gastropoda

Every so often an obituary for the restaurant matchbook comes out, with the cause of death listed as the decline of smoking and the survivors being alternatives like miniature notepads or packs of toothpicks. Unfortunately, all those reports are premature, but if matchbooks do go the way of ashtrays it’s because they are being made so shittily. I used to collect them as souvenirs but now tote them home to light the one recalcitrant burner on my 50-something stove. And lately I’m finding they all either break instantly, don’t have enough head or friction on the box to light or are too short or too twiggy to be good for much of anything. So now rather than having something that brings back good memories, I have a reason to curse wherever I picked them up. The obvious comparison is to business cards printed with the wrong address. Both insure you will not be going back. Then again, if only souvenir T-shirts were as degradable as restaurant matches. We would never have to be visually assaulted with Hard Rocks.

I see from the Guardian that Jamie Oliver is launching a chain of Italian restaurants next. And his partner is promising it will be “completely authentic, rustic Italian.” Also “fast, urban casual dining.” Is there a contradiction in there? Or are they just happy to knock off McDonald’s failed Hearth Express? But at least the chickens will be free range, so maybe they won’t get too flattened by Slow Food in the fast lane.

Now I’ve heard everything — I’ve been accused of going too easy on Panchito. But I think one of my e-correspondents is right in noting that ignoring his own recent takedown of inaccessible restaurants while favorably reviewing a new one does look like “sucking up” to a boss temporarily in a wheelchair. Ten whacks with a crutch for him for not raising his consciousness for real.

As is the case with most magazines that arrive on my doormat through the mail, I subscribe to The Week first and foremost for the food, and last week it outdid itself with a condensed version of Outside’s extraordinary story on eating dog in Vietnam. I found the link to the actual piece through chow but absorbed enough to know it should be required reading for all the big swinging dicks out there (or little flopping ones, more likely) who like to show how tough they are in consuming critters for the camera. Rarely is the culture of a comestible taken into account. May they all be monkey brains in a future life.

Give the Chimp points for timing. He could not have chosen a better week to veto more health insurance for kids, just as a huge burger producer had to actually shut down for good because there was so much shit in so much of its meat. And who would be most likely to be eating cheap frozen beef, and most at risk of getting mortally sick? The same kids he thinks can simply go to the emergency room. For the record, my recent seven hours at St. Vincent’s cost $2,386. Multiply that by 3.4 million  and imagine how many federal inspectors it could send into slaughterhouses. The torture never ends with this sociopath.

Luckily, he now has one of the Skank Twins cleaned up and shipped out to make him look less cretinous by contrast. Anyone who believes she actually had anything to do with writing a book probably still thinks Robo-Mom baked those Cowboy Cookies back in 2000, the recipe for which has since been scrubbed off the White House web site. While I was looking for it yet again, though, I found out how horse-fearing the tough guy really is: The family recipe for guacamole calls for eight avocados. And exactly one jalapeno. I guess we should just be glad he didn’t invade Mexico for harboring habaneros.

I see Barbados routinely notes that it is the only Caribbean island to be Zagat-rated. And that’s supposed to be a good thing? We won’t talk about why, but here’s a hint to sorry Montserrat: Maybe you can buy your way back. No scam is an island.

Speaking of airborne gravy trains, the WSJournal tried to stop the presses by reporting that restaurant bloggers take freebies. Wait till they hear how much gushing travel coverage in mainstream media comes from something more insidious than an opening party. Consider the advice I just turned up on the google — one warning read: “. . . word travels fast if you take free trips and don’t publish. Your free travel will end very abruptly if you don’t follow through on your end of the bargain.” Serious money is involved now that junket is spelled FAM. Beyond friends in convenient places, even Portland was not discovered by accident. Next hot spot: Colombia. There’s apparently a gastronomic fair there to die for.

Delta seems to be flipping a page out of the Turd Blossom playbook — rather than attacking its opponent’s strength, it is showcasing its own weakness. The idea of opening a midtown lounge to serve airplane food with a price tag is so bizarre it makes me half-tempted to trek down and try a gruesome tray-tableful. Then again, maybe the goal is not really to get the asses into the cramped seats to wait forever for takeoff. Maybe it is to give Americans trapped by a worthless currency and witless government a chance to fly high without going anywhere. Eco-sensitive Potemkin Airlines works in Delhi. Why not New York?

