gastropoda

Gorgeous weekend, with great food — so much so it seems the Goods should for once outweigh the bad. . .

Only two Maroons would go to Cuba and complain that the food wasn’t cutting edge. For Che’s sake, can you say embargo? And poor people? But then as a travel writer friend noted, they were clearly just going through the payback motions for the trip. I blame the Food Coven’s honcho for “printing” their drivel; he does seem to take a hands-off approach with his old pals. One just did a trite ode to a “storied gem” of a trattoria that mentions a tart “in the photo above” when all that’s on display is fruit. But at least what he’s not doing is working. I check in just to see the latest brain wreck.

Talk about picking your poison: All this newfound fear over whether organic is safer is pretty laughable. Pesticides might be scary, but fertilizer is often just manure with a college education. And it stands to reason most farm products from China would be “organic;” the stories I could tell secondhand of people who have experienced outhouses and pigs together there would curl your tail. I get too depressed digging out my travel notebooks these days or I’d scare up the details from India, but I remember riding past an aromatic and especially verdant field with a huge billboard boasting that it  was essentially a sewage treatment plant for the nearby town. And, you know, shit happens.

Speaking of which, I am totally enjoying reading the fools sporting Dianne Feinstein hairdos as they proclaim Washington the new New York/Paris/London. Uh. Huh. I’ve lived in six states and consider my recollected travels with consort my retirement account, and I can pretty confidently say that when it comes to eating, the place is Podunk on the Potomac. Even the city’s biggest booster, depending on the outlet, has to acknowledge that its best is 63 rungs below New York, let alone her sainted Berkeley or the finally recognized Mecca, Chicago. Thin-skinned pastry chefs are the least of the problems. You can’t do great food without a great audience — look at the Upper East Side here. Washington is doubly plagued, with the rich and with rubes. Would you chow down where the bloviators on the Sunday teevee shows do? 

File this under HFS*: Did the hometown paper and its trashiest Sunday competition really use essentially the same lede in paying homage to the loser-est onetime chef in town? Did none of their editors notice the pretty racist tone to both? But at least one mouthpiece did not bite on the Jamie Oliver wannabe-ism — put this notorious spendthrift in charge of the school lunch programs and even Madoff wizardry could not generate enough cash to keep them afloat. Funny to think someone so pathetic is almost getting more ink than Grant Achatz, and apparently all he’s done lately is hire a propaganda catapulter. But whoever that is hit a grand slam.

*Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I’ve got some shoes to throw. Or mail. Except it’s not funny.

Of course the biggest horseshit of the week was the rush to document how the rich are suffering with Wall Street collapsing. We got the inevitable comfort food drivel, the inescapable quotes from bankers reduced to drinking beer, the unfailing rush to check in with sweet old Harry. Not just my old employer was guilty, but it all reminded me of the heyday of Krazy Rhymes-With-Lunt, when section editors were ordered to produce instant reaction pieces to some blip. Life is complicated; disaster takes time. But that doesn’t fill newspaper columns.

More proof that we are truly in end times: The WSJournal ran a story on instant marinators. Not only that, it found enough of the silly machines to do a comparison (without ever addressing what marination does, and does not do). We deserve a new ice age if we are really wasting resources on something so ridiculous. Now, if they could kill salmonella, that would be a different story.

My newfound frugal streak is not a pose. I freak out every time I exit the Food Shitty with a jar of Hellmann’s stickered at $5.39 to replace the one I have just thrown out with a $4.69 label. (And I go through mayonnaise like grass through a goose.) But my real sense of battered-diner syndrome kicks in with restaurants. The other night we met five friends for sunset wine at the uptown concession in Riverside Park and left a couple of hours later $35 a person lighter, after (admittedly) too much wine but only three burgers, three Caesar soups, one order of fries and two ears of corn. Seventy dollars a couple used to buy real food in a room with running water and a working toilet. So I can’t even begin to describe how much more satisfying a picnic was two nights later within eyeshot of the Gouge Bar. We settled onto the intensely green grass with another couple who had brought two V&T pizzas (outstanding even cold), gentle-jerk chicken (actually Cornish hens) and corn-tomato and zucchini salads, all of which we supplemented with curry-deviled eggs, cucumber-chive salad, Kahlua brownies, Paffenroth’s radishes (French breakfast and Easter egg), an epi-baguette from Amy’s and two bottles of rose. Given what a bottom feeder I have become with wine, I doubt the whole too-much-to-eat spread cost much more than $60 for the four of us. And I can’t decide which was more pleasurable, watching the sun set over Jersey in a rose haze or seeing a deck full of suckers getting bled dry just a shout away.

Say one thing for Cesare, though: If he had to go out with much less overkill, he was exiting with an abbondanza bang. We were on our way to the subway from my new favorite restaurant when I remembered the invitation to stop by for wine and salame, and so even though we were five minutes ahead of schedule four of us muscled our way in as the party for regulars was loudly winding down. I felt a little like our friend who rang the doorbell early for a going-away dinner in his honor and overheard my behind-on-the-ice-cream consort blurt out: “Shit!” But the herb-scented one’s assistant immediately escorted us into a booth and brought drinks and then the food started coming, much more than promised: the great fried pasta from the bar; cheese and meatballs; steak and shrimp. A waiter dropped off two bottles of wine for the second round, and it was hard to dislodge my friends before we could consume it all — and we had just finished a huge meal. The good news is that the creativity is undiminished: the prosciutto arrived wrapped around watermelon slices. And the better news is that he’s opening closer to us. I just hope he keeps the horse wineglasses. And as one of the accidental crashers with me said: The closing was more fun than an opening.

From up-close and personal experience I know rats are the Al Capones of the food world. Why do they infest bakeries? Because that’s where the sugar is. So the news on the NYC Health Department’s shutdowns of some famous cookie outlets was not exactly surprising. I remember we always had to leave one tray of shortbread uncovered at night because the owner figured the resident vermin would choose the easy dinner over gnawing through plastic film. Now it turns out it’s another way of saying: Leave the droppings. Take the cannoli.

Too bad Citizens Against Breast-Feeding is a media hoax. If this country managed to ban “offensive” public consumption, we could move on to outlawing something truly disgusting: Mickey D on the C train. But I could see a real group forming, one that would actually encourage breast-feeding in restaurants if it shut the howler monkeys up — up to age 12, if necessary. Failing that, my friend Groffoto has an interesting idea for fighting back against oblivious parents whose human larvae are allowed to ruin everyone else’s meal. Their photos should be taken with cellphones and posted in an e-hall of shame. It works for flashers down where the Whoppers go. Why not for parents instilling bad behavior in their spawn? Unfortunately, I was going to say we could call it fulldiaper.com, but that’s taken. By someone selling more crap to the overindulged to keep them too strapped to hire baby sitters.

Many years ago I went down to the old Conde Nast offices to drop off a manuscript at Allure and got on the elevator with an employee who was greeted by two other women who gushed, “Great dress!” She stepped off a few floors later and the Heathers started in: “Can you believe what she was wearing? She looked like her grandmother.” I think of that exchange whenever I go to an especially lavish food party: There’s a whole lot of social prevaricating going on. Not being so good at that stuff, I have my share of awkward moments, but at least I’m spared any “bearhugs” from Molto. And I can always tell when the creme de la creme is feeling a little too insular because the BFs will actually come around, whether out of ennui or just to trash me behind my back afterward. That’s how I knew the better party must have been over on the piers, where all the women chefs were strutting their stuff. But I still had a superb time, as did my consort, and I learned a few things. Like the fact that a $700 hotel in the meat district does not have the “services” of a Hampton Inn (coffee in the room). Or why the Liberace of food emcees is at every damned event — he can read the lamest script off a teleprompter and make it sound ad-libbed. And that a strip steak with no fibrous aspect is a bizarre thing to consume. (They didn’t slip us tongue, did they?) But bacon in the streusel with the apple tart? Bring it on.

Rumors that a burned-out, so-1980s novelist might be named the new restaurant critic of the NYTimes have sent justifiable shivers through both the food and book worlds. If David (Neo Is Short for Jewish) Brooks was a bad hire, imagine what damage Ol’ Dim Lights could do to a newspaper whose reputation as a culinary starmaker is a bit dulled right now. (And was even before the mystery of the missing star for bizarre Bread Tribeca unfolded.) But it gets worse: The new rumor is that the Times has narrowed its search to two candidates, neither with any expertise in high-end eating beyond a lusty appetite.

Imagine any other field in which the critic could be only an aficionado and not an expert. I like art, especially that really famous old stuff framed so well in museums. Why couldn’t I follow Michael Kimelman? It’s one more indication of the disdain the Times holds for food, which just happens to be the second biggest moneymaker for New York City, after finance. Worse, it’s yet another example of the country’s most powerful paper leading rather than following. New York magazine and Gourmet have both already opted for critics who prize sizzle over steak. And does anyone care what they write?

One sharp observer noted that there’s a bit of a backlash in this trend. People are clearly sick to death of the kind of food people who can obsess for days over whether the truffles are up to pigs’ snuff or the fleur de sel is worth its salt. (Even my pinkie goes up in revulsion when I hear the F name.) But a reviewer should know a little more than the average Wall Street guy with an Enron-obscene expense account.

Back when I was in restaurant school, half my class spent half its time railing that Mimi Sheraton was unfit to judge restaurants because, they ranted, she had never actually worked in one. We’ve come a long way from those days. No one expects a critic to have experience, only knowledge. And yet in another way we haven’t progressed at all. I invested in a serious program because I wanted the credibility to write about food: It was not enough that I loved to cook. I had to know the differences among the mother sauces, how to tell when and why veal was overcooked and monkfish underdone, and just what the magic was that transformed 30 rather ordinary ingredients into the miracle of bouillabaisse. The payoff when I graduated was constant work: In 1983 there were a lot of people who could type and punctuate but many more who could cook; those who could do both were rare as capon’s balls.

Sadly enough, today it doesn’t matter. Just when the world is starting to overflow with bright, smart, acutely palated people who can string words together with the same skill they use with seasonal ingredients, and vice versa, the Dubya effect is ruining food. Unqualified but connected is good enough.

