Ask chef Jeff Miller how he knows someone, and the answer is often through Rosella: regulars, others in the restaurant industry, and even his wife, who first walked up to their counter as a guest. Illustrator Peter Arkle is on that list too. Bold yet comforting flavors solidified their friendship during the pandemic, when Jeff would pass bites to Peter from behind a screen at Grape and Grain. After Rosella opened on Avenue A in the East Village, the choking sign was the first thing Jeff asked him to draw. Peter came back with two namesake Rosella parrots in collared shirts, swapping wings for slender arms (with painted nails) to allow for clear visual communication of the steps of the lifesaving maneuver. In this episode of the Cultural Fingerprints podcast, we discuss how drawing may actually be one of the best ways to learn about the world, why Rosella diverged from the fine-dining omakase craze in favor of accessibility, and how eating out around New York City functions as an ongoing cultural and culinary education.

Peter Arkle: peterarkle.com

Rosella: rosellanyc.com

For more information: rheakapur.info and culturalfingerprints.com

Van Eggers has been a skateboarder since he was five and a graffiti artist since he was eleven, and the core of his artwork traces back to those two identities. In this episode of the Cultural Fingerprints podcast, Van walks us through his Long Beach years: living in the legendary Winnipeg Street skate house, full of pros sleeping on army cots and exchanging music, art, and skate lore; relentlessly pitching his work to anyone connected to the skate brands he’d grown up admiring; and painting murals at the parks by day before skating under their lights after dark. Those experiences eventually led to Van’s Common Meadows Creamery choking sign, drawn in the spirit of the mid-century advertisement illustrations he loves. Van reflects on how the incredibly diverse mix of communities in skateboarding surfaces in the boards, graphics, and clothing the sport produces, and on why skating, painful as it’s become with his ankle injury, remains his way of staying alive.

Van Eggers: vaneggersart.com

Common Meadows Creamery: commonmeadows.com

For more information: rheakapur.info and culturalfingerprints.com

Many custom NYC choking safety signs were drawn by those on staff. Graphic designer, illustrator, and artist Sara Rabin has two on the walls of New York City establishments: one made for Dimes in Chinatown, where she waitressed for a decade, and one from Rodeo in Crown Heights, opened by a friend from that same downtown restaurant orbit. In this episode of the Cultural Fingerprints podcast, Sara walks us through both: the hand-drawn Dimes sign she created not long after spotting a wall of bananas in its Chinatown window and deciding to work there, and the Rodeo sign, for which she dressed her boyfriend and her sister’s boyfriend in thrifted cowboy hats and posed them through every step of the Heimlich maneuver. We explore the summer she spent as a teenager at an all-women’s boardinghouse on the Upper West Side, which first sold her on New York City as the place to be. Additionally, we discuss the lasting influence of her training in fashion illustration at FIT, her lifelong loyalty to messy, sketch-style pen-and-ink work in the lineage of Shel Silverstein, and the tight-knit social scene of the service industry, where creative restaurant staff kept getting tapped to design the bars and restaurants in which they worked or which were opening up around them.

Sara Rabin: sararabin.net

For more information: rheakapur.info and culturalfingerprints.com