gastropoda

The morphing of food blogs into food glossies is continuing apace, which I guess should not be surprising given the stranglehold advertising has over both. But I was still amazed to see that just about every cyber-outlet in town picked up a “story” from the NYPost about a kosher cheeseburger without ever noticing that an essential detail was dead wrong. The “popular” steakhouse in the piece was located on the wrong side of the park. Considering I walk past it at least every other day and have never seen it full, I guess I shouldn’t wonder that the repeat offenders also didn’t realize the shill potential of the original piece was at terrorist alert level. Wait till you hear the echo chamber on chefs with charitable hearts. No shit, Forelock.

Consider yourself lucky Joe Nocera is merely wanking rather than flipping omelets at brunchtime in some super-busy restaurant. His take on the downer cows that were ground up and distributed to who-knows-which school lunch or Hot Pocket: One mad cow won’t spoil the whole batch. I am no admirer of animal rights activists who muck around with the food chain, but only someone who has eaten way too many “tacos, Mexican style” in a company cafeteria could seriously think an expose of an undeniable health threat was a simple publicity stunt. Long after Americans are going down with BSE, Nocera and his ilk will be quoting the inevitable Bushism: “No one could have anticipated. . . .” If you think an animal waterboarded to stand upright to pass inspection is going to make good eating, I have a Paula Deen ham to sell you.

Now that the flour has hit the media fan, it’s fascinating to see NYC pizzerias are not bitching about the price of mozzarella as they jack the cost of a slice to gallon-of-gas level — I noticed they substituted mystery slime for even the most base processed cheese long ago. But the disconnect between front page and Metro was weird, with the latter following the exact script laid out in the home of the Human Scratch N Match. The big picture made it clear that, thanks to Chimp rule, we are eight years behind in dealing with both climate change and overpopulation (don’t tell Africa, but abstinence = trouble  — my mom had two books on the rhythm method and seven kids in 8 1/2 years). And the whole move toward biofuels is going about as well as everything else he’s pushed. What kind of switchgrassed society would think fueling an SUV was a higher priority than feeding human beings? I guess one with people too fat to walk. You know we’re doomed when a restaurant offers a shuttle bus that will clog traffic and spew fumes just to ferry patrons from the East Village to the near West Village. I could limp faster than a rolling drunk tank.

What is the sound of one tit typing? A dining room is flourished, single orders of gnocchi compete with entire restaurants, a lobster loses its nerve. I’m starting to think the flop sweat is shorting out the laptop.

I shouldn’t expect much from a paper that actually printed the phrase “he road on his motorway,” but describing absinthe as a cocktail is a little like saying bourbon is a highball. Good thing they had the inevitable ad to set readers straight. And I guess it would have been a downer for the liquor store to give it the usual side-by-side play, so they moved it a section away from the bogus trend story. (Anyone who thinks bingeing-and-purging with booze is new has never spent a night in a girls’ dorm.) Still, expect to be reading a lot more about the green “cocktail.” I recently got an email wanting me to write a “paid review” of one brand, which may be a sign that blogola is the next hot trend. A friend emailed me the other day and mentioned he made all of $2.97 off his blog last month, which is almost $3 more than I ever have. I can see why “kids” with no background in journalism before it became more about buying than thinking would happily take a little under the table when ads are not all they’re inflated to be. Personally, I have no faith in the afterlife, let alone the possibility that there might be shopping malls in hell.

Some read a new memoir and were moved to cook. I read the first few chapters and smelled Seabiscuit excreta. Even having swallowed “Running With Scissors,” I have a hard time believing anyone, even the most obsessive keeper of journals, can reconstruct a life in such microscopic detail, down to the most idle conversation. Then again, maybe I just didn’t read far enough to learn the author had friends in FISA places. It worked in “Lives of Others.”

I see those fine reporting skills Panchito honed as he was being charmed by the good ol’ dry drunk have not gone dull while he’s been chewing and typing. In babbling out a thumb sucker he missed the elephant on Central Park West. Even my regard for the Big Homme has risen sharply since realizing why he opened where he opened: There’s an infestation of gazillionaires just minutes away now. Paul Goldberger wrote a gripping piece about it in the New Yorker, rather breathlessly answering “What does 20 million buy you these days?” But why let a huge development, on a lot that had been empty as long as we’ve lived in New York, with apartments snatched up with fortunes more solid than hedge funds, stand in the way of an easy joke about the Upper West Side?

