gastropoda

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?

Way more obsessive diners than I, people who have eaten more Italianesque in New York than Italian in Italy, can have the final say on whether Da Joe-Mario deserves four stars. I could only throw the paper down on reaching yet another “food that leads to gasps and laughs.” I’ve been eating a long damn time and am still unfamiliar with this weird phenomenon, Roget’s 876.8. And I have certainly never heard ha-ha-ha, crudo, let alone ho-ho-ho, spaghetti.

Lately I’ve been thinking and Tweeting a lot about Richard Thompson’s prescient song “We’re All Working for the Pharaoh.” Who could ever have imagined pennies would wind up as the new dollars, if you were damned lucky? Food aggregators are apparently offering $12 a post, which is $12 more than the Huffington Post is paying as its founder flogs the Big O to do more about job creation. But things could be worse for the gainfully unemployed: We could have big jobs.

In both my stints at the NYTimes, the restaurant critic was always a protected species, a creature devoted mostly to one vital gig, finding and rating the best places to eat in a city with more than 15,000 choices. I’m still stinging from the acid flung the morning I had to call the PS to plead for a critic’s notebook when we were light on copy. It was way too much to demand (although we got it). So I guess it’s no wonder the JGold Wannabe appears to be so overstretched he’s cranking out stuff for the magazine that would take the Bulwer-Lytton trophy. That may have been the most pretentious lede in the history of food writing. Obviously, you can’t answer readers’ questions, chuckle over your fud and round up recipes without something having to give. Straining at stool can be lethal. Ask Elvis.

Back in the real world, the weird news of the week was the big profile of a cartoon character in Dining. Which definitely brought home how far the section and the food world have sunk. Once Emeril could be taken down as the emblem of all that was wrong with celebrity cooking shows on the teevee. But at least he started out a real chef, one so obsessive he made his own Worcestershire at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, one so respected (and subdued) that Julia Child partnered with him in an episode of one of her own shows. By the time he had turned into a caricature, he was ripe for the mocking. But this guy? When Bob opened the paper and saw the travesty, he asked me about the back story and all I could say was that he was known for being known. I would make some sarcastic comment like how the next thing you know Styles will be showcasing Snooki. But . . .

I might not be the only one convinced the hometown paper is killing itself with a 24/365 approach to publishing with no copy editors on board. I read the garbled take on two iPad apps for recipes and went straight to the Google to see if the byline might not be on the take. Instead I saw he had posted that word salad online more than a month before the paper went on sale for $2 a copy. Remind me why I spring for a subscription? (Oh, I know. I like to see the ratio of house ads to paid placements.) But given how stretched everyone appears to be down Señor Slim way, I’m almost saddened to see both the JGold Wannabe and Panchito having to produce even more poorly vetted copy. The former should be able to handle it, fresh as he is to the marathon/megaphone, but the latter is going to be talking to Ralph on the big white telephone on a regular basis. Back to Round One. . .

This week was probably the nadir for food coverage. The Huffington Post started what has to be a parody, and the end of the Craig Claiborne line did KFC’s dirty work. The vendors whose fish has to be eaten the same day you buy it were touted as selling the freshest in Manhattan. Airline food was reported to be “striving to be tasty” (and Francisco Franco is still dead). The WSJournal pretty much declared wine coverage will now be only about wealth-worshiping and name-dropping, as Dr. Vino put it. (But that ridiculous adjective “delicious” will live on.) And I seem to recall some nonsense about ramps being the new arugula, hold the fiddleheads. But on the bright side, a new generation (of wide-eyed bloggers) has just learned a sobering and essential lesson: The Pillsbury Bake-Off is about nothing but crass commercialism, a relatively cheap way for Big Food to gauge what Americans are stuffing into their pie holes and an even better way to inspire those same suckers to consume even more processed crap. The only thing I’m curious about is whether the editors gathered from “real” media to cover the charade were any slimmer than the ones I reeled at the sight of 20-some years ago. (Those broads could pack it away; breakfast was always like the descent of a plague of very large locusts. And they uncritically, even gushingly, wrote up the gruesome results of Poppin’ Junk topped with raspberry and spinach and dipped in chocolate.) Personally, I think any cook who can turn a canned biscuit into a fish taco is going places. Nowhere I’d want to go, but still.

I Tweeted this, but was that hash brown photo the “before” in the JGold Wannabe’s clarified butter lesson? Those potatoes were not “golden brown” but charred to the point of sending them back. I’d sooner eat Tater Tots. And come to think of it, someone should do a Tumblr on the magazine’s food shots like the one mocking Dwell’s photography — so many pictures have been stripped of anything sensual and just have a depressing flatness. The URL could sub Stylists for Pets in WhoWanttoKillThemselves.

I have mixed feelings about Mexico asking for Unesco protection for its cuisine: on one mano it’s laudable, on the other I had a kimchi tamal at Momofuku Noodle Bar that could convert a whole new generation to the religion of masa. But then I think maybe all national cuisines should be protected. Consider Italian. Saturday my consort and I wound up meandering around the West Village in search of lunch after the Union Square Greenmarket and were depressed to find the wonderful little shop across from Minetta Tavern selling focaccia col formaggio worthy of Recco now just bakes any old pizza. The guy I’m convinced proudly sold us our first slab looked beaten. And then we wound up at the newish Quinto Quarto, which looks Italian to the Tuscan Sun max but turns out food so bad it would convert your average Milanese to the McItaly. And it’s still in business. At least we evaded the worst New York food: Glasian — gloppy Thai/Vietnamese/sushi.

