I never watch “Top Chef” unless on assignment, but I do read and talk to people. And I’m amazed at how many times it’s been able to jump the shark. If he ever comes back, Jesus deserves a competitive cooking show.
I typed a “no cussing” elegy for Charlie Trotter’s over to the Epi-Log, but I’ll add a bit more here because he really is one of the good guys — his food and his integrity are on a rare par. I’ll always be grateful to him for actually picking up the phone and calling to alert me when the food coven was out with pitchforks after I’d reviewed a cookbook and pointed out that the empress of the farmers’ markets was wearing no apron. And he was extremely (uncharacteristically) patient with me when we worked on “The Chef” column together back in 2001. But right now I’m impressed that he’s saying nothing more after making his big announcement. Which makes chefs gloating about still being in business at 25 look even more unseemly. Of course Burger Krap money will buy you time.
Are those the best new restaurants or are they the most easily shaken down? And can you really judge a cookbook by its filler (I mean, I’m no fan of the Goopster, but she did hire a good cook to do the important writing: the recipes — and besides, when was the last MFK Pulitzer for a Tin Chef collaborator)? And here’s one way to rake in the dough: Expand your prize categories and charge $100 for every entry — just don’t call it Lotto for bloggers.
I also had to admit to new admiration for the Top Tin among Chefs. For all the Barbaro droppings about kids as critics and cooks these days, he produced the most graphic evidence that they just do not have palates evolved enough to appreciate serious cooking. I have cleaned up similar with my own hands. Cats, of course, are another story.
Back to fat livers, I have often wondered where the food fascists are when it comes to octopus. I can’t recall ever having read a single word about a protest outside a Greek restaurant or inside any trendy plancha-equipped restaurant. But these fierce creatures are almost too close to human for cooking comfort, and wasting their awesomeness is far more of a crime than letting ducks be ducks, capitalizing on their lack of a gag reflex and natural propensity for gorging. But I guess even the plebes can afford octopus, and that is an “American” word, so the “animal rights” activists will continue to stomp all over humans’ right to eat whatever the hell they please. While no one will speak for the industrial chickens.
Finally, I guess because I’m a bitch I haven’t been invited to a cluster fuck in a while, so I was happy to head down to that foreign country — SoHo — for the party for the most unlikely author of a family meal cookbook. It was quite civilized, but what really surprised me was the crowd. I recognized exactly three faces beyond the author’s and committed an unforgivable gaffe with a fourth I didn’t (Oliver Sacks and I have a syndrome). Flacks’ lists must have really gone bloggy. . . . I took my camera for the first time, though, and just want to say to the young ’un in the silly satin shorts hiked up in her back crack: Be glad I’m not bitch enough to post photos.
I tried to tune out all the flackery while I was away and only noticed the shilling for yet another a name chef signing up to do airline food because it struck me as more ridiculous than usual after I’d flown Turkish Air, which was like a flight from before Saint Ronnie turned travel into midnight in America. Even in steerage, the attendants passed out menus (along with amenity kits) to build anticipation, then served drinks with toasted hazelnuts, then dispensed dinner and finally took their sweet time clearing trays. By the time everyone was fed and fine, the plane was so serene you could sleep straight through till a full breakfast (eggs with roasted mushrooms etc.) My pasta with eggplant, tomato and cheese on the way over was so good I’ll get an Epi post out of it, and the whole grains and vegetables with the beef on the way home were easily among the best tastes I’ve ever experienced above clouds. No celebrities were involved, though, just good cooks using respectable ingredients. Interestingly, though, on each leg a chef in toque-to-clog regalia was positioned at the door to say buh-bye. Turkish Air must know walking the walk costs a lot less lira than talking celebs.
I lost a little of the iota of innocence I retain when I Tweeted about book blurbs, after hearing one for an apparently terrible cooking memoir was written by someone who apparently hates the writer. Jeebus. Has everyone’s phone been hacked? If you can’t tell the truth, can’t you take a pass? And I’m not going to surrender my last wisp of innocence and believe people are actually blurbing without reading. Next you’re going to tell me the Kwanzaa cake wasn’t created by the governor’s arm candy.