I wasn’t going to point out that this was not the optimum year for food editors to be reaching for the Hoary file and digging out that beyond-hardy  perennial, the Oscar story with dishes pegged to nominees for best picture. Most reflexive examples I came across were merely predictably cringe-inducing, but the home of the Human Scratch N Match deserves a statuette of its own. A sample caption: “Nothing says bloodstain like a puree of beets.” And that’s for the movie just begging for a milkshake. “Silver dollar blinis” in honor of Javier Bardem’s penchant for forcing victims to play heads-you-die was equally tone-deaf idiotic, although even it was not as bad as deviled quail eggs for “Juno.” (That’s all the anti-choice crazies need, moviegoers craving ova.) Oh, and that “bread pudding” the wealthy British family in “Atonement” would have been familiar with? They forgot the bread. Are we really only weeks away from Erin-Go-Stupid on corned beef and cabbage?

A guy whose unread books pile up in my office like sins to be confessed placed a lively op-ed in the NYTimes proposing a clever way to wipe out the invasive species endangering American waterways: Eat ’em. That’s easy for him to say. He obviously thinks about carp in the abstract. When I was growing up, my dad would catch those nasty things along with catfish and bluegill and crappies, but even he never forced us to eat the four-letter fish. Instead he would always put them out them for our herd of cats. As poorly fed as they were in a house with not enough food for the humans, they would leave those grotesqueries to rot to high heaven. Since reading an insanely good story in Harper’s on how entrepreneurs are trying to get rich on human shit, I’ve decided a better solution to carp overpopulation would be to eliminate the middleman. Just turn the fish into fertilizer with no human consumption.

What’s with this ridiculous outburst of “when crazy met narcissism”? People want to spill their twisted guts for publication to the point that the next story will probably be about what foods give them gas and which go totally escolar on them. Sometimes what happens in your kitchen should stay in your kitchen. Otherwise, to swipe from a couple of verbally agile political bloggers, it’s either a trend casserole (Tbogg) or a schadenfreude sundae (Trex). Neither goes down well.

After “No, we can’t,” the buzz phrase of the week seems to be “Suck my dick.” Certainly it seems to have been in play over at the Big Tent (a k a Satan’s Waiting Room), where the most elaborate game of “I did not have fawning relations with that critic” appears to be going on. Someone shoulda had some ’splaining to do in praising the open-arms treatment at a joint infamous for giving the little people a trashing for being dumb enough to mistake a private club for a public restaurant. But I guess no one could have expected a guy who is served “venison fallow” and thinks he knows from “bolito” to get to the meat of the matter in his weirdly timed stenography session. I would kill to be a bedbug on the next NYTimes reader who books a table at this newly ordained hospitality central and comes face to ass with the real experience. . . .

I could almost see the collective shudder when the WSJ ran its story on rats as the other white meat in Vietnam these days. But the video-documented revelation that a California slaughterhouse has been torturing downer animals to get them up and moving past federal inspectors and into school lunches in this country somehow just warranted another cheap what-are-you-gonna-do? shrug. The same “America, fuck, yeah!” attitude also permeated the NYTimes story on feeding athletes at the Beijing Olympics. If a patriotically obese chef were not brought in to oversee the cooking, the poor fragile flowers might have to eat icky stuff. Maybe even chicken bloated on steroids, something they surely could not get at home in the land of the hyper-conscientious, overly endowed FDA (you know, in the country where workers are, for some reason, getting sick blowing brains out of hogs’ heads?) Ironically, Fred Ferretti got his 15 seconds to have what was clearly a long-simmering say on the same day that bizarre piece ran. Mistaking chop suey for anything in one of the world’s top three cuisines is the least of the sins he could have cited. And why do I assume ground-up cows and pigs will always be on the menu for the champions of the world?

Speaking of the Journal, whatever else Murdoch is doing to that paper, he at least is keeping subscribers up on what matters: how the Kravises eat. Sending Ray Sokolov to drop almost half a grand a head at Cafe Gray was sheer brilliance at a time when the borrower in chief is getting ready to dispense alms to revive the economy. But this was obviously the right reporter on the luxury front lines, not realizing Rome has already fallen: He knew there was a pea under his seat cushion. And gol darn it, when they say chef’s table there should damn sure be a chef around to kiss some derrieres. I think he forgot this is W’s America: To make it here, a celebrity has to work three or four or 18 restaurant jobs. More of those tales, please, sir.

Editors are notorious cynics, but I had to wonder what it is about VD this year that brought out so much slyness. First I saw a headline that used the words “thinking outside the box” (at least it didn’t talk about snatching anything), and then there was a menu for the romantic dinner that started with pasta puttanesca. What’s that all about? Pimp your date?

All I have to say about the new clogger on the block is that he will be cranking it out on a site that actually thought “grandma hides cocaine in bra” was one of the top four news stories one hour. The one that used to give a flying fig about copy under a byline,  about making sure it was generated by said byline. And while I could never top Stephen King’s observation in Time that “60 is the new 50 — and dead is the new alive,” I must note that the baseball cap is the new toupee. Eat your roots out, sorry old waiters.