gastropoda

In a week that started with depositors panicking outside a failed bank, you would think the Chimp could show just a hint of sensitivity at the table. But that would be misunderestimating his soullessness. Dinner for 245 after his silly ballgame was a full five courses, including crab salad and rib-eye steak, when for once hot dogs would have been more appropriate. But here’s a “fun fact” from the White House web site: Parties during the Hoover reign were big events, too, with 4,000 invitations routinely delivered around town. And how’d that work out again?

The base camp is getting even harder to maintain now that I have been swept into the E-ZPass of the internets, a blog that needs links more than words. But it can be trouble, too. After skimming part of the Drivelist’s latest “and then I did this and then I did that” when the wheel was already invented, I set off to Youtube in search of a postable “toddler makes first doody.” Yikes. If I had any money to invest, I’d be sinking it into pharmaceuticals big time. A whole generation is going to regret that youthful exuberance in a cellphone/video world. But even so, a close-up of a floating first turd in a toilet bowl cannot be as embarrassing as, “Look, world: I made snail butter.”

As for the Chimp’s enabler, I freaked out another guest at a superb 50th-birthday party in the Asian Den at Ruby Foo’s uptown when I told her he was more than just a travesty of a restaurant reviewer. She had no idea. The service was so hyper-attentive I might have had more than my share of wine, though, because I can’t remember if I also passed on the amazing gossip I heard about his partner in late-night teevee viewing. Adam, meet apple. . . 

Don’t mess with Panchito and his posse — it gives him double incentive to dredge up his inner A.A. Gill wannabe. This was the week that was for bloggers scooping dead trees. And for from-pink-lips-to-gray-pages payback. If the stock gets any lower, they’ll have to start running press releases.

Panchito should have been squirming this week with all eyes on the Lapdog Handler who has suddenly confessed he was had, too. (Yeah, right.) As if things aren’t bad enough, now we have to hear the Chimp is constantly boasting of his drunken days. What would the world be like today if “one of the most powerful journalists in America” in 2000 had actually reported what a sociopath he really is? Heckuva job, Frankie.

High-five to New York magazine for the profile that made pastis-clear why Panchito missed the Florent boat. “What we thought” is never as good a story as “who I am.” And the French guy comes off as anything but a sentimental fool. Which should not be surprising. How would an idjit who mistook a smirking dry drunk for a serious candidate understand that? With luck, there are restaurants in hell.

One question has finally been definitively answered: Who do you have to blow to get overkill coverage in this town? In the same week when no less an authority than the National Register of Historic Places was warning that the Lower East Side is in danger of extinction by developers, did the world really need a longer-than-“War and Peace” elegy to a relic in a neighborhood that was already lost? And it’s not as if the joint actually left a food legacy — I kinda doubt brunchers a century from now will be ordering Eggs Florent. Compare and contrast the silly loquaciousness with the snide stories in the same birdcage liner on any number of landmarks surrendered to rising rents, greed and the reality that this city is snakelike in its ability to shed a layer and come back meaner. Can you say Gage & Tollner, La Cote Basque etc? But into every dark tragedy a little sunlight must shine: At least readers were spared a restaurant review. Then again, that makes me wonder if the bean counters realize this little reality: Take it away one week and fewer people are likely to drop a dollar next week.

Panchito also earns the gold medal in logrolling for his online ode to a book by the friend of a too-good friend. I had taken to calling her the Drivelist, but then I started getting emails wondering if something more un-Timesian was afoot. This, for instance, arrived in all caps and boldfaced in my subject line: “Is (she) coming right out and saying her trips are free?” Funny, though, that the best solution might be what my consort has been advocating for years, since he used to shoot for British publications with writers perfectly comfortable with their system: Take the handouts, acknowledge them and just tell the truth. But that would require a collection of thoughts not easily evident in an extended headnote that your batty aunt might have written after a junket. Then again, if life gives you only wine ads, make wine copy.

The biggest Epago on the Upper West Side has the funniest “contest” going to commemorate 20 years in a space that previously did in big stars from both California and Cajun country: Submit a favorite memory and get a whack at a gift certificate worth up to $500. (Insert your own W.C. Fields joke on the second prize here.) Most of my recollections involve waiting for the toilets in the grody basement, and I suspect those would be disqualified. I do remember dragging my brother from the Bay Area, his wife and his younger son there one long-ago summer, just because there were tables outside, and I think he has never taken me seriously on food since. If people actually celebrated wedding anniversaries in the joint, this neighborhood was in worse shape than Panchito knew. All that said, though, I heard an interesting story from a friend who just tried to eat at the hottest thing off the avenue (according to everyone but the Mighty Cuozzo) and was actually turned away from his 6:45 confirmed reservation by a maitre d’hostility who said someone had called to change it to 9:45. Where did he wind up? Epago’s upscale sister. I guess that’s why I have so little interest in the really swankola places opening up here. Assholery should require a train ride.