 

Here’s how you can tell it’s the Year of the Monkey: All the hot new restaurants are aping each other. There’s Asiate and Geisha, Riingo and Matsuri — all Asian all the time. For someone like me, oriented toward Europe, this is a fate worse than fugu. I like soy and ginger and shiso and wasabi, alone or in combinations, as well as anyone else. I just want something a little more inspired than “barely cooked salmon marinated in miso-mirin with shiitake mushrooms and grilled scallions.” That sounds like weeknight cooking at home, and it’s what’s on the menu at Geisha for $24. No wonder I can’t get into Lever House for my birthday. Everybody knows this Asia is nowhere.

 

 

Reading about the first confirmed case of mad cow disease, I could only feel a weird sense of relief. It was always a matter of when, not if, the manure would hit the fan here. Now that it has, maybe now people will quit calling me elitist for pointing out that food is like gas: you have to pay a little more for premium if you care about your engine. Americans can’t keep eating in a fools’ paradise where two beef tacos sell for 99 cents. Beef was never meant to be cheaper than beans — not unless it comes from a downer dairy cow with every part but the moo ground up.

As for giving up beef, I figure it’s too little, too late. BushCo can blame Canada till the sick chickens come home, but there’s no denying our food supply is seriously compromised by big business, and it has been since even before some greedy bottom-liner realized you could pass sugar water off as apple juice. There’s also no giving back all the bone marrow and offal I’ve succumbed to over the years at chefs’ insistence. Considering the incubation period for BSE, the brains my consort insisted on ordering in France in the Nineties could come back to bite us in own brains. The only answer is to look for organic on the label and hope for the best. That or move to India, where the vegetarian food is so good and varied — and the cows so scary — you don’t even think about beef, at any price.

 

The New York Observer weepingly reported that Grange Hall in Greenwich Village is closing, but don’t count me among the mourners. Having lived in both Nebraska and Iowa, I always found it wildly ironic that a place that pretended to cultivate a warm and fuzzy Midwestern image had such hostile characters in the front of the house. The place made you feel as welcome as an atheist at a church supper, and the food could barely compete with Lincoln’s best. Apparently farmboys aren’t the only rubes in this world. New Yorkers can get taken, too. (Except by a Californian recycling Eighties hits at Washington Park, that is.)

 

The Bruni memo was memorable for a line channeling a Republican attack ad: “his writing will not just serve members of the food elite.” If that’s the Times’ attitude, maybe chefs should be allowed to judge the Pulitzers.

 

 

It’s not often you go out to a press lunch and wander into a Fellini film. This one was promoting the food and wine of Lazio, and the surreal aspect started with the setting, a curtained-off area in a trade fair at the Puck Building. The menu would have been wild enough: 10 wines and nine courses, launched with prosecco and slabs of roast pork and chunks of pecorino Romano and progressing through the likes of lamb liver with artichokes. But there was Gina Lollobrigida (apparently she’s still alive), and there was a 30-something chef who had no idea who she was. There was Franco Nero, that heartthrob from “Camelot,” in shades and pompadour but looking a little worse for four decades’ wear. There was “the king of Italian TV,” looking just like someone you would see on the formaggio network. There were French chefs from Daniel looking baffled, a poor overdressed and overly made-up microphone girl nervously prowling the horseshoe table, Tony May bashing the Times as if I had anything to do with its miguided recommendation of American buffalo mozzarella. And there was the star chef, looking dangerously close to becoming the Paul Prudhomme of the Italian kitchen and making some of us wonder about the wisdom of nine-course meals with 10 kinds of wine. The down side, beyond the 3 1/2-hour bite out of the day, was that this turned out to be an audience participation film. We had to sing for our lunch, and I failed miserably. Asked about a red wine on the table during one particularly long lag between two pastas, I could only blurt idiotically: “It needs food.”

 

But the high point came with a flashback to seventh grade. I walk in to see place cards in 70-point type, and the person beside me says: “Oh, you’re sitting with Arthur Schwartz.” I mentally shrug and think: I can handle that. I’ve had to face people after saying far worse things in print than that that they run cretinous radio programs at a time of unparalleled sophistication in food. But then he arrives, sees the cards and sidles (well, maybe lumbers is a better word) over to the PR person, who immediately switches my name one chair away from his. I’m amused as she gracefully tries to cover by saying I would be “more comfortable” next to her. But I’m really laughing on hearing Gina L totter in and crankily ask: “Who’s Arthur Schwartz? Why am I sitting with him?”

 

 

Food & Wine’s “best new chefs” party is always worth the subway ride, if only to see how not to throw a fete for the masses. This year it was in the Surrogates’ Court building downtown, which is imposingly gorgeous but not exactly set up for four chefs cooking too-complicated food to order for throngs with a precarious hold on their drinks. Each of them was crammed into a hallway overlooking the central court, and it was like snacking on the A train. Try that with a fried shrimp wrapped in filo threads sitting on stir-fried bean sprouts in a puddle of red that too easily goes flying onto the closest person’s good clothes. Slow-poached eggs in a Parmesan broth served in a coffee cup were also not easy eating. (And the beet concoction Dan Silverman from Lever House was dishing up seemed to have wandered in from another event, maybe a wake. Beets are for penance, not a party.) The one saving grace was the endless supply of Mumm Champagne, especially since the wines on offer were one cork over airline caliber: sip and shudder.

 

The awards were awfully late in arriving, so much so that my consort stopped and asked the lighting technicians what the holdup was. “We’re waiting for the presenter,” one said. “He’s got another engagement and then he has to leave right away for one after this.” Bob of course had to ask, “Who is it, the mayor?” But no, it was some guy from “Queer Eye.” There are nights when you’re embarrassed to be in the food business, and this was one of them.

 

 

One of the most disturbing signs of spring in New York is the bare flesh busting out all over. It’s bad enough on the street, seeing fat guys in shorts already (why are the worst always the first?) But it’s a true turnoff in a restaurant. Everywhere I go lately there are women hunched on barstools with a winter-whitewall spare tire bulging between top and bottom for everyone behind them to see. Even more queasy-making are the thong wearers letting it all hang out of low-rider jeans. Someone should amend the no-shirt, no-shoes, no-service rule to exclude the Britney wannabes. Some of us are trying to eat.

 

 

One problem with having an office just down the hall from my bedroom is that I tend to eat too close to home. It’s hard enough to leave this sunny apartment over the park, let alone venture beyond my little neighborhood. And so I was almost glad to have an errand way downtown one night around suppertime when I would have otherwise been home alone.

After tramping those bleak crowded streets for about an hour, I could only wonder: Where are the great restaurants in Soho? Savoy is nice but no better than @sqc. Balthazar is all setting, with forgettable food. Honmura An is lovely, but I’ve never felt compelled to rush back. Add up all the stars south of Houston and you’re still short a galaxy. I succumbed to Dos Caminos (taquitos filled with short ribs seemingly carved off an elephant), wishing I was at Cafe Frida, up in the food Sahara I call home.

 

 

Great moments in mandatory hygiene: I was waiting at a new bakery/cafe on Broadway when the pizza guy came out of the toilet — still wearing his little rubber gloves. Apparently you can lead a cook to water, but you can’t make him wash.

 

 

There are many days when I wish I’d listened to my consort, and the night we ate at Amma was the latest. He’s the kind of guy who swears off Italian for months after teaching in Tuscany every summer, on the theory that you should never eat the food of a country you’ve just come from until you can’t remember what you’re missing. But I guess I don’t travel enough. I stupidly ignored Bob and took a friend up on an offer to get us impossible reservations at the latest Indian two-star.

A month earlier I might have been thrilled with my meal, although even before I learned to eat with my hands I suspect I would have recognized that the naan and roti were too thick and doughy. But with memories of so much sensational food so fresh in my mind, it was hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Only the dal was exceptional, as good as any we had anywhere in India. “Crispy” fried spinach was one tough cookie. Baby eggplant was more peanut sauce than vegetable, unlike the sublime version I had at Grain of Salt in Calcutta. And the Manchurian cauliflower was like Chinese takeout from Dunkin Donuts compared with the rendition we stumbled across in a Tibetan settlement near Mysore. Amma’s Indian wine, however, was the real deal: it was as shudder-inducing as what we braved in Bangalore.

It’s probably all our own fault. Maybe we should have ordered the more Manhattanized concepts on the un-spell-checked menu, like the “tandoor girlled lamb sausages cased in sweet peppers,” and left the crispy tangy okra with tomatoes uncharred in our memories. At least until the curry faded.

 

 

Back in the last century when I started in newspapers, no obituary ever dared print the scarifying word cancer. “After a long illness” was the preferred euphemism if cause of death had to be mentioned. I think of that today whenever I hear someone 47 or 52 years old has died of a heart attack. Could the real culprit be a certain diet that Bloomberg’s been trashing?

 

 

Misery is a fish served cold, but that adage apparently eludes the latest chef at Campton Place in San Francisco. His signature dish is reportedly branzino served two ways, half straight off the bone at tableside and the remainder after a return trip to the kitchen to be transformed into a showstopping entree. I can’t think of anything less appealing. Plating in the dining room already guarantees a tepid meal (not to mention high anxiety as skin and bones go flying). Watching it happen is about as seductive sitting in on an autopsy. But to see that same leftover flesh come back from the dead, all gussied up, would be even creepier: Too many hands pressing the icy flesh.

 

 

I may be the only professional eater on the planet who gets the willies just looking at the TWC (transpose those initials and you’ll think twice, too). I’m sure I’ll eventually be lured into one of the Keller/Kunz/Trotter restaurants that Gourmet has already designated among the best in the city, but the fire that just broke out at barely opened Per Se only reinforced my intention to keep taking my edible chances at street level. Better mediocre than sorry.

 

Anyone wondering whether diving into a sinkhole in Iraq has made America safer should spend a couple of days in Washington. You won’t be able to get within blocks of the heavily barricaded White House (a k a the Chickenhawk Coop), and your hotel key card will be constantly demagnetized by all the metal detectors you’ll have to pass through to get into museums. On the plus side, you’ll also have a hard time contracting salmonellosis on capital time.