And while I’m trying to break myself of “gobbling digital doughnuts” over on Twitter, I do enjoy getting perspective from disgusted readers far from the hometown paper’s shrine to hubris. Brussels reaction to Paris old-timers? Same as ours, all-cap boring. Buenos Aires reaction to yet another ode to Buenos Aires? Who’s in the tank? Unfortunately, one thing leads to another and soon I’m reading a complaint that anyone trashing Ducasse for saying London’s the best food city probably should be eating in London more often; otherwise he/she looks like the left-behind. Which of course made me wonder just why or how well the JGW knows a snooty club there so well, whether from half of Jay McInerney’s travel rule (speculation) or by hanging out there personally. Which would be less surprising given the lede that ran on another guy’s piece on how “everyone” has childhood memories of suffering through cafeteria meals on field trips to museums. Earth to Señor Slim Tower: Not all Americans grow up with either food-equipped museums to visit or money to eat in them. Among the many things destroying old-style journalism, that blatant disconnect between the comfortable and the afflicted is the most corrosive. Lie down with only Ivy League graduates and you wake up believing it’s always morning with steak and eggs in America.

I’m becoming more forgiving of a reporter who always sent her editors into the archives to be sure she had not written the same lame story using the same lame language in the past. Either brains shrink or cranial hard drives get overloaded, I’m slowly acknowledging. Youngsters, though, have no excuse. You want to announce a huge discovery while promoting your next product, at least be sure it wasn’t already done. Confit sans gras, my derriere.

And I guess I have to do my bashing of the section formerly known as DI/DO, so I’ll start by saying sometimes a cutlet is just a cutlet and a column cannot be inflated without collapsing (but I understand why a more significant topic got tucked inside like a cutlet in a bra — been there, edited that shit). Worse was that the genesis of the eating-kosher-cuz-it’s-better nonsense was plain to see. Fishing for sources to back up your thesis is like hunting for quail Cheney style. (How soon they forget the immensity of the Agriprocessors scandal. But I’ll never forget the friend in Lincoln, Nebraska, who once worked in a slaughterhouse and talked constantly of the rabbi overseeing the kosher beef. You don’t want details, but they involved bathroom, hands, No. 2.) And then there was the JGold Wannabe. Twice in one day the same rating was given, in almost the same words: Reads like writing-class exercises. RIP, Britchky. You are now certifiably inimitable.

Meanwhile, the JGold Wannabe continues to turn some winsome phrases, but too often his sentence-stringing makes me wonder if anyone editing him has ever diagrammed a sentence. You cannot mention “a recipe” in one between-the-caps-and-the-period construction and, in the next, say “even made by an amateur . . . they can approximate.” Subjects, verbs, objects kinda need to connect. Maybe not in a deep kiss in a bar somewhere, but grammatically. Worse, as smart as he is about cooking, cockiness is dangerous: Advising blog readers to grind their own hamburger meat is absurd without a warning that the beef itself has to be carefully sourced. Someone trekking home from the supermarket with a “nice-looking” side of E. coli will not be saved by a clean Cuisinart. Shit’s shit, for crap’s sake.

The JGold Wannabe tried out yet another new voice in mystifying readers like my consort, who braved a few grafs and could not understand why the rave added up to only three stars. Poor Britchky’s fingers must have been twitching in his grave. I’m so naive I believe even a Poor would not have hurt a restaurant that does what it does so well, and has for so long — I will not soon forget walking out of the deserted Four Seasons last summer and seeing the floral Frog jammed; if you’re going somewhere for a scene and not cuisine, flowers are a fixed face’s best friend (I ate there for my long-ago Allure story on how restaurants make women look good or bad). What was most surprising is that no attempt was made to connect the news dots between that review and the profoundly depressing information that the chef on whom Ruth once lyrically bestowed four stars is now slaving at a Midtown East joint one step up from Tout Va Bien. Of course I’m so old I got addicted to quenelles before I ever had to face down gefilte fish. But I do know that there’s a whole food truck devoted to schnitzel and that people make special expeditions to Cafe Sabarsky for the strudel alone. I just can’t tell the Egotist from the Drivelist sometimes. Or understand how “blackened fruitcake” saw print. Sloppy is as sloppy ledes.

And I’m really happy it’s not just me losing it over Panchito’s poor successor, flopping around trying to fill those outsized sneakers. First there was the meh mess; 27 years here and I never knew it was a New York expression. And then there’s the new Bruni Digest, a Miami blogger who has nailed the tics big time. You have to read it to get it. While the ghost of Britchky not so gently weeps. . .

I have to confess I felt a pang after forging on beyond a cringe-inducing simile and finding a couple of nice turns of phrase by the critic with the small sneakers to fill. Maybe, I thought, he has evolved beyond the old “get out the dick, start pounding the keys” days. Then he had to go and ruin it by letting that T.G.I.Friday’s handout get printed after acres of contorted prose. Forget the Party of No lawn jockey. This guy is the Rich Little of food writers. (I have not done due diligence with Kerouac, but the words on the wall at the outstanding Robert Frank exhibition at the Met did make me suspect yet another fount of imitation.) I always thought he at least has eaten enough to do a credible job, but even that notion came into doubt when I was lured to Diner’s Journal and read the drooling over “lard-fried tortillas.” What is it with NYC “culinary journalists” that makes them so clueless about Mexican food? The manteca belongs in the beans, for chinga’s sake.