I tuned it out, but a friend had an interesting reaction to Panchito’s pathetically dribbled top 10. She saw “Vantage Point,” the film about an assassination attempt viewed through many characters’ perspective, and said by the fourth re-enactment people in the theater were yelling, “Not again!” Johnny Rotten must be spinning in his bath at never having realized high-amortization stories could be milked until they curdled.

Just like the outgoing unevolved Chimp, though, the incoming Father Time knows how to massage the hell out of the pack media on the campaign trail. Just by treating reporters to a barbecue at his log mansion very near where I grew up (not Sedona) he got no end of Tiger Beat-worthy coverage. They even ran his rib recipe, for Costco’s sake (nothing but the best for “my friends”). For once I’m glad Panchito is safely confined to the chewing-and-typing beat. Imagine the damage he could inflict with a manly man in an apron rather than a cowboy hat doing the jive-talking. America would be convinced this is not the Gordon Ramsay of candidates but the guy to have a comforting plate of macaroni and cheese with.

I see those fine reporting skills Panchito honed as he was being charmed by the good ol’ dry drunk have not gone dull while he’s been chewing and typing. In babbling out a thumb sucker he missed the elephant on Central Park West. Even my regard for the Big Homme has risen sharply since realizing why he opened where he opened: There’s an infestation of gazillionaires just minutes away now. Paul Goldberger wrote a gripping piece about it in the New Yorker, rather breathlessly answering “What does 20 million buy you these days?” But why let a huge development, on a lot that had been empty as long as we’ve lived in New York, with apartments snatched up with fortunes more solid than hedge funds, stand in the way of an easy joke about the Upper West Side?

My consort and I watched the extraordinary “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” from the very first row of the theater thanks to Bob Time, but it was still impossible to miss how powerfully food was woven through the story. The nature mort of fish over the hotel bed was a rich touch, as was the dog’s dinner of wedding leftovers. Plus how naive to socially inept would two girls have to be to bring cakes to offer an abortionist? Mostly there was the long scene at the table at a birthday party, which was excruciating but sounded oddly familiar. Then I placed it: A bunch of New Yorkers sitting around nattering about chicken liver. Oy. As they say.

After “No, we can’t,” the buzz phrase of the week seems to be “Suck my dick.” Certainly it seems to have been in play over at the Big Tent (a k a Satan’s Waiting Room), where the most elaborate game of “I did not have fawning relations with that critic” appears to be going on. Someone shoulda had some ’splaining to do in praising the open-arms treatment at a joint infamous for giving the little people a trashing for being dumb enough to mistake a private club for a public restaurant. But I guess no one could have expected a guy who is served “venison fallow” and thinks he knows from “bolito” to get to the meat of the matter in his weirdly timed stenography session. I would kill to be a bedbug on the next NYTimes reader who books a table at this newly ordained hospitality central and comes face to ass with the real experience. . . .

For 27 years I’ve driven my consort crazy by distilling the semantics class I took in high school with a “textbook” by S.I. Hayakawa. Anyone today who even remembers him probably recalls only the senator* who seemed to suffer from narcolepsy, but he deserves to be quoted into infinity for one observation: The word is not the thing. Or, to put it another way: Words have no power until your brain charges them. (You disagree? Try saying “asshole” to Ferran Adria and see what reaction you get.) All of which is a roundabout way of marveling, yet again, at how a restaurant critic for a once-respected newspaper could confuse a television persona with the food on his plate. I don’t remember who said this, but one of my favorite quotes ever is: Sometimes the news is in the noise. And sometimes it’s in the silence. Bluster makes good teevee. What the fuck does it have to do with cooking?

Oh. Right. This is the guy who informed us the Chimp would be the best candidate with whom to sit down and sock back a few brewskis. Foreign correspondence school should include a class in how “the image is not the person.” And how it’s a slippery slope from Panchito to Kristol-Cloudy.

At the expense of a feeble laugh, I also have to add that I remain amazed at how many people these days will pile on and criticize without reading anything more than a headline. I hate to point out the obvious, but that’s the first warning sign of cretinism. Then again, I force myself to slog through the shallow Bruni waters before dissing, and you can see where that gets me. . .

*Oops — I said he was from Hawaii, but an alert reader notes that the sleepy one was actually from the great state of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan.