I also have to Tweet Longer on the premature exultation that makes this time of year so miserable for a food writer. Bad enough I’m inundated with xmas flackery before we’re even at Gobbler Hysteria Day. But I’m already getting e-releases for VD. Shouldn’t there be a mandated period of candy corn digestion before we have to start going all dark chocolate?
No wonder I can’t get focused to snark here. Minus 140 characters will always reverberate around the Twitterverse before I can get my MacBook started: “Television personality is a pretty sorry job description.” I meant it as a retort to all those flacks flooding my inbox flogging babbling heads for a dying medium. But if the dis fits, run with it.
Not sure this was intentional, but a review copy arrived on the doormat the other day with the press release obscuring three letters of the title so that it read “The Bris Book.” I doubt even MFK could say how to cook a foreskin, though.
Speaking of infamous, I do not think that word is what was meant in the release for a new cookbook. Unless the author is a member of the Borgia “foodie family.”
I tried to tune out all the flackery while I was away and only noticed the shilling for yet another a name chef signing up to do airline food because it struck me as more ridiculous than usual after I’d flown Turkish Air, which was like a flight from before Saint Ronnie turned travel into midnight in America. Even in steerage, the attendants passed out menus (along with amenity kits) to build anticipation, then served drinks with toasted hazelnuts, then dispensed dinner and finally took their sweet time clearing trays. By the time everyone was fed and fine, the plane was so serene you could sleep straight through till a full breakfast (eggs with roasted mushrooms etc.) My pasta with eggplant, tomato and cheese on the way over was so good I’ll get an Epi post out of it, and the whole grains and vegetables with the beef on the way home were easily among the best tastes I’ve ever experienced above clouds. No celebrities were involved, though, just good cooks using respectable ingredients. Interestingly, though, on each leg a chef in toque-to-clog regalia was positioned at the door to say buh-bye. Turkish Air must know walking the walk costs a lot less lira than talking celebs.
Not sure which is more surprising (as in disheartening): That Craigslist has a flack. Or that so many smart outlets would take the bait. Naive me, I always assumed items about bizarre cooking jobs or ingredients for sale were discovered by reporters curious enough to go digging. Nope. It’s just more Eleni’s cookies, delivered to digital desks.
ReTweeting myself, but I was pretty amazed that a flack would actually send out an e-release, in this the year of equality 2011, hyping “Mrs. Wolfgang Puck.” My first thought was: Which one? But it got worse. This was actually shilling a profile whose second graf states that “she prefers you not to know her simply as the woman behind the mogul chef.” Then why not show us what she does before you tell us who she is? And how insulting is this? “The Puck family isn’t exactly counting on Gelila’s share of their income to make ends meet.” That’s as far as I got. But I now know a new epithet. It’s the job description of the profiler: content producer. Which is very different from sentient being.
National Nutrition Month turns out to also be National Frozen Food Month. And I don’t think they’re talking baby peas, which really are better than fresh. Shouldn’t the former designation get 12 slots on the calendar? And in other flackery gone bad, someone hit me with the big news a chef is “reinventing” shepherd’s pie using lamb rather than beef. I have yet to hear of a crook for calves’ necks. And no one would ever describe New Zealand as a place where the men are men and the cows are nervous.
I know I seem especially hard on flacks, but here are two opposites to show why. One follows me on Twitter, sees me begging for help on the most daunting chocolate story I’ve ever done and emails me to hook me up with a young, smart pastry chef who’s doing exactly what I need. The other . . . Where do I begin? My editor has provided me with my most solid lede, but the 9-to-5-er at the restaurant where she thought he bakes never responds. Only after I go Yahooing (which is so often more fruitful when reporting, to screen out the SEO bullshit) do I learn he has moved on, and I turn him up in Las Vegas. So I call the new restaurant, in an allah-forsaken casino, and the nice woman who answers says the best way to reach a pastry chef is to contact the PR person by email. Which I do, giving great detail. Only to get a response a couple of hours later asking: “Who is XXXX?” Yikes. This guy gets paid to promote and has no idea a high-visibility pastry chef is involved in what turns up on the plates for the suckahs? I want the checks he’s cashing.
Given the frenzy to concoct a cocktail for every conceivable occasion, I’m kinda disappointed in all the craven flacks on the high-proof payrolls. With the Golden Globes, they were pitching Black Swans and Inceptiontinis. And Martin Luther King Day is not worth a Dreamarita? A Mountaintop Mojito?
ReTweeting myself:
–I saw a sign at Holy Foods for “troll-caught albacore.” From under a bridge, I guess.
–If ever a movie cried out for a cocktail to be invented by desperate flacks, it’s “True Grit.” Not “Black Swan,” for Peter Martins’ DWI sake.
–And this really is a superb take by the Daily Show on the San Francisco ban on Happy Meals.
After 27 years in this business, I’m not often totally gobsmacked (astonished/amazed/shocked, yes). But this week, dangerously late on a column I could not be late on again, I resorted to the last resort of desperate freelancers and hit a PR agency with a blanket request: HELP, find me a notable chef with three or four bits of advice to offer. Sure, sure, came the answer. And at the end of the day, I got exactly one quote from some obscure idiot that read like an outtake from a particularly cretinous episode of one of the cleaver-rattling shows on the teevee. I wanted to hit reply with: “This is a joke, right?” Instead I moved on, more confident than ever that dinosaurs are languishing between chefs and reporters. Surely those scores of restaurants could be putting those fat fees to better use. Maybe not coincidentally, my consort and I were just at a party where the photographer host was lamenting the shutdown of all the photo agencies that once marketed his work for a percentage. As I pointed out, why do you need the middleman in the age of the internets? One day, probably soon, a restaurant with a high-profile flack will be like a website with annoying music.
I ran into a friend the other day who said the flacking biz is tough lately because clients who want placements in the NYT and WSJ can’t understand people don’t read newspapers anymore. (No comment.) So you’d think one who got great exposure in one of those outlets would be smart enough not to boast about using tons of an endangered fish. There is such a thing as bad publicity: Las Vegas has to be the clearest sign of End Times. And another learned you can certainly flog your cheese. Just don’t say the words “raw milk.” Dance around for a few sentences. . .
All my good stuff gets Twittered away, but I’ll repeat that I was amazed at the e-release I got using culinary as a noun. The stupid word should be banned even as an adjective. And I didn’t Tweet this but have thought about it ever since wasting good credit on lunch at an old favorite: You will never get great fries in an empty restaurant.
The ultimate sign that cupcakes have nowhere to go but down: Some flack pitched them as a gift suggestion for graduates. Unless the recipient is moving on up from kindergarten, I can think of many things more appropriate. Cash, say. At least evolve to macarons.