gastropoda

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.

In other lapses down by the Taj Sulzberger, a restaurant critic of all people seems to be unaware that shit can happen in a year (or less) in the notoriously volatile world of food. A roundup of chefs’ favorites included one that I seriously doubt is still even in the guy’s mental GPS, a full 14 months after he mentioned it. A certain blog may still be getting kickbacks one way or another, but, as I’ve said, Elvis has left the wine bar.

Panchito certainly did his part in paying down the Taj Sulzberger mortgage with his peculiar assault on the flea circus in the Sherry-Netherland. I’m sure the page views went multi-stories high; otherwise, what was the point in carpet-bombing a single cockroach? You got a mom-son act? Lump them together in a dismissive snarkfest. Got a serious chef opening his most ambitious restaurant? Kiss him off in a couple of snide grafs. But a “restaurant” no one gives a flying Wallenda about? Bring on the dedicated trash talk. It all reminds me of the most famous quote from Frieda of kiwi fame, one echoed by the foie gras producer currently under siege by animal rights terrorists: There is no such thing as bad publicity. One day when the theaters are all bright with lights again, some idiot tourists will be wandering the East Side and think: “Hey, there’s Cipriani; I’ve heard of that,” before bumbling right in. And some weird mission will have been accomplished.

Now I’ve heard everything — I’ve been accused of going too easy on Panchito. But I think one of my e-correspondents is right in noting that ignoring his own recent takedown of inaccessible restaurants while favorably reviewing a new one does look like “sucking up” to a boss temporarily in a wheelchair. Ten whacks with a crutch for him for not raising his consciousness for real.

Maybe if Panchito had not been so distracted by towel snaps on the butt we would not have had to wait all these years for Vicente Fox to reveal that the Chimp is afraid of horsies, and the world might have been spared a fraudulent Cowboy in Chief. The detail is not surprising, but just imagine how far Molto Ego would have gotten if anyone thought he was scared of pigs.

Of all the dispiriting details in excerpts of the new “Dead Wrong,” the most stomach-churning had to be those describing the Chimp at trough, wadding cheese into his maw and spewing hot dog fragments while talking with his mouth full. Now we indubitably know “honor and dignity” in the White House really means a child with his boots on the people’s irreplaceable desk demanding, “Bring me an ice cream.” Which he needs, he admits, because he craves the sugar in booze. Surely Panchito could have passed along these kinds of tidbits in time to warn the world a disastrous boor was headed for power-drunkenness. He got seduced. And we got the sloppy seconds.

Steve Cuozzo has officially established himself as alpha dog in this town. He proclaims the Upper West Side a dining destination and the pack falls right in line, including the teacup Chihuahua who is considered the pit bull. Funny that the homecity paper will barely cover bad news out of Walter Reed or Baghdad if the competition breaks it, but a right-in-plain-sight story gets regurgitated online like a particularly tasty hairball. Maybe blogs are the new editorials.