DEVONN FRANCIS IS SPENT TOO
A guest essay from a chef, our show's Critic's Pick nod, hating spacecore, Heinz's grillz, and much more.
The following essay is by my dear friend, cherished collaborator, and all-around brilliant human DeVonn Francis. I could think of no better person to kick off SPENT’s infrequent guest essays than the extremely hot, queer, Caribbean chef/artist himself. The usually-scheduled segments that follow the essay are written by me, so please don’t confuse my hot takes for his. You can read more about DeVonn’s work here.
Failure has a way of stripping you down. It doesn’t ask for permission—it just arrives, sits across from you, and starts unpacking your things. For a long time, I thought I needed to be a dazzling brilliant capital "C" Chef in order to matter. To be seen as exceptional. So when things didn’t work out—when a project fell apart, when I changed my mind, when the outcome didn’t match the vision—I didn’t just feel disappointed. I felt visibly invisible. Like the failure wasn’t just about the work. It was about me.
Every now and then failure sends me into a shame spiral so deep I can barely see out of it. I abandon the project. Stop responding to texts. Hide from the people who care about me because I don't want to explain why the thing I said I was building didn’t come together. It felt easier to disappear than to admit I didn’t know what I was doing.
But here’s the truth: most of the time, I have no clue what I’m doing. And I’m starting to believe that might actually be the point.
The past year has been full of moments where I’ve had to confront the limits of my plans. Ideas that felt brilliant in the beginning slowly unraveled. I was trying to juggle so many projects at once—dinners, collaborations, community events, new offerings—and I kept wondering why I felt so disconnected from myself. The work wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t feeding me in the way it used to.
I had lunch recently with someone who works in hospitality from a very numbers-driven perspective—someone precise, strategic, linear. During our conversation, he asked about all the things I’d been working on. In that moment, I found myself laying it all out—not as chaos, but as a kind of ecosystem. I started connecting the dots aloud, explaining how each offering fed into the next. That these weren’t scattered ideas, but part of a larger story I was trying to tell.
But what I realized in that moment is that he couldn’t see it. I laid it all out like a constellation, and he looked at it like I was describing static. He just blinked—no shape, no signal, nothing. Because to him, the value is in metrics and scale. And to me, the value is in meaning and connection.
And still, I walked away with a kind of clarity. I realized I’ve been underrating my intelligence—because even though I use spreadsheets and pitch decks all the time, my process isn’t linear or quantifiable in the traditional sense. And for a while, that made me think it didn’t count. But what if the process is the work? What if experimenting, shifting, responding in real time to what feels alive—that’s not chaos. That’s design.
I build through instinct. Literally, through clocking how the vibes feel. I prioritize people, not perfection. And for a long time, I saw that as a flaw. But I’m learning to see it as a strength. I’m building a hospitality empire through intimacy. Hospitality is my way of being in process, in public. It’s not about teaching people how to host the perfect dinner. It’s about creating space for people—myself included—to reconnect with what they value. It’s about learning how to show up again after disappointment, how to be generous with yourself even when the thing you hoped would work didn’t.
I think one of the hardest parts of failing is doing it in public. A lot of my work lives online, in the world, in rooms with other people. So when something flops, or fizzles, or doesn’t take the shape I imagined—it’s visible. People saw it. And that makes me want to hide until I can come back with a polished version of myself.
But I’ve started to realize that my public process is one of the most powerful parts of what I do. Letting people see the in-between moments—not just the glossy finish—invites them to do the same. It creates a kind of intimacy that’s hard to manufacture. I don’t want to live a life where everything I share has to be finished. I want to live a life where the becoming is allowed.
Failure has taught me who I am when things don’t go my way. And more importantly, it’s shown me that I don’t disappear when the work changes shape. I’m still here. I’m still building.
I’m not always confident. But I am courageous. I’m willing to stay in the process, even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when it’s quiet. Even when I don’t have the right language yet.
And right now, the thing I’m building is rooted in that promise to myself. Hospitality is both an offering and a mirror. It’s a way for me to come back to myself, and to invite others to do the same. Not in spite of the failures, but because of them.
So here is where I find myself: learning, gathering, failing better, and starting again.
