A Michelin-Recognized Chef Was Allegedly Set to Cater a Hackathon. So Why Did the Food Look Like “ass”?

Earlier this month, xAI, the startup responsible for programming Grok, the chatbot that’s really into talking about white genocide and Elon Musk’s urine-drinking prowess, held a hackathon in the Bay Area. I don’t generally give two flying fucks about whatever the next Grok hate crime is gonna be, but a tweet from xAI staffer Umesh Khanna caught my eye:

Chef Christopher Kostow is a big name in California cuisine: he led Napa’s Restaurant at Meadowood into its three-Michelin-star era in the 2010s. While that restaurant was lost in the 2020 Glass Fire, he’s carried on his work at The Charter Oak in St. Helena, and the more humble Loveski’s Bagels in Marin and Napa. When I first dined at The Restaurant at Meadowood in 2019, I considered it to be one of the best meals of my life: a singularly vivid and lively rendition of fine dining. (However, in the wake of the 2020 fire, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that some former Meadowood staff described the work environment as demeaning and traumatizing, while others noted “that was standard behavior for a Michelin-starred kitchen and it didn’t bother them.” Oof.)

The fact that a well-known chef had signed on to cater a hackathon isn’t too surprising. Restaurants and chefs in the Bay Area have catered to tech companies for a while now; I know plenty of freelance chefs who’ve picked up a few meal prep gigs for billionaire families in places like Atherton. Back in 2016, food writers and other observers noted that the past decade’s boom in Michelin-level fine dining restaurants in the region was partly a reaction to the influx of tech money, and that trend has continued on with the AI bubble. 

That leaves only the question of why, as one Twitter user noted, the food served at xAI’s hackathon looked “ass”?

Well, it kind of does, huh?

According to the photo posted on Dec. 5 by NYC startup guy Rich Zou, dinner was pure, thoughtless dude chum: a hunk of bone-in ribeye steak and half of a baked Russet potato. It looked like you could play pickleball with that paddle-shaped steak. It was as if somebody’s husky was terminally ill and they decided to ball out, one last time, because who gives a shit. 

There’s something extra cursed about the potato, which is tilted toward the camera: a wobbly thing seemingly just thrown onto the plate. The food is just tan, with no sign of a perfunctory garnish or sauce, though one might spy some flaky sea salt on the meat. The disconnect makes perfect sense here, for a group of people who have devoted their lives to destroying the environment to power a racist chatbot because they’re psychologically incapable of recognizing what is good or valuable in the real world.

It called to mind novelist Joyce Carol Oates’ incredibly based takedown of xAI founder Elon Musk as someone who posts like he doesn’t enjoy “or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates — scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book… In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured.” 

I reached out to Kostow’s representatives to ask if the steak was his doing. Was it sabotage? I haven’t heard back after two inquiries. 

Then I wondered: Was it not Kostow’s doing after all? Did something come up, and xAI had to call in the B-squad to cater? When I emailed the company’s media team for comment, the only response I received (one minute after the email fired) was, “Legacy Media Lies.” OK then!