On both mornings I was stranded there, an egg breakfast started to look as attainable as Iraqi democracy. The otherwise wonderful Hotel Rouge serves only a continental, and badly, and the desk clerk just suggested another hotel where I had already eaten dinner, or a Cosi (Friendly’s must have been closed). So one day I made my way to the Tabard Inn, which used to have a good restaurant, and was told at 9:45 that the kitchen was closing. And the next day, Poste, in the Hotel Monaco, had already given its cooks the morning off at 9:55.

The eerily quiet Tabard did finally come through, close to lunchtime, with decent scrambled eggs, “whole wheat” toast with suspicious caraway seeds, grease sponges passing as home fries and a side order of instant grits with smoky bacon and processed cheese shreds. Luckily, my chewing was drowned out by a woman who strapped on her cell headset and treated the whole half-full room to a line-by-line revision of a long manuscript (“Where you say ‘exacerbated by race,’ let’s make it ‘transcends race’’’). No state secrets there.

The host at Poste at least sent me on my way, to Spy City Cafe, next to the new spy museum in the next block of F Street. It looked like one of those grab-and-go stands you have to suffer in airports, but it had a grill and decent tea and a great schtick: the cooked food takes so long you examine everything else for sale and wind up going back for the tempting $3 cup of fruit after clogging up on the cheap eggs. What made it really worth a stop, though, was seeing the walls lined with photos of Washington landmarks in espionage history, from those good old days when war-launching intelligence just might have been intelligent.

 

 

The new parlor game, naturally, is: Guess the new Biff Grimes/Ruth Reichl/Bryan Miller. Never a good gambler, I’m putting my pennies on Calvin Trillin, Bud to his buddy “Johnny” Apple, whom he just coincidentally profiled in the New Yorker not so long ago. But come to think of it: What a way for RWAjr himself to wind up his Times career, as the ultimate arbiter of food. I personally would pay cash money to be in a restaurant the night both he and that other 800-pound primate show up, one presumably under an assumed name and the other barreling in as usual, his sport coat hanging as low as his arms from the weight of his giveaway guides.

 

Why W is one magazine that has to be opened as soon as it lands on my doorstep: Someone there understands what the Times apparently doesn’t — food is fashion, food is style, food is vitally important. A one-pager in the latest issue on Thomas Keller’s inamorata/booker is worth the subscription. Not only do you get details on her and him, but when you read between the wide lines, you understand that mere mortals had better abandon all hope of ever eating at his New York branch, Per Se. There are too many PXX’s, as Daniel would call them, and not enough tables. Or, to put it another way, we’re not in Napa anymore.

 

 

Fear and favors: In one of those strange coincidences, one afternoon I’m having lunch with an editor at the country’s most self-important daily who’s kvetching about the overwrought ethics standards forcing her to perform painful contortions to be absolutely sure no reviewer she contracts has any connections with any author up for review. The very next morning I open the Sunday supplement of the same national newspaper to find an article about a rather weak chef written by a staffer who owes her job partly to the chef’s much stronger mother. The piece does mention they’re “friends,” but you have to wonder. There are 8 gazillion chefs’ stories in the naked city. The one about the job-jumping daughter of a mentor is the most compelling?

 

With no luck, though, maybe we’ll find the same story in the country’s premier fashion magazine next month. A pattern appears to be developing there: Newspaper with national circulation inflates culinary tidbit into story; magazine with dedicated following in the food world throws its hefty weight at the identical ort just weeks later. And women wondering if a Caja China is really just a cigar are left with nothing to read.

 

 

Where’s Tom Ridge when the Upper West Side needs him? You can’t get into the better restaurants for all the East Siders flocking in with their fixed faces — Nice Matin is fully committed even at 5:30. I’m sure a little fingerprinting and photographing would keep us from having to close the borders.

 

 

For a rather large couple, the Zagateers are oddly agile targets. Mark Gimein in Fortune comes close to nailing them in “Table for Mr. Bigfoot” (best line: Why does Paris have just six restaurants rated 27 or higher for their food while Dallas has 14?) If they didn’t manage to slip away unscathed, yet again, it might be worth a link.

 

 

With a name like Natchez, a new restaurant in the East Village would seem to have an idea of hospitality a little less northern than arctic. But we had one of the most bizarre “welcomes” I’ve ever experienced in an almost empty restaurant. We walked in nearly on time for the reservation to find our friends ensconced in a corner waiting for the beer and wine they had ordered, and we all proceeded to sit unattended until the hostess set down the phone and started manically moving tables with the busboy, while the cook stood by idly in the open kitchen. Finally she came over to explain that she might have to move us because she not only needed our table, she also needed to fit one more in behind us to accommodate one of two big groups she was expecting.

Back in the last century I worked in a department store that all but tattooed employees with the message that a customer in front of us was always worth 20 on the phone. I hope Natchez got its hordes, despite its cash-only policy and too-limited menu, because the four of us immediately put on our coats and walked north to the busy Mermaid Inn, where we were greeted, seated and drinking good Zinfandel in a matter of minutes.

 

 

Casa Mono does do a few dishes you won’t see anywhere else. But the only way I’m going to eat cock’s combs is in a hot dog.

 

 

After my guide in Calcutta emailed me a link to a food story in the Times of India, I inadvertently got a clue to how the rest of the world sees what has happened to our peace and prosperity. All of us grew up being told to finish our food because children were starving in India. Now the tables are upended. A blinking link on the newspaper’s web site implores Indians to help wipe out hunger . . . in America (secondharvest.org).

 

Waiting the usual 10 minutes for a menu and 15 minutes for service in a restaurant (Nice Matin), I suddenly realized what half the 10 million jobs lost under the tragically limited occupant of the White House must be: waiters. Hosts of either gender now routinely seat you while withholding any clue of what you might choose to order, and I’m convinced it’s a delaying tactic to stretch a thin crew even tauter. Apparently it never occurs to them that they could turn tables faster, and maybe even sell more food and wine, if they sprang for more bodies. If only wait staffs could be outsourced to India.

The latest byline on the NYTimes magazine’s food co lumn can be read many ways, but I see it as the final curtain on that dark era of Raines of Terror. Order has been restored on 43d Street. Once again, well-connected white boys rule.

 

 

As Natchez reminded me, I’m cursed with a good memory for bad experiences. My consort never suggests a restaurant without asking: “Or is that on your shit list? I can’t keep track.” I can never forget a dis, miserable food, hostile service, food poisoning, corked wine, painful noise or any other conditions that provoke us into fighting. This city has too many other choices — about 15,000, I think.

What’s peculiar, though, is that I tend to forget why places are not bad. I wandered into Le Monde, up near Columbia, with a floating notion that it was worth a revisit. Only after I had eaten half my overdressed avocado-bacon-lettuce sandwich with anemic tomato and limp french fries did it come back to me. The food is not the thing. It’s the service that’s exceptional. The hostess cleaned the window table I chose, the waitress was friendly and fast and even the busboy stepped in to bring my wine and take my credit card. Sometimes half a loaf is just right.

 

 

Just when I thought Real Simple had reached its absolute nadir, I happened to flip open the issue labeled (like the last six) the absolute last of my ill-advised subscription. And there was a pages-long story on how to doctor up takeout to make hors d’oeuvres fit for company. I hate to keep kicking a retarded horse, but every idea was lamer than the last. Hollow out cherry tomatoes and stuff with prefab guacamole? What could be more tedious and time-consuming? Cut out little rounds of partially baked pizza, garnish each one and rebake them? Canapes would be quicker. Whoever described going out to dinner as the two-hour solution to a 30-minute problem never realized how complicated shortcut cooking could get. And the fact that this tripe was written by someone known for churning out high-end chefs’ cookbooks tells you everything you need to know about the schizo world of food today. Message: buy the book, get intimidated, put absurd energy into reprocessing processed junk.

 

Cookbook publishing is one mysterious business, though. Lately there’s an outbreak of heavily promoted books from restaurants not known for their food. Did trees need to die for recipes from Balthazar? Or, worse yet, from the Palm? I can’t wait for the cookbook from Gray’s Papaya.

 

 

Great moments in terror prevention: Booze was banned from Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but doesn’t Al Qaeda also see alcohol as the root of all evildoing?

 

 

It’s the season to be queasy: Walking past a certain yuppified “Chinese” place on Broadway known for its grease, I picked up a whiff of something much stronger than pine needles and turned just in time to see a tanker trunk from a rendering plant pulling its hose out of the basement. Hope it was a pickup and not a delivery.

 

At Schiller’s, the third time was the jinx. The place itself was still magical, a transporting experience on a raw day. But the waiters were bumbling at best and I stupidly ordered what had to be the worst choice on the menu: eggplant Parmesan. I know I deserved what I got, but it really should have been better than a bowl of tomato soup with a few undercooked strips of eggplant and about half a pound of mozzarella. It was like pizza without the crust, a bun without a burger, a fish without a bicycle. The nearly perfect french fries held up their end of the meal, though, and the rotisserie chicken was certainly acceptable. It’s amazing how good scenery can sometimes taste.

 

Buche Rolling in Our Time: I like the food writing in Vogue enough to risk a hernia plowing through the fashion pages to get to the tales of boudin-bound pigs actually squealing like pigs. Which is why I think the big writer was not well served when his latest collection of columns was thrown to a friendly puppy to chew and review. Anyone who can see where the apron strings lead (“My Buddy, Myself”) will write off the book as one only friends and family would spring for. Anyone else will probably underestimate its brilliance because of the self-aggrandizing. The reviewer, who got a big plug in Vogue in December, could have done the honorable thing and admitted: A fresh reader without a bone to suck is always a much better judge. But then who would mime the critic’s praises when he publishes his next forest-depleting masterwork?

Narcissus watchers might want to stop picking on Rocco DiSpirito and start in on Jonathan Reynolds. The NYT magazine contributor has taken his self-indulgent column to the big stage, and the result is pretty but far from witty. I only saw a preview, when a friend of the producer persuaded us to join her on a discount night, but it was hard to imagine how the one-man show could be saved, short of firing the casting director, as my consort suggested. Like the lawyer who hires himself and winds up with a fool for a client, Reynolds is a far better playwright than an actor, and despite his great “Stonewall Jackson’s House,” that’s not saying much.

Probably the biggest problem is that when a blueblood opens up a vein, ice water trickles out. It’s hard to empathize with a rich kid whose mean old maman was emotionally stingy (try being poor and beaten). Using food to milk sentiment also seems cheap, the Patsy Cline “Crazy” of dramatic devices. And even if you could care about the plot, the self-consciousness and self-congratulation and kielbasa hamminess make it impossible to respond without total cynicism (all four of us shuddered when he threw the Polish sausage into his cardoons).

If you go just for the food porn, you may come away with a new appreciation for the old Fat Ladies. They did that cook-and-chatter schtick so much better, so much sooner. The only saving graces are no half-time, a gorgeous set (oddly, no credits are given in the Playbill for the back story on the appliances and cookware) and the one aspect not spelled out in how-clever-am-I smarminess: Reynolds’s menu must have been designed to do in his mom with gout. Why else would he serve a deep-fried turkey with a cheese-loaded potato souffle?

“Dinner With Demons” may benefit from the oldest rule in the food business, though: location, location. The theater is just down the block from the playwright’s benefactor.

 

 

Just spotted the ultimate cross-marketing, and it’s not a joke: Chicken McNuggets and “Haunted Mansion.” Talk about a scary movie.

 

 

Why the oral experience has to be so aural is one of the great mysteries of eating out, but I think I’ve come close to solving it. The breakthrough came after we met friends at Thalia just for a drink before a show but wound up at a table where, as always, we had to yell to talk. One of my friends seemed to say her Jonah crab claws were the best she had ever had, which was surprising, since my Caesar salad was a little on the timid side and the “herbed” fries were not just bland but cold. It also seemed strange that she wasn’t polishing off her small plate.

Only later, as we were walking out of the theater, did my ears clear. “Those crab claws,” she reiterated, “really were the worst I’ve ever had.” No wonder bad restaurateurs crank up the volume. It’s cheaper than buying fresh.

 

 

Reading all the “best” cookbook roundups, I had to wonder why anyone publishes in any season but fall. Recipe reviewers apparently have shorter memories than Oscar voters, and they have no excuse of not being able to watch a video to check out the little guys. It would also be easier to take these Golden Globs seriously if they all didn’t inevitably crown the same members of the food world’s inner circle, the cookin’ coven.

 

Chefs and scientists have apparently done their damnedest with the burrito, finally calling it a wrap, if the increasing bastardization of the taco is any indication. I don’t know which item I noticed recently was scarier: the grocery coupon for $1 off on Old El Paso Seasoned Taco Meat Bucket (could there be a more appropriate container?), or the Todd English recipe in Bon Appetit for “rib-eye tacos” mucked up with horseradish and onion jam. Actually, there’s no contest. The English tacos (say no more) use flour tortillas, inexplicably cut into squares. Reinvent some wheels and you’ll get carsick.

 

 

Two weeks away from the easily manipulated American media must have been deleterious to my cynical side. I saw the famous Bon Appetit/campaign shot plastered everywhere and never questioned where in the name of Saddam Shrubya’s string pullers had been able to find a food stylist that good in a Baghdad so dangerous only Hillary Clinton and colleague could walk free. (Did anyone see Martha Stewart in this country on that day?) Even worse, it never occurred to me — a veteran of a mass Thanksgiving feeding in New Orleans — that gorgeously roasted birds are rarely presented whole to hordes. But as the turkey in chief would say, fool me once. . . . When he sneaks back to that hangar with caviar on New Year’s Eve, I’m going to look twice.

 

 

IIf your worst nightmare is winding up on the wrong flight, headed for Omaha instead of Oaxaca, don’t fly Song. Delta’s new discount airline is putting all its promotion into one weird campaign that sends some very strange signals. One ad in the New York Observer touted a big smiling “Mimi,” on a flight from LaGuardia to West Palm Beach, as having “time for Animal Planet, Discovery Channel and two cosmos.” But what’s in her shaking hands is not pink at all — it looks like a mutant mojito but with lemon. Can you trust them to find the airport if they don’t know their booze?

 

 

Once again, gossip columns gushed about all the klieg wattage at what I thought was a rather dull (read AARP guest list) party. Admittedly, I bailed on Egi Maccioni’s book fete at Circo. It started at 5, I got there around 6 and was just able to get a glass of quite good pinot bianco before the pizzettes and other savories vanished. Speeches were followed by sweets, which to me is the equivalent of blasting the lights on at last call. But apparently the stars only come out for sugar — Liz Smith listed a whole roster I never saw. Call it the case of the materializing celebrities.

 

What is it with old gray ladies and risotto? In the last few weeks the paper of rice has run at least three recipes — two back to back in the magazine alone, and two by those renowned experts in Arborio alchemy: Brits.

 

 

A cute little automatic match for candles was just hand-delivered from Steve Hanson’s people as a promotion for his new outpost of Fiamma in Las Vegas. Too bad he isn’t using it to light a fire under his staff closer to home. I actually tried to eat at Ruby Foo’s uptown, having never been there in the eons since it opened, but the warning signs were the same as at Atlantic Grill recently. Almost every one of the tables in the front section where I was seated was squirming in anxiety. Two had their credit cards out in that subway-evoking deaf-mute plea for a check; three more were sitting waiting for food with those peeved-but-trying-not-to-lose-it faces I increasingly see in Hanson properties besides Isabella’s. The rest had cobwebs growing over them. I waited 10 minutes with no sign of a waiter and fled. And not to Fiamma, here or in Vegas.

 

 

Minimalist trick of the month: turning a sauce into an ingredient (shouldn’t it be the other way around?) Pipian is described as pumpkin seeds in the paper of cupcake record. Which is sort of like defining pesto as pine nuts. No Booker Prizes for food brains this week.

 

Not just because my cellphone-dependent father died of brain cancer, I tend to be a little more neurotic about the ubiquitous ego extenders than apparently anyone in New York. And more and more, I keep noticing how the annoying little cries for help bring out the beast in their owners at feeding time. I was raised not to talk with my mouth full, but that was before eating in public became solitary recreation. Wherever I am, I can’t help spotting people who sit quietly until their food arrives, then go on autodial and let their callees suffer the sounds and saliva. It’s a bizarre phenomenon, particularly in Mexican restaurants, where it’s rampant and where crunchy tortilla chips and slurpy salsa are inevitably involved. At my loneliest, I would never a call a friend in the middle of a takeout pizza. It would be rude and cumbersome — not to mention profoundly pathetic.

But as much as I’ve become accustomed to the gruesome performance, what I just saw while getting my hair cut left even me gape-mouthed. A scrawny woman with big hair and diet skin was apparently content to sit scrawling in a notebook in a nearby chair as the hairdresser tugged and dried. As soon as he left her to go off and bring back a strange machine, though, she got out the cell and ostentatiously hooked up the earpiece. Then she opened up a pint container of boiled egg whites. About 10 or 12 of them. And then she proceeded to autodial as she made like a mongoose. The whole thing was surreal. It had to be one of those successive sets of calls where every callee pleads: “I’m losing you.” Sucking eggs should not be shared.

 

I subscribe to New York magazine — at the most discounted price on the planet — but with every issue I wonder why. The latest one, on “Best Chefs 2003,” could have been overseen by Zagat, it has such a disconnect from the food scene. Not to mention that the opening spread seems to have been shot by the same woman who just did my visa photo for $7.95: it may be anatomically correct, but where is the flattery, let alone the professionalism?

I like a lot of the guys in the feature, but if they’re the best, then New York is just what I’ve been complaining: A tired Podunk. Either that or the depression I keep diagnosing on the food front is worse than even I’d thought. This feature has a going-through-the-motions feel you would not perceive in Sydney or London. Then again, maybe these hangdog chefs, and the editors, are all contemplating having to cook for Republicans next year.

 

Imagine if the NYTimes ran a forum on a celebrity cooking for a head of state. Say it was Emeril for Blair. What you would read would never be as acerbic, even brutal, as what the Brits are suggesting the Inflatable Chef whip up for the Chimp in Chief.

After Nigella was spotted skulking around power central in London, the British papers didn’t ask the obvious: Why not have a real chef rather than a TV presenter cook? Instead, the Guardian just let readers let fly. Not surprisingly, the responses were nothing like what you will read on the defanged NYTimes site, which seems to be all about cookies and milk. Toasted chads and jerk chicken were among the milder suggestions; most were in the strychnine-hemlock-fugu vein. In short, more than the mice used as food tasters in Thailand may be needed on this trip to “our” main coalition partner.

 

 

Studs Terkel had a great column recently in which he referred to America’s “national Alzheimer’s disease.” He diagnosed it in a more substantive context than food, but it’s hard not to agree with him when you walk past a newsstand anymore. Low-carb has clearly supplanted low-fat as the No. 2 cover line after great sex, but does no one really remember how obese the whole gullible country got gorging on Snackwells and other fat-free wonders?

 

 

Given how addled Americans are about food right now, it’s bizarre to read a menu like the one my consort just brought home from Bloom in Scottsdale. Two appetizers and six entrees on the long, overwritten list (creme fraiche, for instance, is modified by both cool and chive) carry little asterisks, decoded at the bottom with two lines reading: “Regarding the safety of these items, written information from the United States Food and Drug Administration is available upon request.”

I assume it’s a notice not unlike the one you see in any restaurant in New Orleans serving oysters that may pose a risk to anyone with a compromised immune system. But that red flag is at least straightforward. This one makes you wonder how badly you want that “spicy tuna tartar, chilled sunomono salad & crisp black seeded wonton.” Will the FDA give the all-clear on the sunomono or the black seeded? The drunken cherry sauce with the duck does not warrant an asterisk, and either does the “tamari nap” with the wok shrimp. But the lamb, the two beefs, the pork, the tuna and the scallops all do.

The sad part is that the little asterisk does nothing to reassure, any more than the little heart alongside the low-fat entrees made them any more alluring in the heyday of Lean Cuisine. These days, with the EPA lying about air quality at Ground Zero and the pretender in chief lying about who hung the mission accomplished banner, I think I’d trust the chef on what was safe to eat. Even if he was serving forbidden rice.

