What do you do when the worst people in the world seem to be winning?
The question gnawed at sommelier Jake Laugle as he watched the relentless procession of horrible things unfolding daily: the mass detentions of immigrants, the proliferation of concentration camps, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It was so obviously wrong that masked goons in paramilitary regalia could climb from Penske trucks and, without provocation or warrant, round up brown people at gunpoint. The apparent inability of the system to somehow stop any of this left him angry, but also feeling powerless. “I had this desire to do something, but what?” he told me.
Laugle works at Mosquito Supper Club, perhaps the most celebrated Cajun restaurant in the world right now. Maybe, he thought, he could somehow leverage his wine knowledge. He decided to organize a not-for-profit wine pop-up called Delicious and Harmless. He would choose wines, find venues owned by people with principles similar to his own, and somehow attract a crowd. He would make the events accessible to as many people as possible and pour drinks at all price points. (“What I have to charge—not what I can charge,” he said.) All the proceeds from whatever wine he sold would go to groups helping those most affected.
It would be an understatement to call the events a success. Since the first Delicious and Harmless event in March, they’ve become can’t-miss social events in a city where the bar for “can’t-miss” is very high. And through them, Laugle has raised money for groups that include Immigration Services & Legal Advocacy, a rights group for immigrant communities; Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which supplies medical care to Palestinian children; Toups Family Meal, which provides meals to local communities; and Sprout NOLA, which helps locals get into farming and the community food system.
He is part of a growing movement led by workers in the hospitality community, who are using their talents and local prominence to fight authoritarianism at every level of government. When the Louisiana governor and the Trump administration gutted school lunch and childhood hunger programs, local chef Isaac Toups began closing his restaurant early each day, making meals for thousands of people in underserved communities. And I’ve written previously for The Food Section about Bacchanal’s Primal Nights, in which local chefs cook donation-based meals for nonprofit organizations.
On July 14, I attended Delicious and Harmless No. 5, held at Hungry Eyes, the Uptown sensation known for its martinis, cocktail food, and 80’s aesthetic. I managed to snag the last open table in the place. As the host led me through the crowd of revelers swirling glasses and pouring another, I spotted Laugle across the restaurant, working the room, obviously in his element, speaking passionately about something more than wine.
To eat, I ordered artichokes on the half shell, a Hungry Eyes specialty, part of a special menu the chef had composed on behalf of the evening’s cause. (Because I have no self-control, the dish didn’t stand a chance, and a charcuterie board followed, which fared no better.)
When Laugle made his way to me, I asked him about his approach to the evening’s wine list. “I always try to choose wines that tie in the organization we’re supporting, and what’s going on in the world, or what’s been weighing on my mind. It’s Bastille Day, so we’re raising funds for Step Up Louisiana. They’re focused on workers’ rights and advocacy, so it seemed fitting,” he told me. “I chose wines that are French and celebratory, and maybe a bit confrontational. And naturally, working-class wines are well-represented here.”
The list comprised nine wines by the glass, five bottles, and two non-alcoholic drinks. I asked him to choose a flight for me, and he didn’t disappoint. Among the wines he poured was an austere and exquisite 2019 Anjou Blanc from Château de Breuil: a dry, 100% Chenin Blanc grown at Clos du Frère Étienne, a regenerative vineyard in the Loire Valley. (For those who care about this sort of thing, we’re talking tight acidity, ripe orchard fruits, beeswax, and a touch of oxidative depth. This would be the Robespierre of the flight.)
It contrasted perfectly with a 2023 Les Temps des Cerises, titled “Jalava,” a natural red from the Languedoc: 100% Cinsault, bright strawberries, rose petals, fresh and a little funky (“real deal proletariat juice,” said Laugle). The winemaker, Axel Prüfer, employed ten days of carbonic maceration before pressing the grapes, imbuing the wine all the playfulness you’d expect from a wine named for the man who saved Lenin during the Russian Revolution.
Before the night had ended, I bumped into a friend and we relocated to the bar. We closed the place down—and we weren’t alone. A packed restaurant is a rarity on a Monday night, and especially a Monday night during the tourist-free New Orleans summer. But Hungry Eyes was standing room only, its revelers bound by camaraderie and beautiful wines. Nothing could be more appropriate for La Fête Nationale.
Jake Laugle, with his tousled hair and kinetic presence, evokes a young Mick Jagger. He looks younger than his 32 years, 15 of them spent working in restaurants. His first job was garden bar boy at a Ruby Tuesday in Virginia Beach, keeping vegetables stocked and counters clean. After paying his dues, he began waiting tables, which was a revelation: a job that paid “about as much as you could make, as fast as you could make it legally, for a college student.”
He’s been in the hospitality industry ever since. “If you have experience in restaurants, you can get a job anywhere in the English-speaking world—and I’ve done it,” he said. “Several years ago, I moved to Australia with no network, no apartment, no nothing, and within a week had a job.”
