling — that episode wasn’t really about the retreat. It was about the hunger we all have for real connection. For smaller circles. For the kind of conversation you can only have in person, over a meal, away from the noise. or the Groovy Eats Valentine’s Day episode where I talk about the soul and romance of Al Green and a retro 1972-style Valentine’s Day dinner. And a deep dive into the Eagles musical history and the late night dinners of Chicken Parm and Penne Ariabatta they had at Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood while writing their most famous hits. On YouTube, the Groovy Eats cooking videos are shot to feel like a memory. Warm light. Real kitchens. Music that means something. The camera lingers on the sizzle in the pan, the steam rising from the pot, the moment when a dish comes together and you just know it’s going to be good. There’s no hustle energy here. It’s slow, it’s sensory, and it’s intentional. On The Artful Gourmet blog and Substack, I’m writing the longer stories — the heartfelt essays that take you somewhere. The piece about chasing comfort in my tiny New York studio apartment on a freezing January day, when all I wanted was a home-cooked meal and ended up at Zabar’s in the rain, hunting down the perfect cheeses for a gourmet mac and cheese that tasted like childhood. Or a nostaglic post about January 1978 that lives in the sweet spot of retro dinners and memories — when soft rock ruled the radio, casseroles ruled the oven, and dinner brought everyone to the table. The Groovy Eats recipe posts that pair a retro dish with a retro song, an artist, a playlist and a memory, so that cooking becomes a full sensory experience rather than just a task. Each of these pieces of content is me doing what the analogue movement is calling for: building in a delay between living and posting. Creating things that feel collected rather than manufactured. Letting the story breathe. Bringing something tangible — a real recipe, a real memory, a real emotion — into a digital space that can sometimes feel pretty sterile. The Future Is Both Here’s what I keep coming back to, and what I think the analogue trend is really telling us: social isn’t dying. It’s evolving. The future isn’t offline or online. It’s both, held together by intention. And the creators and communities that will matter most going forward are the ones who understand that — the ones who bring real texture, real warmth, real humanity to what they share. The ones who make you feel like a regular somewhere, not just a follower. That’s what Groovy Eats is for me. It’s my version of the scrapbook aesthetic — layered, personal, imperfect in the best way. It’s my vinyl record, my vintage film photo, my phone-free dinner table. It’s the place where food and music and memory get to exist together, without apology, on their own unhurried terms. If you’ve been feeling the pull toward something slower, something more real, something that actually fills you up instead of just filling your feed — pull up a chair. Put on a good song. Make something beautiful to eat. That’s the whole vibe. That’s Groovy Eats. Thanks for reading Kristen Hess - The Artful Gourmet! This post is public so feel free to share it. Tune into the companion podcast on The Artful Gourmet Podcast - listen wherever you tune in. Stay tuned for Groovy Eats Ep4, coming soon! Disco Night | Retro Cocktails & Late Night Bites 💃 🪩 🍹 🍤 Explore the Series: * 🎙️ Groovy Eats on The Artful Gourmet Podcast * 📺 Groovy Eats on YouTube * 📝 Groovy Eats on the Blog * 💌 Groovy Eats on Substack * 📲 Groovy Eats on Social Kristen Hess is a Food Stylist, Photographer, Writer, and the creator of The Artful Gourmet — a food and lifestyle media brand rooted in fresh comfort food, visual artistry, and the stories we tell around the table. Find her on Substack, The Artful Gourmet Podcast and YouTube Channel and her food blog at theart