As I’ve often complained, the Upper West Side has the terrible reputation for restaurants, but its eastern equivalent is the real wasteland. Once again after PT I found myself adrift at lunchtime between 56th and 96th on the wrong side of the park, gimping from posted menu to posted menu trying to find the elusive combination of interesting and affordable. I wound up at the bar at Payard, having retained some distant memory that it was running an anniversary special, and of course was immediately put very firmly in my place for crashing a private party. Luckily the duck terrine was calling my name and I could be glad I had not settled for the $19.97 deal when the bartender went off on a rant to the regulars on how “they come in for it, but they never come back.” That led to a bitch session about Restaurant Week and how someone at San Domenico has the same complaint about one-time bargain hunters. I suspect I know why the “cheapskates” are never seen twice. Shit on them once and they won’t get fooled again. But it turns out the rich are no different. The old guy next to me started chortling that he had gone to Cafe Boulud “by accident” during Restaurant Week “and they were serving mackerel — can you imagine?” Yeah. It keeps the ignorant away.

I don’t know why I never noticed this, after 24 years in the business, but something about the idiocy piling up on the series of tubes flashed it into my brain in neon. Food spelled backward is the best reversal since god and dog. And jeebus, does it fit some of the overextended pap producers I read these days (one thanks to this BS detector). Too bad Andy Warhol is not around to reassure us everyone will be blogging for only 15 minutes.

As entertaining as Bill O’Reilly’s shock and awe up at Sylvia’s in Harlem has been, it does make it clear he hangs out with the Chimp crowd. I guess he expects everyone to behave like the Wasp in Chief at table, talking with mouth full and spewing slobbery dinner roll while muttering to Tony Blair that Hezbollah needs to be told to “stop this shit.” Given another famous incident in a restaurant, Al Hunt can insert the motherfucking joke here.

Processed food is getting scarier. Kraft is now making an orange product — I wouldn’t call it cheese — that it says will “help keep your digestive system on track.” Is that a promise or a threat? Somehow I keep hearing Angelica Huston in “The Grifters” when something else that color appears. . . .

The most jawdroppingly idiotic statement ever by a chef has to be this, on the new metromix, by a certifiable American praising Keyser Soze for his bashing of people who don’t eat meat: “To be a vegetarian is a very privileged, First World thing. It’s arrogant at times. . . .” Think about it. This guy actually believes nearly a billion people in India alone have access to 59-cent beef tacos and at least a quarter of them just choose to make restaurant kitchens crazy by expecting a little imagination on the menu. What makes it all worse is that he claims to be among the privileged few. Someone should sign him up for a true reality show where contestants have to subsist on less than a dollar a day in a country where they don’t know from lethal E. coli in cheap frozen burgers. This idjit made the videographed beauty contestant who couldn’t find her ass with both hands sound like a geopolitical whiz kid — I’ll bet he thinks offal was considered prime cuts by the Roman upper class, too. No wonder the Vitamix spatula carries a label warning not to use it while the machine is running, and to remove said label before using the damn thing at all. Clearly, the best chef’s knife won’t make you sharp.

More signs the food world is brutal on the English language: Goodburger is describing its lettuce (iceberg lettuce at that) as “hand-leafed.” Agave, I noticed in walking by, serves “hand-hacked” guacamole (except to Van Gogh, who gets the ear-hacked kind). And just consider the slogan of the new brand I spotted in the dairy case at what the Grocer calls the Food Shitty near me: “Milk from real cows.” As opposed to what? Would the response “udder nonsense” be too obvious?

Also, I got this secondhand from a real restaurant reviewer whose name starts with P: Some joint where he recently wasted a meal on a bad tip is serving “crustiness.” Apparently that is Albanian for crostini.

And I can’t be the only New Yorker who got the (hill)willies thinking about eating steaks carved from animals all descended from one bull, as the forthcoming Primehouse is promising. They have a name for that in Appalachia. It’s called Rudy’s first marriage. Then again, a steak sandwich made with what the new Kingswood claims to be serving might be all right: heir tomatoes. That’s the Wasp way of saying depleted gene pool.