gastropoda

If you like eggs, though, you might want to think about the latest installment in the saga of how foie gras is making certain idiots batshit insane. The food world’s equivalents of the right-to-birth crazies are now talking about petitioning the USDA to declare lusciously fat livers unsafe to eat. Their faux concern is exquisitely timed, just as Eric Schlosser has highlighted how humans continue to be obscenely abused for reprehensibly cheap burgers. It just makes it patently clear how badly these nutcases with no lives want to shove their noses in my plate. No wonder some days it seems we have never evolved out of Eden and that goddamn apple.

On the bright side, all government agencies are apparently so under siege that the chances of foie gras even moving onto the agenda are about as high as bananas all around in the Middle East from the Chimp and his ivory-tickling enabler. The very credible report just issued on the FDA was enough to give any sentient being the E. coli squitters: no money, no computers, no coherence, but more scary food imported and grown and distributed every day. No wonder the nutrition nazis are feeling emboldened enough to propose limiting sodium in processed foods. Everybody knows that’s going nowhere in the age of Big Food and osteoporotic government. Salt on your own private plate would be banned first.

You know you’re getting ancient when hors d’oeuvres from Martha’s first books are passed and they don’t taste ridiculous. We were all wide-mouthed and innocent a quarter of a century ago, before the world was so awash in food information 24/7 that cartoon characters could be hired to throw ingredients around ridiculously on the teevee. Almost every other aspect of the quick roast at high heat, though, hit its mark, whether the Bitch wine poured beforehand or the explanation of why a fume blanc was served (Robert Mondavi coined the name — a spin on pouilly-fume — but was not so greedy as to try to trademark it). The Control Queen should only have been savvy enough to realize the best rule in pushover partying is very simple: First you marinate the neighbors.

Eat at the otherwise admirable Pamplona at your own credit risk. My consort’s studio manager, inputting our dinner tab in Quicken, noticed the receipt showed his bare-naked Amex number. Since her other jobs in this booming Bush economy include waitressing, she of course went bonkers and called the restaurant — only to be told by the cretin who answered the phone some nonsense about how the credit card processor was making them do it. I went on the google and immediately turned up a recent LATimes story addressing this same invitation-to-fraud situation and confirmed what we both suspected: Since exactly a year ago [technically since December 2004, my older brother interjects], it is illegal to print out the digits in full. And that only makes the argument that they need the whole number “in case we need to reauthorize the charge” reek even more. As TC Boyle would say, with plenty of notes on the food: “Talk Talk.”

Walking to Pamplona from the B train I was struck, the way I am almost hourly in this city, by how fast neighborhoods are changing. Even two years ago, who could have imagined heading to dinner at an ambitious newish restaurant on sleepy, dusty East 28th Street? Now there’s a hip-looking Asian joint right nearby with a blackboard out front advertising, right below “lobster roll,” “spice girl roll.” You used to have to go to the corner of Park Avenue to eat that. . . .