gastropoda

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.

What I wouldn’t give to read Mrs. Friend’s chef-driven update of that had-to-be-a-spoof recipe for duck roasted under a blanket of bacon. The instruction to test for edibility, then microwave and feed to the dogs could have applied to the housing for the vegetables. The only thing greasier would have to be pork belly braised with both guanciale and lardo. Put that in your latte frother and foam it.

I forget where I read the gossip about the editors on the book review at the NYTimes who once saw a co-worker on the Sunday magazine being taken out by ambulance and guessed that “someone must have had an idea.” But I know where I read the proof that it was not a joke: On gawker, which bared the recovering Botox addict’s pathetic plea for help in coming up with trends to obsess on for T for Twaddle. Here’s a suggestion: Food editors who persist in dropping their friends’ big names. If it ain’t one J, it’s another. And next thing you know it’s an oily mess.

What is it with Mrs. L and Mr. V? I heard her on Brian Lehrer talking about taste being the most provocative stimulus of memory (I’d vote for smell or sound, myself), and when it came time to drop a chef’s name, guess whose was trotted out yet again. I absolutely doubt the Friendship is curdling, but it is odd. And of course I only bring this up because I was recently asked to blurb a book by a blogger I have never met, only to be advised by his handlers that my terse praise was not used “in the hopes that your editors” may “allow you to write about” the opus. Undoubtedly it was a face-saving excuse, but even words that wind up on the cutting room floor count in my estimation — a phantom blurb should haunt you more than one in print.