- DeVonn Charles Francis
WHAT I CONSUMED
We had our opening night for George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck on Broadway. It was a sweaty evening at the Winter Garden (with a star-studded afterparty at the New York Public Library). There was something strangely poetic about the financial market tanking on NYC’s first warm night of 2025 while 1500 wealthy New Yorkers celebrated an expensive play about the protection of free press. Jesse Green surprised us with a NYT Critic’s Pick and Patrick and I ate as much short rib as we could find. It all felt very iconic.
I fucking hate the aesthetic of “space” in pop culture. From Ariana Grande’s 26 minute visual for the deluxe version of eternal sunshine to the latest (and by far most peculiar) installment of the On x Zendaya partnership—in which she is an alien?—I can’t stress enough how unsuccessfully rich people attempt to tinker with or cosplay spacecore. It’s as though human life and Earth’s existence pale in comparison to their WiLd iMaGiNaTiOn, when in reality, it’s a completely overdone pitfall of milquetoast creativity that’s run dry. The whole thing feels wildly Bezos-coded to me, and I can’t believe we’re still watching it permeate the decision-making of artists with far more capacity for originality, as often as we are.
I love everything about Miley Cyrus’s current album rollout, most notably her latest music video for “Something Beautiful”. It feels like she’s manifesting a vision she’s had tucked away for a long time.
During a delightful meeting with Emily Bergquist from Seaview, I had the dirtiest Dirty Martini of my life at The View of all places. Mind you—this was after the server asked me if I wanted it “with a twist”, which obviously made no sense whatsoever. I doubted the hell out of her. She shut me up with a truly filthy glass of brine. Touché.
I need to know what the fuck Don Lemon is doing. His TikTok feed feels like a midlife crisis social experiment.
I’ve listened to the new Bon Iver album SABLE, fABLE in it’s entirety upwards of 15 times at this point and I just don’t think I can get on board with it. It feels, sounds, and tastes like what I imagine a day at bible camp to be. The project’s bizarre art direction aside, and despite a select few songs I simply can’t stop listening to (especially the song featuring Danielle Haim), I found Justin Vernon listing all the brands he’s collaborated with + his presence in social media outlets all just so…confusing? A friend’s recent comments about it all also hit hard for me:
WHAT I LEARNED
Apparently Paul Thomas Anderson and Warner Bros. are butting heads over the final cut of his upcoming film, aptly titled One Battle After Another. It astounds me that filmmakers of that magnitude never really carve out full autonomy—unless you start a winery and dump $200mil into your own passion project.
This fun fact from a recent Eric Adams press conference is just too good:
The most punk rock thing I’ve seen in a minute was a pregnant Eartheater pissing into a bucket on stage, mid-performance.
Fox Nation is planning a reality gameshow about isolated people guessing what Trump did (or did not) do in his first 90 days as president. Onjoli Martelly pointed out to me that the “grand prize” is a mere $50k.
Pitchfork giving the new Will Smith album a 2.4 out of 10 rating made me laugh.
Thirst-trapping culinary royalty Padma Lakshmi dragged The VIP List girlies (you know, the ones who say “GO CRY ABOUT IT” and aggressively yell-talk when “critiquing” restaurants on TikTok) for their ignorance.
Andrew Cuomo used ChatGPT for his housing plan, a cornerstone issue for any NYC mayoral campaign. What a fucking loser.
Heinz Brazil is releasing a signature line of grillz designed to help open their packets of ketchup and mustard. Kind of awesome, to be honest.
In a far-from-subtle nod to the rising intersection of right wing politics, Silicon Valley and mainstream culture as a whole, Meta signed a multi-year deal with UFC. Every time I remember Zuck attempts to practice MMA, I get drier.
Lastly, despite an ongoing National egg shortage for the last 5 months, Trump thought it’d be best if the White House’s annual Easter Egg Toss be with 30,000 real eggs.
SOMETHING ELSE TO READ
Christianity Was “Borderline Illegal” in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion - And interesting and far-from surprising Vanity Fair piece on the rise of money-fueled Christianity in Silicon Valley.
Mike White, what’re we doing here? - Yes, I am one of those people that also loathed this latest season of The White Lotus. I found Teddy Kim’s piece for Feed Me to concisely voice a lot of my issues.
I’m currently reading Martyr!, an absolutely show-stopping novel by Kaveh Akbar. I truly haven’t read a book at this pace and with this much focus in years—I cannot recommend it enough.
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