 

 

Another souvenir of that vicarious trip to my birthplace was a special wine section from the Arizona Republic showcasing what has to be the weirdest gimmick ever presented in a mainstream publication: a wineglass dipped in chocolate filled with a “bold” cabernet or “peppery” zinfandel. The rest of the section was actually quite savvy, but I cannot imagine what led an editor to showcase this rim job, particularly next to an item touting Healthy Choices’ new frozen dinners allegedly made with merlot or chardonnay. It was almost like a parody of a margarita. Then again, the writer gave away more than she intended when she started off by saying: “Discover what women with PMS already know: Chocolate and wine are perfect partners.” If you’re going to get greedy and try to get both in one mouthful, wouldn’t it be a lot less lip-sloppy to dunk the chocolate in the wine?

 

 

Everyone must know by now that airlines are starting to charge for what they call food, but who knew the trend would invade the supermarket so soon? Kraft is now marketing Philadelphia [registered trademark] To Go, little packets containing a cream cheese spread with one of those bagels engineered to survive six round-trips to LA. It’s exactly the kind of breakfast you might suffer at 30,000 feet. But who here on earth would spring for it, even if the little knife packed with it would fly right past security?

 

 

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in restaurant school — besides never to grab a knife as it falls, and always to elevate a bleeding digit to slow the blood flow — was that words have to be strung together to make anything on the menu sound as if you could taste it, or at least couldn’t wait to taste it. The way to a man or woman’s stomach is not through the heart but through the hyper-critical brain, the one attached to the wallet and the gold card. Ingredients have to taste good to your ear.

 

And so the food at Butter under the new chef with the powerful mom may be absolutely brilliant. But I’m not rushing off to try it. Even lust needs mental synapses.

Where is the harmony in watercress, sage and tangerine sauce with grilled beef? Could ravioli with a wild mushroom filling actually survive a sauce with not just roasted beets but poppy seeds? Somehow I suspect Butter’s biggest seller is the strip steak with those out-there accoutrements, creamed spinach and onion rings. Now you’re talking my $31 language.

 

 

Washington may not be a lost cause after all. The Up East branch of the Shrub family’s alleged favorite Austin restaurant has gone under like a Neil Bush S&L. Jeffrey’s is out of the Watergate, and Aquarelle is back in. That wouldn’t be a Freedom place, would it?

 

Mrs. Latte has reconsidered. Emeril is okay. As long as he’s English. (I don’t blame her, though. I know who she reports to.)

 

When it comes to Mexican food, I’ll go to the opening of a can of black beans. And so after a particularly persuasive PR woman called and emailed twice to insist I come to her promotion at Pampano, I had to say si. I had no idea it was a sit-down dinner — at the prime siesta hour of 4:30 in the afternoon — until I showed up late and spotted the friend I had invited wedged into a banquette with full flatware in front of her. To join her, I had to interrupt and then wriggle past a braying ass on a cellphone in the prime seat at the table. He continued bellowing and preening even as the chef was giving her soft-spoken spiel to the whole room on exactly what we would be eating, and how she had put the client’s products to best use. Of course he was then mystified by the origins of the huitlacoche with the excellent swordfish, and he dumped habanero salsa all over the carefully constructed tamal with green chilies. Worse, when he asked my friend who she “was with” and she said freelance, he reacted as if someone had laid cat mess on his plate. (Luckily, he was too appalled to ask me.)

Who was this buffoon? None other than the huge company’s top PR guy. Apparently Rumsfeld has a twin in the marketing business.

 

What I got out of the cena from hell, besides a pretty decent goodie bag, was a tipoff to a “comida Latina” trade show at the Javits Center the very next day. This is clearly the food of the future, with nearly 40 million Hispanics in this country, and I had high hopes for produce and chilies, maybe tortillas and tamales. What I tasted was mostly processed, processed and processed. Aside from some phenomenal queso de freier — a Mexican cheese like haloumi that both crisps up and turns oozy when heated and could be the greatest snack for drinks since Spanish chorizo — what was mostly on offer was the kind of stuff you open at your own risk of 4-inch-long ingredient lists. Frozen pupusas. Pina colada yogurt smoothies. Precooked ropa vieja. Yucca fries and yucca empanadas and yucca balls. Chorizo-flavored potato chips. Some big mainstream food companies were out in force (I’m still trying to get the taste of Kozy Shack’s dulce de leche pudding out of my mouth). But what was most disheartening is that the bulk of the name tags I spotted moving from booth to booth were from restaurants from all over the Northeast. Coming soon to the margarita mill near you: Guacamole with a 45-day shelf life.

 

This was not a good week for any diner who believes cleanliness is next to savoriness. Brasserie 8 1/2’s carpeting and barstool upholstery were positively grimy when I stopped in for a drink (the overburdened barman’s jacket had also gone gray, and the giveaway grissini were days past their eat-by date). Strange, since there were barely enough customers to dirty a rug. Over at Atlantic Grill, my wineglass had an unnerving crust on it, almost as thick as the one on the saltshaker. Hard not to wonder if restaurant managers haven’t been scared cleaner-less by the Wal-Mart raids.

 

Chef’s catalog seems bent on proving that the more dazzling the kitchen arsenal, the less likely the owner is to do any actual cooking. Call it the Garland range/Chinese takeout syndrome. Chef’s latest mailing includes four full pages of mail-order food, and not the kind of inaccessible indulgences even the confident might be hesitant to try at home, like the tamales and exotic sausages Williams-Sonoma and Needless-Markup have always offered around the holidays. Haute@Home is the silly label chosen for dishes like biscuits and bread pudding and chicken enchiladas, staples of poor cooks from the era of wood stoves. There’s just something gleamingly absurd about the owner of a $900 set of knives shelling out $50 for a one-time panful of sweet potatoes Anna. And judging by the photos, you couldn’t even pass this food off as homemade. It’s too crude.

 

 

My rant on the idiocy of cooking frozen broccoli in its own bag in the microwave has been validated: Some scientist actually compared nuking and steaming and determined the former leaches the life out of one of the more healthful choices in the produce aisle.

 

 

Simple has two basic meanings: uncomplicated, and mentally deficient. A real major magazine has decided to be the latter. It’s increasingly prostrating itself before advertisers while flipping an unfloured finger to honesty and common sense.

In the November issue, readers could get mental whiplash flipping back and forth between what has to be the most cumbersome recipe ever for pie crust (made in a food processor; 15 steps before you even chill it) and the most bogus page ever of “pie myths debunked.” Not only does it actually recommend Pillsbury refrigerated crusts for their “quite good” flavor and texture but it also prescribes shortening sticks for the flakiest crust. Can you say transfatty acids, and ingredients not existent in nature? Butter is best, but if you want that old-time flakiness, why couldn’t they tell you lard is by far the healthier choice? Probably the dumbest idea, though, is to “tuck your pie dough into a square brownie pan” to avoid the cliche of the round pie that’s on “every dessert table in America.” (Who writes this stuff? Oh, right. He’s credited.) There’s a reason those boring old pies are round. They cut better, from core to perimeter, and they give just the right proportion of crust to filling. How simple is that?

Real Mentally Deficient lives down to its name even more in the main Thanksgiving feature. The theme is avoiding a sink overflowing with pots and pans, which is about the most appetizing idea they could toss up on the happiest of holidays. Suggestion One: Substitute carrots and leeks for a roasting rack under the turkey so you don’t have to scrub it afterward. (Personally, I would rather soak a rack overnight than clean leeks and scrub carrots, but I guess that’s too complicated.) Suggestion Two: Use crappy processed garlic bread for stuffing to save on chopping parsley and garlic. (Not quite Apocalypse Now, but oh, the horror.) Suggestion Four: Cook your frozen broccoli florets “right in their microwavable bag” to save on pot washing. (If you’re going to get out a skillet for the lemon butter, cook the whole fresh head in it. You already sprang for the leeks, for Crisco’s sake.) My one suggestion: Warn your guests they’d be eating better at a Boston Market. And a lot faster.

Given how craven the magazine seems to be about soliciting ads through name-brand copy, I’m surprised it didn’t suggest using that great new Dawn Power Dissolver for the rack. Do leeks have lobbyists? But I’m mostly disheartened that a magazine that started out with a brilliant concept — cutting through the jangle in our lives, as the founding editor put it when I met her back in the beginning — has devolved into a very slickly packaged 1950s ode to convenience foods. In these glory days in the American food chain, convenience is such a better word when it’s a noun.

 

 

The true test of my Manhattanitis came on the buffet line at Bay Leaf in midtown. With a friend who had suggested the place, I had just started filling my plate when the young Indian guy ahead of me blurted: “Did you see what I just did?” There was no mistaking it: a very brazen cockroach parading among the squash heaped decoratively alongside the Sterno pans. It was too late, and too unpolitic, to drop my plate and flee, even after the guy grabbed a waiter to give him hell. And I’ve seen worse: Whenever the exterminators sprayed in the kitchen of the restaurant where I went to cooking school, sluggish roaches were always dropping into serving plates for a day or so. My consort and I were once eating in an Indian restaurant off Amsterdam Avenue when we spotted a roach strutting its dirty stuff on the wall and pointed it out to a waiter who simply reached over and crushed the bug with his thumb (the same one later to be seen in our saag paneer).

Roaches are just a fact of restaurant life. Even Jeremiah Tower ’fesses up in his memoir, “California Dish.” But I left Bay Leaf feeling rather queasy nonetheless. As my friend and I ate, I noticed the waiters were not changing the linens when they turned the tables. They were merely swiping the curry crud off the Teflon textile onto the floor and laying down what I hope were fresh settings. Humans only get the buffet at lunch there. For roaches, it’s gotta be a 24-hour smorgasbord.

 

 

You know things are bleak when Reagan starts looking bright. He only declared ketchup a vegetable to save a few bucks on food for schoolkids. These days the NYTimes reports prison officials around the country are not even bothering with semantics. They’re flat-out changing the definition of what adequate is for inmates.

