gastropoda

As my day drifted away in a digital haze, I did get a good laugh from this almost Taiwanese-worthy animation of a JGold Wannabe review: A porcupine “laughing” over his/her food.

After my consort shrewdly asked me if I would ever be pleased with the hometown paper’s choice of a restaurant critic, I was hesitant to write anything about the erstwhile JGold Wannabe’s Trocadero Ballet-worthy swan song. But a couple of great takes made me focus on what was so misguided about going out on such an obvious high. Admittedly, I know too many people who presume they’re in the 1%, but everyone I know who admits to being solidly in the 99% has left the joint underwhelmed. The price just canceled out the pleasure. Luckily, they’ll never get in now. But his overlords will be wowed by how well their table is treated when he struts in from Holy Toledo.

And I know I’m heartless, but I did laugh at the “no one coulda predicted” tone of the story on the murder in the Vermont food co-op. Haven’t we all been fed no end of tales from the very same publication on how the Park Slope co-op is fascist and full of infighting and right on the edge? (I still remember the JGold Wannabe telling me just the mention of the place made his fingers twitch.) Plus those kinds of shared labor tend to be fraught with scorekeeping of the most dangerous kind. With the post office being pushed out of business despite the Constitution mandating its existence, maybe the new term will be “going co-op.”

And now we come to the sorry end. Or, as I Tweeted it, the aspen falling in the dead-tree forest. I just wish Johnny Rotten were still in the baath and could weigh in on the lightweights taking the heavyweight jobs. My consort keeps saying stuff like “I don’t want to insult you, but food is just not serious news.” And he’s mostly right. JR was so wise in only dabbling in fud while swinging from the side of the heavyweights. Plus he was never empowered with opinions. Heading into a particularly contentious election, with the country on the skids, they picked a fine time to entrust a reviewer with oversight of unbiased news coverage. But if it gives the guy, and his readers, a break from a verbal form of what did in Elvis, I’m all for it.

Speaking of which, did Big Bird barf all over the food page the week before? (Yes, I know I’m way behind, but I was being the good in-law equivalent one weekend and then the good guest the week after.) Someone has apparently never been to Piemonte, and the giveaway was not just that history was ignored (um, why is the tuna always conserved?) But also that vitello tonnato there is not just an art form but a two-part indulgence that can be taken apart — we have a friend who makes only the sauce, fuck the vitello. Garnishes are for Jersey, of course. But it was just sad to see how far that Colavita-seducing page has come over the decades. Say what you will about Marcella and Giuliano, but they knew from real Italian. And once would have been consulted before any restaurateur yapping on his cellphone. (Also, too: Veal — It’s what’s for cucina povera dinner!)

I’m a little behind, but did we really need a Brit advising Americans on how to cook on a camping trip? As Paul Theroux must have wondered, shouldn’t she be sitting in her underwear staring out to sea in Cornwall? I would ask if they’ve lost their fucking minds, but the answer is too obvious. I could deal with bangers on the barbie before fava beans in the field. It’s been 40 years since my family would pack up the bedrolls and the old Coleman stove, and I still remember what a hassle cooking anything but freshly caught trout was. And we had a wood stove to practice on at home. What’s most amazing is not just that a recycled book is being passed off as fresh. It’s that I was the most recalcitrant Girl Scout ever and still know you do not approach a campfire barefoot. You may start thinking s’mores with those marshmallows. But watch out for napalm. . .

I felt the teeniest twinge of remorse about being mean about the AP Stylebook’s venture into food. Because I now wish I had a copy just to see what it has to say about the biggest confusion in the biz: Food writer versus food critic. An organization that you would expect would have a pretty clear take on that let the whole journalism world down this week by doing a roundup Q&A confusing the two. I’ve spent 28 years now answering “What’s it like to be a food critic?” with “I’m not a critic. I write about food.” If the institutions don’t know better, no wonder everyone wants to be a blogger.

All that ranted, I really wish the inimitable AA Gill’s main outlet would open his reviews up to the big wide world again (and not just so I can get more people looking here for “porn star’s scrotum”). His writing is so great I can almost forgive him shooting a simian. Luckily, he also does interviews, and one in Oz made a fascinating argument against one of my “food critic” idols. I find the way she thought and stitched together words so seductive that I have actually read her late at night and considered getting out of bed and heading out to find grape leaves and mushrooms to bake with garlic. But Mr. Cranky makes the good point that her romanticizing of Mediterranean food, in a country still gasping for real chocolate after wartime rationing, set British cuisine back for decades. His review of the new St. John, scanned and emailed by a friend of ours in London, was caustic enough to make me wonder if he might have been appeased if a shooter’s sandwich had been on the menu. But I do trust his take on the pork & beans, far more than what a critic closer to home said with not even a quarter of his ease with the King’s English.

