gastropoda

One good thing about publicly ranting only once a week is that the smart set gets out ahead on the big sins of the day, leaving the venial ones for me to masticate. Ezra Klein rightly took the NYTimes to the cyber-woodshed for its staggeringly condescending review roundup of restaurants where the little people eat, as if the editors who approved that idiocy for publication did not go to Chili’s themselves (Applebee’s, not so much — I remember when it first opened on 42d Street and a co-worker said it was too pricey). Didn’t a political reporter even take Gomer to the Olive Garden, for crap’s sake? Some boss must have been blinded by arugula (although that canard was thoroughly roasted by another blogger who wondered what’s so elitist about a green so ubiquitous it has made iceberg esoteric in all the best restaurants). And Jay Rayner pretty much said fuck-all that needed to be said about Gordon Ramsay and his bombastic notion of fining chefs for using produce out of season. One word: Dubai. It hadn’t occurred to me, but I, too, kinda doubt there are locavores around Abu Dhabi. What’s most energizing about all this smart talk is that it is mostly coming from outside the food coven. While so many food blogs increasingly prostitute themselves to Big Food, emulating the glossies where the wine copy is indistinguishable from the Yellowtail ads, people who love to cook and eat and think about food are stepping up to the plate with really sharp perspective. Minds can’t thrive on asparagus recipes alone.

What should be scaring the Barneys pants off print journasaurs is this: In the time it took me to gimp the mile and a half home from the press lunch at Cafe Boulud, someone got a blog post up. I was reading about what I had eaten before I had even begun to digest it. Which makes me worry for onebonyass.com — my consort had the same “Shades o’ Molly/How do you make a million in cyberspace? Start with three million” reaction I did. Free is an unbeatable price on the series of tubes.

Thanks to Chow’s Grinder, the one clog with bite, I see Chicago is not stopping with banning a food only a minuscule fraction of its population even eats. Now that the village idiots have come for the duck livers, they are turning their evil eyes on chickens raised in backyards. The justification is that chickenshit attracts rats. And if that’s the case, the City Council chambers must be overrun.