In a country with the cheapest food supply on earth (can you say rampant obesity among the very poorest?), it’s unsettling to think 15 percent of the states are so strapped they can no longer afford to put two flour-and-lard biscuits on a plate and now have to serve just the dirt-cheap chicken and forget the extravagant macaroni and cheese. If there’s $100 million to spare for a witness protection program for exactly 100 Iraqi families, it seems criminal not to spring for breakfast for Americans — even bad Americans — on weekends. There’s also an element of pennywise poundfoolishness to dumping fresh vegetables and substituting “juicelike” drinks when you consider prisons will always have to pay for health care for the malnourished.

 

Goulash to gulag is an easy slide, especially considering these are only the changes affecting “legitimate” prisoners who have access to lawyers and reporters. What could they possibly be serving at Guantanamo?

 

 

Maybe one way prisons could make up the shortfall would be to produce the “Texas Budget-Chainsaw Prison Diet,” with testimonials by cell potatoes. It couldn’t possibly be as offensive as something due out in January from Jacqui Malouf, Bobby Flay’s interpreter on the Food Network. The promo for it shows her bare-topped in bed with a trayful of breakfast under the title “Booty Food,” and it goes down-gutter from there. There’s an “aphrodisiac alert” with entries like “anchovies — they get your love loins going” and a back page of “lust symptoms” that will put you off your feed. To get your pork loins going, there’s a sample recipe that allegedly serves two but calls for a pound and a quarter of meat, two cups of “corn-grit” polenta and a whole cup of Parmesan. So much for sex on the dining room table — anyone who ate all that would have to say: “Not tonight, dear. I’m digesting.”

 

 

This will be my 22d Thanksgiving in New York (I missed one in New Orleans), so I’ve clearly been here awhile. But I have to say I have never had a conversation about hero sandwiches. Wraps, bagelwiches, burritos, even rotis, sure. But heroes just aren’t on the salumi radar. So I was mystified by the big spread devoted to them in our hometown paper. And then I remembered where I saw the gruesome things on a regular basis: five-foot-long ones sitting unrefrigerated and sneeze-unguarded on the sandwich bar in the Cafe Regret, the feeding station where they were brought in as a special treat for the voluntarily incarcerated on West 43d Street. I can only envision the heroic sequels: Dishwater soups. Gluey puddings. Tacos, cafeteria style. This is why editors should go out to lunch.

 

 

Only the most naive recipe follower would believe any chef really wrote a cookbook. Those guys are too busy doing everything but cooking to slave over a hot keyboard. Just about all of them hire partners in deception. But now I’m wondering how those same collaborators can churn out so many books. I have this vision of them sneaking around like kitchen contractors, putting in a day or three here, then disappearing for a couple of weeks while they go off and appease other clients they never mentioned they had.

 

The question only came up when I got yet another review copy of yet another book with this fall’s It Collaborator, and I only noticed because he was getting cover credit this time. The end of anonymity is a big step forward for the word grunts in food publishing, but it also spares them reviews like my all-time favorite on a chef cookbook not written by a chef. Referring to the Sylvia’s of Harlem opus, Nation’s Restaurant News memorably wrote: “Unfortunately, the book would have benefited from a ghostwriter.” (Also like kitchen contractors, bad collaborators live to sin again — this one went on to infamy with a pastry chef who went on to sell out to a sandwich chain.)

 

 

Does anything go stale faster than flavor-of-the-week food? Stewart, Tabori & Chang has just published a collection of the “100 best recipes” from New York magazine and moths virtually fly out of every page. What seemed so fabulous when Meigas was still in business, and when Patrick Clark was still alive, now looks about as exciting as my 1972 copy of “All Around the Town,” which at least boasts “hundreds” of recipes from New York’s “finest” restaurants. Can’t wait for the sequel: “100 best fashions,” a showcase for leg warmers and shag haircuts.

 

 

Be careful where you wander into after a party with Texans who pour faster than the Bush twins. We tried to go to nice and sedate Beppe after a liquid soiree on Park Avenue South, but the kitchen was already closed around 10, so we headed for Dos Caminos, where I figured the guacamole sommelier never sleeps. It was the right place for a last glass of wine and a couple of hangover-deflecting tacos and salad, but the wrong place the next morning when I realized my Amex card was missing. Somehow the waiter had remembered to give us the sign-up spiel for the BR Guest mailing list (the one I’m starting to think is being compiled for Jet Blue) but had forgotten to hand me back the plastic.

 

I immediately called, expecting to hear a reassuring, “Yeah, we have it right here.” Instead, the receptionist took down my first and last names and color of card etc. and put me on hold before reporting she had it. I schlepped to 26th and Park, gave the same information at the hostess stand and waited about 10 minutes before another employee came back. With at least 15 credit or debit cards clutched in her hand.

 

There once was a time when a restaurant would immediately call you to say you had left your vulnerable card, even offer to messenger it to you. Now, let the diner beware. Having just been billed twice for the same $82 lunch at Rez’s Cucina Italiana in London, I’m putting on my glasses for my next Amex statement.

 

 

Just back from Salzburg and London, I can’t help thinking New York looks somewhere between provincial and moribund. The energy of those cheese-eating, Blair-challenging cities is sadly absent here anymore. Restaurants take no risks with food or with design, as if eating safe will keep us safe, and how ridiculous is that? Londoners sound just as convinced they’ll get hit, too, but they seem determined to go down in a blaze of innovation if not glory. Salzburgers see no need to bury their heads in Mozart, either. Compared with the bathrooms in even their classic restaurants, New York’s look like Portajohns. And the circular bar at Hangar 7 in Salzburg, with a computer function under the glass that lets one drinker send a little “plane” with a message to another, makes downtown look like Des Moines.

 

 

Coming home to the huffing and puffing in the Time Out and New York fall previews did not do much to lift my gloom. Those breathless promo pieces are always the desperate triumph of hope over experience — how many times has Gray Kunz announced he’s really, seriously, finally opening a place? How many of those dozens of bright and shiny new places will actually see the light of candles? (I always save the gushings to do a head count the following spring.) But this season it’s worse — much of what they’re promising is either confusion passing as fusion (Samuelsson does sushi, Burke gropes for his inner Italian) or still more risk-averse menus. Marc Murphy takes years off just to come back and serve steaks and sauces? Christian Delouvrier’s channeling his Gascon grandma? Ken Aretsky’s reviving that peculiar Pearson barbecue (without the diabetes-inducing potato salad, I hope)? Even Ducasse’s opening seems a little forlorn. London gets Pierre Gagnaire’s brilliance. New York gets multinational macaroni and cheese. With peanut butter.

I can only take solace in an I-told-you-so. More than a year ago my “editors” pressured me to make Katy Sparks the lead of a story on chefs on hiatus. The fatherly saps were just besotted with the idea of a woman home with her baby reveling in quality time before opening the restaurant of her dreams in mere months. Things got nasty, but they finally had to stick a diaper in it when I insisted that the chances of that place ever materializing were about as slim as Gray Kunz setting up shop in Lever House. Now a little blurb in New York reveals that Sparks’ erstwhile partner is not opening Katy’s on West 10th Street but — surprise, surprise — Twilight 101. Tapas, anyone?

 

I knew there was a reason most of the people dropping megapounds in the Fortnum & Mason tearoom were of the Hello Kitty sweatshirt variety from Japan. My absurdly overpriced scone seemed to have been baked by Poppin’ Fresh. (Don’t ask about the rare tea that drew us there for my consort’s job — it was 6 pounds a pot including surly service.)

 

 

One juicy detail got left out of the New York Times’ bedazzled account of the Paris boondoggle for Chefs des Chefs d’Etat, the coalition of the culinary catering to heads of state. According to the Daily Telegraph in London, Geedubya’s man in white, Walter Scheib, was set up by hoaxsters from a French TV show who sent a woman pretending to be Mme Chirac to his hotel to offer him a job cooking for her husband, who she said was longing for freedom fare like hamburgers and barbecue after so much of that silly old French food. On camera, the poor dope actually asked for time to think “this great honour” over before the scam was revealed and he started whining about “a diplomatic incident.” Given how the Maison de Bush apparently prizes loyalty above all other considerations, the fickle Schreib could be the first chef in history who may be needing a taster himself.

 

 

One more way the Europeans have it all over on us at the table: vegetarians get the four-star treatment just about everywhere. But the Brits at least keep a sense of humor about this mad cow world. A brochure I picked up at a sausage shop offering a “nonmeat selection” in the Smithfield Market carried a wry little reassurance: Please note that no animals were harmed in the production of this flyer.

 

 

Another good sign from London, where purification seems to be half the point of eating and drinking anymore: A pub in Soho with a chalkboard outside advising “Retox here.”

 

Consider it one more paving stone on the road to extinction. Black & Decker has come out with the appliance the whole world was waiting for: an electric jar opener. It’ll be just the ticket for the next blackout.

 

 

When the lights went out, I was standing in the paper products aisle of Food City and wishing I had had the foresight to be caught near the canned tuna before the manageress threw everyone out of the store. I’m the kind of recovering Catholic who has a recurring nightmare about tanks rumbling after me for filching a single grape, but for once I could understand why shoplifters grab and run, even when the cash registers are working. I would have been happy for any food that could just be opened and eaten if the blackout lasted.

Turns out I didn’t need the Progresso after all. My apartment had gas and running water and lots of red wine, and we could cobble together something approximating penne putanesca from my bulging kitchen cabinets, without breaking the seal on either our overstocked refrigerator or our crammed-solid freezer. And when I finally cracked open both doors next morning, two hours after the power surged back on, 16 hours after it had gone off, the frozen foods were all still iceberg-hard and even the milk was still cold.

Which made it all the more suspicious to read over the next two days how all the New York butchers and pizza bakers and grocery stores and restaurants were diligently — and photogenically — following the mayor’s reflexive advice on the food front: “When in doubt, throw it out.” No restaurant I ever worked in paid much attention to sell-by dates, let alone to the absurdly wasteful idea of tossing out meat or fish just because it might possibly maybe be on the verge of going bad — or even because rats had gotten the first nibble. In restaurant school I was taught that the first salad bars in upscale markets originated as a way to turn tired produce into high-priced takeout, that stock was just a smart chef’s way of recycling carrot scrapings and onion peels. Dump borderline food? Yeah, right. Maybe if a photographer was there to record the noble act. (One of my favorite cartoons ever is of a chef standing in a card shop asking for 600 get-well greetings.)