Wasn’t it rich that the same guy working up a head o’ outrage about industrial tomatoes was simultaneously flogging a recipe using a fruit that was then, according to farmers in our market, weeks away from being locally available? And I’m not talking melon. And how sad was it that the same chef who was humiliated by one jackass picked himself up, dusted off the Pepsi foam and did it all over again? Almost makes me long for the good old days of Betty Crocker, when a fake home cook really was a fake home cook.
A high point of the week, I must say, was talking with a chef and his wife from London who looked at me blankly when I mentioned Molto Ego. Neither of them had the faintest orange idea who he was. This was a gathering, of course, where a megastar from South America moved among us unmolested. But my faith in the globe was restored. Even though I had to agree with the woman who said that without the guy Americans might not today be buying guanciale instead of bacon for carbonara, made with eggs and not cream.
This was a nice little boondoggle: I was flown over to be on a roundtable on the future of Italian cuisine in the world, but thanks to my digital bocca grande no one apparently really wanted me to say much. And no wonder. As I kept thinking, I went to an Italian forum and a hockey game broke out; I only managed to toss a crottin in the punchbowl. Emotions were running hot, on whether Italian is overpriced in Asia, whether Michelin ratings are skewing things (or is it the internet?), whether sushi is mucking everything up, whether emigration has actually done the most to unify Italy (as the left-behinds cling to their regional styles). I did enjoy the strident push-back once someone in the audience brought up “molecular cuisine.” The best response was that it’s not a cuisine but a technique — if you can produce a better bollito misto with sous vide and mirrors, WhyTF not? And I’d say the Herbaceous Chef made the smartest point: Technology has been very, very good to winemaking. You could still do it in amphoras, but why not avail yourself of science? Dinosaur piss is an elusive elixir.
And my brain is still fried, so I’ll step out temporarily by reTweeting myself, with new resonance after being asked in Parma why I was not invited on the helicopter gangbang: Leonardo would have died from exhaustion trying to paint the last suppers at elBulli. How many are there going to be, for Christ’s sake?
Apparently only outsiders read the hometown paper’s public editor’s lament about trash-tracking, which noted that three different sections had run silliness about a non-story. This week readers were subjected to back-to-back gluten-free BS. Of course, this is the pinnacle of journalism that sold the world the connection between yellowcake and WMD. But still. Would a better story not focus on whether this trend should even be a trend? Humans have been eating wheat/wheat products for millennia. Why the pushback now? Has everyone gotten lactose-intolerant to oat bran with pomegranate juice? A few years ago I met a woman in Tuscany whose brother’s guts were being corroded by celiac disease, and I have taken it seriously ever since. Still, I somehow doubt half of America could be similarly afflicted. But I am looking forward to Nivea in Thursday Styles . . .
I hope no one who believes Jesus rode a dinosaur caught up to Jasper White’s review of a couple of lobster books I’m glad he read (and liked) so I don’t have to. Did he really state, unequivocally, that the Red Crustaceans “today are in fact very similar to the original members of their biological family, which appeared about 250 million years ago”? If the chain’s namesake is older than Earth, how is any creationist going to be able to eat mislabeled fish while stiffing the server again?
One of many things that amaze me about Al Gore’s invention is how huge it is and how niche it is at the same time. Fud people wanna talk fud, that’s it. Luckily, political types can eat and think at the same time, so you get great links that put fud frenzies into perspective. I have said before that I was paid to consider the cookbook from Molto Ego’s traveling companion in Spain, which could very well have skewed my judgment. But really, it is any more ridiculous that she’s on the cover of a magazine targeted at Middle America when you remember the King of Siam also got his “own” recipe collection in bookstores? And without even including her banhi mi and other Asian accents.
The latest “goddamn, is it time to fill up a page again?” from the pen wielder formerly known as Mr. Cutlets was beyond amusing. Whom shall we blame for obesity? Why, chefs, of course. As if all of waddling America could be flocking to real restaurants to gorge these days. I’ll just repeat one thing that came back to me over and over in the 15 days I was immobilized in a hospital in Torino, repenting at leisure for my bad eating: I did not get fat at Daniel. Even if you were privileged enough to eat there every night, you’d still be doing better than the average consumer of Crunch Wrap Supremes washed down with HFCS water. From a drive-through.