Three words on elBulli: Make it stop. It’s impossible to parody at this point, no matter how jealous you are you missed the helicopter. So up that to five words: Make it fucking stop. Please.

As everyone addicted to it knows, Twitter is the wrong room for an altercation. But as everyone addicted it to it also knows, it is very hard to resist low-hanging baited fruit. So I should have clicked faster when I saw a big name in food wondering if anyone in my part of this little island had actually eaten at a restaurant most of us in these parts had never even heard of. But my point — who but a Brooklynite looking for fodder would bother? — got lost. I guess I came off the dummy for not having succumbed to acknowledging a place that, if it survives, will only do so for a few years because of the old location, location maxim. Having lived up in these parts for going on 30 years, though, I’m not too worried. With a plethora of restaurants opening as canteens for the priciest co-op in the city, the mediocrities that traditionally survived thanks to proximity to Lincoln Center curtains may have to try a little harder. As in: Make the natives restless. Or at least aware.

I’m sure I’ve recited one of my mantras many times: You can refuse to grow up, but you still grow old. And the downside to that is that your cranial sieve collects all the wrong bits. In the case of the JGold Wannabe’s review this week, that would be the fact that the shift-shaping restaurant of the week has had many game-changers over the decades. Who needs to reach into the way-back machine for Stieglitz and O’Keeffe when the JBeard Wannabe is so recent? Face it: If a name chef and a reinvention could lure New Yorkers into that desolate canyon, Mr. Artisanal might (might, I say) still be there.

Okay, sap’s stopped rising. Back to bile. Is there anything sillier in a 140-character world than 30 gazillion words about a single recipe? Even without slogging through, I was reminded of the coulibiac in the marvelous “Decline of the American Empire” — all that yapping about fish in a blanket.

And speaking of “no new stories, only new reporters,” it was rather telling that the hometown paper ran yet another section-front piece on the magic of the Microplane without noting that it, too, had been part of “the press fueled the hype.” I remember the planning meeting well, in 1998. But it took a political blog to point out the creeping crud in the latest feature. Why did the company’s worker-stiffing negativism have to be sold as a positive in the food pages? No one opens a factory in Mexico to benefit the local economy, or America’s. I’m glad I’ve already learned the original grater cannot be improved. Because I’m not sure I’d buy another. To the paper’s credit, though, it was amusing to watch Mimi speak and the JGold Wannabe obey: The food moved to the head of the four columns. And the hed, at least in print, did double duty: Winning by Not Trying So Hard.

I do hope there are no razor blades in the afterlife. Poor MFK would be slicing her wrists big-time on reading her mentee’s “savory taste” and “a delicious one at that.” And I could not get through the where-are-the-hosts-of-yesteryear BS and so had to rely on Twitter followers to confirm what I suspected — the likes of Zarela went unacknowledged. But I did read just far enough into the review to wonder where TF the editor was. I guess now that “real America” has decided there’s no money for 9/11 responders it’s okay to fantasize about explosions and fires outside an East Side restaurant. I still remember getting censored in reviewing then-rational James Lileks’ immensely entertaining “Gallery of Regrettable Food” in about 11/11 for mentioning one dish looked like something had blown up in the kitchen. We are all insensitive now.

The digital ink was not even fading on the Elaine’s death notice when the snideness started. And somehow I suspect more bile will ooze out, not just about the notoriously lame food but also about how the legend treated “host” as shorthand for “hostility” for anyone not in the club. I still laugh thinking of the inimitable Seymour Britchky’s description of her waddling through the restaurant hoisting up her underpants — it always made me realize her devotees perceived her more as the help they had to tolerate than as one of them. But of course those devotees, and their children, are perpetuating the myth. No wonder the employees took out a big homage. The ding-dong doesn’t sound quite so celebratory when it was the witch who signed all the checks.

Now for a bigger question: Was the cat away for the Thanksgiving Eve edition of the section formerly known as DI/DO? The lede story was was so tedious I couldn’t even read it to count errors (although I did detect a punctuation glitch in the caption). The off-lede was so painfully overwritten I wanted to scald my own eyes. And the hoariest cliché ever was actually pressed into crude service for the hed on the review. Or should I call it the turd that finally plunked into the punch bowl? What other restaurant has had so long to get its act together before the starry hammer dropped? From there it was on to the outsized narcissism of a restaurant critic ordaining himself the expert on home cooking, and then the clunky verbiage on alleged restaurant openings. How absurd is “ingredient-driven food” when your lede story is on . . . beyond-esoteric ingredients? And WTFF does “pushes the sports bar envelope” mean? Pigs in a jockstrap blanket?