As if to validate my cynicism, the Food City when I stopped back in the day after the disaster had an ice cream case just as packed as it was when I had abandoned my basket. The Haagen-Dazs cartons looked a little more crusted with frost, but what else is new? I figure anything I buy in Manhattan has always been through more mini-blackouts than Noelle Bush.

 

 

On the bright side, I had the good sense to disregard the petit poulets on our transistor radio the morning after and go out to see for myself if the sky was still in place. My feet automatically turned right at Columbus Avenue, toward the Friday Greenmarket on 97th Street. I couldn’t imagine there would be anyone there with all the doom and gloom and chaos on the airwaves, but the white umbrellas were immediately visible from half a block away. Not to sound soft-headed, but I couldn’t have felt more encouraged if I had seen the flag flying over Fort McHenry through the rockets’ red glare. The farmers were still there.

And they were definitely doing no dumping. At Bialas Farms, from way up north in Orange County, I told a familiar face I was surprised to see him and he just said: “We had to come. We had everything picked when the power went off, and it would have rotted if we didn’t bring it in and try to sell it. There was no traffic. And we only brought raw things, in case there was no power — people would still be able to eat.”

Tell that to the grandstanders who claimed to dump a quarter-ton of butter (which doesn’t go bad overnight at kitchen temperature as sickeningly as it does over days in an ungroomed walk-in), or 250 kinds of cheese best stored outside a chiller, or $25,000 worth of beef and pork and chicken. Funny how they sell that stuff without refrigeration in the Caribbean and Cuba, and even in France and Italy and Spain. Not so funny, though, how the Iraqis have to endlessly jury-rig cooling systems for their true perishables while they wait for their months-long brownout to end.

 

 

Dire straits should have made me more forgiving of restaurateurs’ foibles, but then it’s hard to forget the little things when the big Amex bill arrives. And so I have to admit I was more than a bit appalled at the latest “innovation” at Blue Water Grill, a restaurant I should forget exists even though it is so convenient to the Union Square Greenmarket when I have just bought my Blue Moon fish for dinner and suddenly get a craving for a cheeseburger for lunch (one reason Steve Hanson has done so well, I’m convinced, is that he knows a great burger will hide a multitude of menu sins).

At the cramped, dark table in the horrible corner under the stairs and in the waiters’ kitchen flight paths where I am inevitably seated, I was presented with a new kind of ketchup for my fries: ketchup in a Heinz squeeze bottle. Maybe it was an improvement over the glass-banging challenge you usually get, but there was something ineffably tacky about it. Not to mention unsavory: previous users’ fingerprints are harder to wipe off plastic.

I’ve been eating professionally for 20 years now, but I must still be a rube — I’m always so impressed when a restaurant cares enough to decant the ketchup into a ramekin. Then again, now that we know how rustic life can turn in minutes, maybe I should have been glad for the trailer-trash squeeze bottle. I could have been handed a few packets of fast food mess.

 

 

One more sign that the restaurant scene in Manhattan is bleak and getting bleaker: The first Chipotle Grill opened, and got major press.

It’s just a glorified McDonald’s, for Kroc’s sake.

 

Alain Ducasse had better get his new Mix open soon or New Yorkers will forget how to use silverware.

 

 

Press lunches can be deadly, and the one given by Wildwood and King Estates from Oregon at Eleven Madison was starting to show ominous symptoms — a preponderance of wine geeks at the one table, and an earnestness about the menu and pours that made it hard to chew and listen at the same time. Then the talk turned to native son James Beard and his being “asked to leave” Reed College for “inappropriate behavior.” The jaded hands in the room sort of chuckled and went on, but one fresh-faced young thing finally asked innocently: “But what did he do?” More laughs as everyone wondered: How do we tell her? Could anyone be so naive? Finally one woman burst out: “Something George Bush is only just coming to terms with.”

 

Maybe Jeremiah Tower’s graphic new book should be required reading in food-and-wine-writing school.

 

 

I seem to be one of the last internet addicts still sitting who is not seduced by FreshDirect. The idea of letting some stranger pick out my parsley and corn and veal is incomprehensible — I don’t even trust my perfect consort to decide when an avocado is guacamole-ripe.

This time of year, high season for local food, unpacking boxes from some warehouse seems even more absurd, which is why the FreshDirect truck I spotted idling on one corner of Greenwich Street in Tribeca stuck out like Reddi Wip at Payard. One block away at Duane was the Greenmarket, which has blossomed into one of the city’s best on Saturdays, with Blue Moon’s spectacular fish, De Paola’s superb turkey, Cato Corner’s excellent cheese and maybe a dozen other vendors selling everything from Korean cucumbers to wild mushrooms to the best berries. After picking up two slabs of gorgeous tuna, I ducked into the store next door to buy something frozen to keep it cold for the trek home and immediately went into supermarket-envy overdrive. That’s the cleanest, best-stocked Food Emporium I’ve ever experienced. And to top it all off, Bazzini’s just across the street has morphed into a market to rival Dean & Deluca, one that could have been airlifted in from San Francisco. Once a little nut shop, it’s now a huge and well-stocked food hall with housewares and every known condiment along with good-looking fresh fish and a great meat counter, and a coffee bar to boot.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why that FreshDirect truck was parked outside. The driver might have been doing some shopping.

 

 

The report that the White House strongarmed the EPA into putting a happy face on what it told New Yorkers about the air around Ground Zero after 9/11 was no surprise to me. I live a good five miles uptown from the WTC site, and I went to sleep with that melting-plastic smell wafting in for weeks after the attacks. Worse, I spent the better part of the second week after the devastation walking around the city for a story on how restaurants were coming back, and some of what I saw and inhaled haunts me. The creepiest sight was of the sidewalk cafe at the Odeon at Sunday brunch, exactly 11 days after the towers came down, when what we all were breathing included incinerated bodies along with mercury, lead, benzene, PCBs, asbestos and fiberglass. Just a few blocks upwind from the huge smoldering crater, people were tucking into their mimosas and egg white omelets without a care in the air. What, us worry? Our misleaders told us to get out and spend.

 

 

Mystery of the month: Who took out the hit on farmed salmon?

I gave up on the stuff quite some time ago, after reading one too many horror stories in the superior British press about the creepy risks it poses to the environment, let alone to health. Now that the wild salmon that used to be sold only in cans is available fresh nationally all the time, why would anyone who could afford clean, lean, supremely flavorful fish settle for anything less?

But lately, to read the sudden rash of Live at 5-level hysteria everywhere, you would think pink fish is the scariest thing since that other salmon word (-ella). What’s really odd is that the wild fish is winning the PR battle. Wild foods tend not to have lobbies — in fact, the Wall Street Journal just ran a depressing story on how Karl Rove stepped in to increase the irrigation flow from the Klamath River in Oregon for vote-buying reasons, leaving 30,000 wild salmon dead in the low water. Maybe fish farmers just didn’t pay their GOP dues this year.

Down the line, what will be more interesting to see is how many of these save-the-seas food crusaders give up smoked salmon along with the easily avoided cheap fresh stuff from the supermarket. As far as I can tell, very little of what’s in top markets today was made with pristine and politically correct wild fish. And what’s a bagel eater to do?

No one is also talking about another issue: more and more, farmed seafood in general is being promoted as an alternative to the overfished species. Salmon is certainly not the only trouble in the sea. What else should we be worrying about? For now, farmed salmon is this week’s transfatty acid — it’s selling newspapers and magazines and TV ads. The only good news is that the nutrition nazis have issued this indictment, and now their ADD insanity can move on.

 

I never thought the day would come when I would long for the old Balducci’s in Greenwich Village. I hated everything about the place — the crowding, the pretension, the prices, the attitude, the escargot posing as cashiers, the prices. Everything, that is, but the stock. It was the Alice’s Restaurant of food shops in a city with no shortage of superb markets: you could get anything you wanted, and always in camera-ready condition.

I was mourning it all last week while on a hunt for Smithfield ham for a recipe for a magazine piece — not a whole ham, which I can buy in any butcher shop in Chinatown, but a pound or so sliced. Balducci’s would have had it without fail.

Zabar’s was out. Jefferson Market doesn’t carry it; Fairway either. Garden of Eden tried to sell me a fatty chunk of what was clearly labeled Missouri country ham even after I pointed out that Smithfield is in Virginia. And Citarella, as always, topped them all. The appetizing clerk just looked at me with insouciance worthy of the worst of Balducci’s and said: “Never heard of it.” It was enough to put me off Dean & Deluca.

 

Things must be looking dismal over at the Four Seasons. First a famous magazine editor keeled over with a stroke at lunch and later died, bringing the kind of publicity no restaurant should ever suffer. And now Gourmet is running a dual promotion that reeks more of Midwestern openness than Manhattan exclusivity. I just got a mailing signed by the magazine’s publisher saying: “Come in for lunch or dinner between now and September 20, mention you received this letter (and that Alex & Julian invited you) and enjoy a complimentary bubbling glass of Moet Chandon Rose upon your arrival.”

Then again, maybe things aren’t so bleak, for the restaurant anyway. At least once a year I usually get a postcard from the Four Seasons offering me a whole free bottle if I come in for dinner without mentioning Gourmet.

 

 

Imagine if Orwell wrote for Zagat. You won’t have to try very hard if you look at how the Barbetta “review” has changed over the last few years.

 

A Philadelphia friend tipped me off when he emailed me wondering if the geriatric Italian was worth risking for a birthday lunch in the Theater District for another friend. “This friend seems to like overembellished places,” he typed, “but an old Zagat’s noted: dull, pompous, overpriced” etc. In warning him off, I flipped through the latest little maroon gazetteer out of curiosity and found Barbetta is now described as “romantic,” “genteel,” “grand style” etc.

Either the place has undergone a transformation not seen since Mamma Leone’s had the grace to shut down, or I’ve just cracked Zagat’s euphemism code. Who knew “Jurassic Park” really meant “corner of paradise?”

