An Invitation from the BildungsEssen Restaurant Group

This week, Kelly Lagor joins Sunday Morning Transport for the first time with a carefully crafted morsel that is at once delicious, mysterious, and revealing.

~ Julian and Fran, November 16, 2025

November’s Sunday Morning Transport arrives with a bounty of stories by Benjamin C. Kinney, Kelly Lagor, Andy Duncan, and J.R. Dawson. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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An Invitation from the BildungsEssen Restaurant Group

by Kelly Lagor

Soon Liesl will become the greatest chef there ever was. For now, she waits in the parking lot for my BildungsEssen app to send her further instructions, as outlined in the detailed email she received from me this morning. She’s gotten very good at following instructions this past year; she works at one of the best upcoming restaurants in Los Angeles, after all. While she’s taken all the right steps, she’s stagnated, unsure where she lost the thread. Tonight she will either find it or she won’t deserve to find it ever again.

When my app, required for admittance, tells her it’s time, she exits the sleek black car. She’s slight, more from overwork than underfeeding, with an anxious face and precise hands. She walks quickly across the large lot (my restaurant, Trieb, occupies the entirety of a warehouse near the train tracks in downtown Los Angeles) and stops at a handleless black door marked three. In the waning daylight, her face is illuminated by the sign above the door, the name shimmering in a font like a hallucination. She is, by design, alone.

A slot opens in the wall beside the door containing a pair of large clear goggles. Another alert instructs her to put the goggles on and informs her taking them off at any time will end her meal. She puts them on. The door opens.

Inside is a low-ceilinged corridor lined by regularly spaced knobless red doors. She walks, only a slight hesitation betraying anything less than complete confidence. After a few turns there’s a green door. It opens.

At a round table with a water pitcher and three glasses sits Evelyn, whom Liesl hasn’t talked to in six years. Liesl isn’t sure why Evelyn invited her. The summer after high school, they had, what she called in her electronic journal, a fading out, as Liesl had always found Evelyn to be a bit shallow and desperate, but she’d chosen to never say anything to her about it to keep the peace. Liesl couldn’t say the text she got from her this morning, begging her to come, was out of character, as she no longer knew what Evelyn’s character was. Still, she came hoping to reconnect and maybe be reminded of what had excited her about food in the first place. Just as I knew she would.

“Lisi!” Evelyn stands, wrapping Liesl in a hug. Evelyn is dressed, not just similarly, but precisely the same as she did in high school: the side ponytail, the Digipet wristband, the shivering sateen tunic, even the metallic gold lip gloss. The only difference is the set of large, heavy gold frames the goggles don’t quite fit over.

“Wow, Evie, you haven’t changed a bit,” Liesl says as she sits. The chair is designed to be more comfortable than its minimalist look suggests.

“I prefer Evelyn now.” She also sits. “It’s more authentic! How are you?”

Her indefatigable bubbliness, as Liesl once wrote, is also unchanged.

“Good. Sachen keeps me busy. I didn’t think I’d get the time off, but when I told Schroeder I was coming here, he lent me his car and nearly pushed me out the door. He wants a detailed report on the menu tomorrow. How did you get a reservation?”

“My manager!”

“Manager?”

“I’m a food influencer! I hit it big a few weeks ago after I interviewed Kaye Gorman.”

“I heard about that,” Liesl says. “Didn’t he disappear after the Leicht scandal?”

“He shops at the same specialty goods store I do in Silver Lake. I followed him home after, then manufactured enough run-ins until I could get him drunk one night. I recorded everything.”

“That’s legal?”

“He consented. Not my fault he thought I’d stopped after we fucked. My viewers expect me to be first to dish on all the dirt in the LA food scene now.” She leans toward Liesl. “You must tell me all about Schroeder. I’ve been dying to get into Sachen. Not even my manager can get a reservation. I’ve heard you’re guaranteed a Michelin star next year!”

“Schroeder’s cool,” Liesl says carefully as she pours herself some water. She has a complicated relationship with her boss. His enthusiasm, wrote Liesl just that morning, is both infectious and obliterative, and she worries he intends for her to become an identical yet less successful copy of him. “Did you know no one’s reviewed this place yet?”

“Yes! Isn’t that incredible?” Evelyn says.

“I don’t understand how it’s possible,” Liesl says. “Everyone’s talking about this place.”

The dominant rumors are: Trieb is a reaction against the hyper-now, hyper-local trend, with their hourly changing menus and expensive profit-sharing supply chains; and Trieb has no set menu, serving meals unique to the person. No one knows who the head chef is, and no one spreading the rumors has talked to anyone who’s been.

“I don’t know”—Evelyn taps a golden nail on the table—“but I’m going to be first.”

The door opens. Millicent enters, wearing pristine chef’s whites. Her hair’s pulled back tight enough to give her serious face, beneath the goggles, even more gravity. She takes the remaining seat.

Evelyn claps. “Everyone’s here!”

“Hi, Millie,” Liesl says.

“Millicent,” Millicent says. “Why are we all here, Evelyn?”