His whole career, he’d heard that if you really wanted to make money in service, you had to learn how to sell wine. He put it off, however. “I wasn’t really working in those kinds of places, and anyway, at that time in my life, I wasn’t taking hospitality seriously.”
Then, during the pandemic, a fine dining restaurant hired him. On his first shift, the somm he was shadowing made as much money as Laugle spent on one month’s rent.
He decided to teach himself wine by tasting. He soon found a small community that elevated his game. “Eventually I tasted a couple things that flipped the switch for me. It was sudden. I got into it to make money, stayed in it because it’s magical.” His tastes today gravitate toward low-intervention wines with uninoculated fermentations, their grapes farmed without synthetic input, and with respect for the local biome and planet’s ecology.
I first met Jake in 2022, when he was a floor somm at Chemin à la Mer, the French restaurant at the Four Seasons, with one of the best views in New Orleans—and one of the most exquisite wine lists. Eventually, he was hired as sommelier of Mosquito Supper Club, the Cajun culinary sensation offering a prix-fixe dinner service at family-style communal tables.
“Melissa and the team there have tapped into something really powerful,” said Laugle, “They have this commitment to harnessing the power of nostalgia and using the very best ingredients that exist in this part of the world to express really authentic parts of Melissa’s identity and personal history. It washes over you.” The experience, he said, is greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s one of those very special places that you can have some idea of what it might be like to go there, but you’ve got to go there to actually know.”
Mosquito Supper Club is one venue of many that’s hosted Delicious and Harmless. I first heard about the pop-ups through word of mouth. When I learned it was Laugle’s creation, I wasn’t surprised. And having felt the same frustrations that he and so many others have, I was drawn to his goals and the broader effort by hospitality workers to defend the notion of hospitality itself.
When fascism came, I guess I expected it to be seductive, somehow, or have to be sold to the masses through eloquence and obfuscation. That when it was all over, the nation would emerge as though from a cave, blinking in the sunlight, astonished by what we had gone along with, as stunned as the rest of the world.
Instead, it came from an absurd, transparently stupid man who cleared a path for cynical hucksters and feckless sycophants to take the levers of power. (There’s not much difference between Caligula making his horse consul, and Trump making the star of The Real World: Boston and Road Rules: All Stars the head of NASA.) In his rare instances of lucidity, Trump is merely hateful, saying, for example, that immigrants are “not human,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And enough Americans agreed with him to make him president. Orwell wrote that the final, most essential command of an authoritarian party was to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” We see people doing that every day. I have to believe that even the MAGA crowd is shocked by how well it’s all working, by how fragile the system turned out to be.
I also never thought that if all this happened, we would have to just go about our lives as though things were normal. Masked men are violently rounding up the most vulnerable people in our communities, and while they’re doing so, we’re running errands and taking lunch breaks, watching TV and mowing the lawn. I write about the administration’s wrongdoing when I can, and I go to protests, but it doesn’t feel like we are in some liminal space between “ordinary life” and revolution. We’re just in ordinary life. Pay your bills, wash your car, fold the laundry—it all leaves me feeling complicit in an evil system, and helpless to stop it.
Which is why Laugle’s pop-up feels so important. He’s not dealing haymakers here against fascism. Rather, he’s doing something arguably more beautiful: he’s quietly chiseling away at the problem. The Trump Administration cut $400,000 in federal funding for composting programs in New Orleans. So, Laugle dedicated Delicious and Harmless No. 3 to Sprout NOLA.
Though I’m writing about Laugle’s successes in retrospect, none of this has been easy. The first Delicious and Harmless, in March, was a wild success. “When you do something new that you care a lot about, and you’re lucky enough to have a wonderful community that supports you, a lot of people show up. ” The last time he’d been in a room with so many people he knew and loved, he said, was his engagement party. The event raised about $1000 for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
The second event, two weeks later, was a complete bust. “It was humbling,” he said. He felt awful for the Original Nite Cap, which generously let him hold the event, and for the group he was raising money for, Hagar’s House, a shelter for women, children, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people. “I realized that I couldn’t only depend on my friends and family to come out and spend all their money on my silly little thing.”
That could have been the end. But Laugle stuck to his vision, pausing only to figure out how to build greater awareness of the pop-ups. His commitment to pouring excellent wines in inviting spaces would not change.
And it’s working. He said he now sees more strangers than acquaintances at each event. “I’m making this up as I go,” he told me. “It’s been really an amazing thing to see the snowball get rolling downhill and get bigger.”
Delicious and Harmless provides a road map for how we’ll get through this. Laugle is a living example of how we can each do our part to push back against the worst people in the world, a little at a time. Maybe it won’t solve the moral rot that led us to this place. But it might just get us through the worst of things, and to an age that is again hospitable to civility and compassion.
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