gastropoda

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.

This is a bit of a re-Tweet, but it was odd to see ramps suddenly being touted for Easter on a day when everyone was bundled to the max looking at the sad remainders of New York winter at the Greenmarket. Some flack must have told the producers to hop to it.

A nailed plagiarist got all the attention last week, but every day there are more signs that the old gray lady’s letting standards slip as fast as aging bosoms as the cost-cutting gets more brutal and the hamster-wheeling gets faster. The stuff you hear about how little oversight the blogs are graced with would make your glazed hair curl. The Chelsea Market, for instance, did not evolve naturally. I remember the deals made to get food producers in there more than 10 years ago — it became what it is by calculated design. And then you get these silly opinion pieces on taxing soda that do not make the obvious point that it would be the first honest and effective Ponzi scheme in history: Take money from consumers to pay off Big Agriculture, eliminating the middleman of Congress with its farm subsidies. And finally you get the strange situation where the fact that Romania is considering taxing fast food is never reported. But a 528-pound woman giving birth in Romania is big news. Señor Slim must be messing with their heads in more ways than one as he engulfs and devours.

Funny to see news outlets scrambling to be sure Mrs. O’s huge anti-obesity movement is covered by all the wrong people (“eat as I say, not as I do,” in one case). But at least the Time Tool was not unleashed on the anti-Big Food beat. Following in the sordid tradition of the Coulter/Molto blow jobs, he let the fastest food take him for a royal ride. Did you know the Big Mac has a chef behind it? Yeah, and so does all the shitty airline food. He actually swallows the catapulted propaganda and mentally transfers a high-end lunch with celeriac and salmon to the crap wraps the “most influential chef in America” claims to have innovated. And believe me, the reason the flack freaked when the chef mentioned poached pears was not fear of copycat competitors. She had to know the chance of something like that winding up on the diabetes menu was about as likely as a frequent flier ever tasting Todd English’s food in steerage.

It says something about how much nonsense floods my Writeme box that I actually read a “release” about shot-hustling kosher girls heading out on the first night of Hanukkah and took it for a flout (flack tout) rather than the spoof it so obviously was. Wasn’t it? In my defense, the scam thing landed not long after I got something from an apparently legit agency hustling salsa made with pancetta. And maple syrup. And walnuts. Why not throw in some raspberries and chocolate?

Premature exultation is always a problem with flacks, but it’s getting seriously out of hand lately. On a stinking 90-degree day in August, the last thing I want to think about is New Year’s resolutions. Let alone VD and chocolate. It’s pretty bad when a “sweat treat” for Rosh Hashanah looks almost timely. The only good news is that they are skipping right over Thanksgiving to get to the Peeps.

Did the paper of Al Siegel really use “froo froo” in a story on the Emerald Inn? Did a blogger really describe a muffuletta as a “cold cut and tapenade juggernaut”? And why would a restaurant boast that it’s considered “a surefire closer” for “Romeos?” Eat, drink and get laid is a weird come-on, even for V.D.

Looking across the northern border, I have to say this is the saddest slogan ever for a new miracle food: “Already extremely popular in Canada.” What, “Less disgusting than poutine” was taken?

Funniest phrase in FlackLand lately: Chef-driven bistro. Why do I conjure a Shriner spilling out of a miniature rolling Balthazar?

If there’s any consolation for the degradation of the news business, it has to be the fact that flacks are debasing themselves even faster. How much did the one who sent this out get for her soul? Within hours of Ted Kennedy’s receiving his death sentence, she actually offered a cancer expert available for an interview. It was like Ghouls Gone Wild. But what does this have to do with food, you may ask? I had the same question. These people must get paid by the inappropriate overture.

The award for worst “Are You Shitting Me?” e-release has to go to the one touting a Father’s Day booze-and-golf package priced at a mere $118,000. But I know just who should spring for it. The lying Sacrificer in Chief must have enough ill-gotten gains from his insane war by now to buy 4,080 of them for the dads who won’t get to have a beer with their kids this June. To him and his blood-sucking overlord, that’s just Chimp change.

One thing I have abandoned all hope on is a vaccine against the Stupid. And so the future will inevitably bring more people who are paid to write about food not knowing that you don’t spell it “pallet,” that the shoes are not Minolos, that there is no way to carve a steak off a catfish (even one recalled for bacterial contamination). Chefs will always be doing “seasonal” menus with Brussels sprouts in springtime; big food companies will always invent garbage like a dressing called — seriously — Tuscan Romano. (As opposed to Venetian Reggiano?) But the true proof that there is no stopping idiocy was the layout in the magazine of the newspaper that simultaneously ran a big story on Americans wasting food. Showcasing stylish kitchens, the shoot squandered enough fresh vegetables to feed 17 Ethiopian villages. And the irony is that those are the kinds of kitchens that once installed will never make contact with fresh favas and fennel again. I guess it could have been more ridiculous, though: The prop stylists could have used Chicago foie gras.