 

New York magazine is gossiping about a little trendlet of sorta famous wives being rescued after they nearly choked their last on chunks of protein, one on steak and the other on a meatball. The natural first question is whether the Atkins Diet was involved. The second is if dead weight counts as a loss.

 

 

The other night I dreamed that an uncharacteristically savage Drew Nieporent had me pinned to a bar and was ranting that there was “nothing clean” about anything I had ever written. It was pretty freaky, but nothing like opening up the newest issue of Sunset magazine and seeing a maniacally grinning Donald Trump with his bizarre hair mat waving a slice of pizza in a two-page ad for GE Monogram kitchens. On one level, it was refreshing to see an advertiser acknowledging that obscenely expensive kitchens are used mostly for eating takeout standing up. On another, you have to wonder what kind of company would think there was anything remotely alluring about a vision even my sick subconscious would never pull out of my mental drain.

 

 

I think it was Calvin Trillin who warned, “Never eat in a place called Mom’s.” I have a whole list of more subtle signals that you’re headed for trouble in a restaurant, starting with the innocuous — a help wanted sign outside — and ending with the unsettling — a waiter and a manager in a fistfight at the door. But there’s one I can never seem to remember until it’s too late.

I learned it all over again on a stopover in Providence on the way to Cape Cod. Cafe Nuovo was our lunch destination, a place I had found in my restaurant database and then in repeated raves online. It turned out to be off the sterile lobby of a sleek new office tower, but it was right on the river and the menu looked promising. So we plunged in.

And we stood for many long minutes at the receptionist’s desk while no one even approached us. Finally my consort stepped around to the bar and asked if we might be seated. Grudgingly, we were, at a table where the “linens” looked as if they had not been washed since Hamilton was dead-center on the ten-dollar bill (synthetics may repel food, but they can’t ward it off forever). The one waitress still working went into major ditz mode when she finally showed up to rattle off the specials. And the food was on the same level, starting with crab and avocado maki rolls that tasted of neither crab nor avocado, let alone maki (who knew rice could go stale?) Bob, usually the diplomatic palate at the table, was starting to accuse me of making him eat “crap,” and then we had to beg for coffee and the check. Refill? You must be kidding.

 

Back in the car, both of us hit on what had gone so wrong. The guy we had to prod to acknowledge us was busy sorting bundles of money. And in a plastic world, dollars should never matter more than diners. If you walk in and someone is too busy counting cash to welcome the prospect of taking in more, you might want to walk right back out.

 

 

If anyone believes “The Restaurant” is really a reality show, let alone the “documentary” the NYTimes labeled it, I have some yellowcake I’d like to sell. . . .

 

Speaking of Rocco in Wonderland, it’s interesting that when he went looking for a stage set for his infomercial, he had his pick of properties once presided over by the last media It chef, Matthew Kenney. The curiously made-over DiSpirito couldn’t get the Canteen hole in Soho and settled for the Commune space in the Flatiron. If he finds himself with a sequel, maybe he can take over the Commissary on the Upper East Side. Or the one in Portland, Maine. If he doesn’t, maybe he can consider what happens to chefs who succumb to the lure of the camera and vain overexposure.

 

 

Dear Miss Manners: A casual friend is part-owner of a thriving restaurant I’ve always believed deserves to thrive. My pavlovian side has led me to order the pastrami reuben dozens of times since the place opened, and it’s always been the same: meaty meat, sturdy rye, chewy cheese. And then one afternoon I stop in and get a sandwich that looks like the good old days but is so unsatisfying that I wind up obsessing on the Lurch-like waiter strutting around the room stroking his oily face and slicking back his slick hair and looking as if he spends most of his life in front of a mirror even though it’s been a good 30 years since what looked back was, shall we say, savory.

So how do I tactfully tell my smart, generous, sweet-tempered, gifted-cook friend whom I owe in a half-dozen ways that his product is slipping? How do I say the cheese tasted processed and the bread tasted more white than rye and the whole thing was flung together with less care than a Whopper?

Do I attempt a friendship-corroding intervention with denial the inevitable first response? (My cooks aren’t cheating on me!) Or do I just scratch another restaurant off the list of 15,000 in the barely clothed city and hope my friend has the luck of the Carnegie Deli, where the crowds keep coming long after the quality has left the building?

 

 

Once in a while something happens that makes you believe there may be a restaurant god after all. The closing of 222 on West 79th Street was the latest for me. If ever a place deserved to die, it was this poorly designed, pretentious joke.

We ate there exactly once. It was stupefyingly expensive, and nothing about the decor could let you forget you were trapped in a warren-like basement in a decidedly uncool section of the city. The appetizers and main courses were wiped off my mental hard drive about 700 meals ago, but I still can’t get over the dessert. It was some kind of pudding, and it was, like so much on the menu, strange. Not interesting. Not ambitious. Just strange. And of course my consort had to take the bait and order it. The waiter immediately warned him it was bad. He didn’t listen. But when it came, it was beyond bad. It had been chilling, unordered, for so long it no longer tasted of anything but refrigerator. It was also $10 or $12, at time when those were double-whammy numbers.

We asked to have it taken off the bill, even offering to let the waiter taste why it was so offensive. He refused and sent the officious owner over to inform us that “that is how the chef intends it.”

 

There are many reasons why Nice Matin, just across the street, is jammed every night even with a lemon of a burger. And if it’s what finally put a stake through the liver of 222, long may it run.

 

How not to promote a restaurant for private parties: Send out a press release littered with grammatical and punctuation errors, one that refers repeatedly to the “dinning” room. Spell the party coordinator’s name two different ways. Be sure to enclose a cheesy tiara made out of gold cardboard and silver tinfoil.

After a class hustle like that, who wouldn’t want to book a dinner for 100 people at “casual elegant” Gotham Bar & Grill for $45,000 plus tax and tip?

 

Lightly sauteed is one of the most annoying descriptions any menu writer can type. What does lightly mean, exactly? Barely? Not too heavily? With very littlel butter? It ranks right up with “touch of cream” in denial and idiocy. The literal definition of sauteing, after all, is “frying quickly in a little fat.”

Now Hudson’s on the Bend, down in Austin, has come up with a whole new bastardization. One dish in its cooking classes is described as asparagus wrapped with salmon, crusted with herbed panko and “deep sauteed.” Figures that the phrase would turn up in Texas, home of the forked tongue in chief. They can twist language till cows show up at the “ranch,” but fried is fried.

 

 

On the fear-of-food front, it figures that a huge E. coli outbreak in ground beef would happen just when people were getting worked up to a proper frenzy over farmed salmon, and just when the tom-tom beat against industrial pork was starting to be heard. It only made me realize that even as salmon has become the new chicken, no one ever cleaned up the henhouse. People are still buying foul birds from the supermarket. The government is still looking the other way in the slaughterhouses. Look for big business’s answer to the whole problem to creep beyond the meat case. They’re already irradiating beef and selling it with deceptive labels. Will Babe of Smithfield and that pink chicken of the sea be next?

 

 

Pace is finally getting its new cooking sauces into supermarkets, for cooks who would never think to coat their baked fish in good old salsa. My favorite of the four varieties, in name only, is the “roasted ranchero.” Hope they don’t try to export it to one of those countries where they can translate the label: “cooked cattleman.”

 

 

Was it a caption or was it dummy type? The line under the photograph with the city’s preeminent restaurant review reads: “Roman Holiday: San Domenico serves pastas, risottos and such . . ..” I can’t wait till some other multistarred joints are re-reviewed. Le Bernardin? “Serves fish and seafood and such.” Nobu? “Serves sushi and sashimi and such.” Probably reads well in the heartland, though. Where they have Chipotle Grills already.

 

 

The July Harper’s has a seriously funny exchange of letters between Coca-Cola’s ad idiots and a former English teacher outraged over the slogan on the Dasani water bottle: “Treat Yourself Well. Everyday.” As he points out, the last word should be two; otherwise it means “Treat Yourself Well. Ordinary.” I can only hope the poor guy doesn’t see the new ads in pidgin for Bisquick (“Bursting with more cheese-garlic”) or for Jack Daniel’s EZ “Marinader.” Both may be, as the Coke correspondents would put it, “more impactful.” But, like something else they claim is not in the dictionary (“words with suffixes”), neither attempted usage is the way Webster’s would see it.

 

 

Speaking of food, lies and media, I thank my cynical-reader friend down south near Philadelphia for pointing out this job title at McDonald’s: “healthy lifestyles director.” Turns out the beleaguered company also has a “director of social responsibility.” Is Rove with his bag of euphemisms moonlighting for another evil empire?

 

And, speaking of evil empires, the most disheartening trend on the fast food front is that McDonald’s is reporting huge interest in its salads now that Ol’ Blue Eyes With a Conscience has signed on to dress them. One article I read actually reported that mothers were dragging their kids in for their first Happy Meals now that mom had the promise of Newman’s Own sustenance as well. As a major consumer of health scare stories, I’d be very wary of salads in a fast food joint. Some of the most terrifying Shigella Mary outbreaks have involved unwashed raw greens handled by unwashed gloves attached to minimum-wage bodies with no health care. Personally, I’d rather take the cooked E. coli and run.

 

 

“Greenmarket” menus are like bad pennies: they just keep turning up all over town. And this summer, as always, they have as much in common with what’s actually at Union Square as Eli’s produce does with Gristede’s. The new Westville in Greenwich Village is the latest to snooker restaurant writers with visions of the chef out at dawn gathering vegetables so local they’re still dew-kissed. As a frustrated Greenmarket junkie, I can tell you there may be tomatoes and honeydews on the plate, but right now the Jersey/Hudson cupboard is pretty bare. With all the rain, I’m still settling for asparagus and radishes and waiting for the first Tristar strawberries. So exactly how does the early chef get the corn? Maybe by fooling all of the critics all of the time.

 

 

WD50 gets the award, not just the nomination, for most peculiarly pretentious wine service. When we ordered a bottle off the by-the-glass-or-by-the-bottle list rather than the much pricier “real” list, the Levis-wearing waitress disappeared, then came back and set down the same cheap but durable glasses we use for everyday. Then she brought the bottle, showed it, popped it open and poured a taste. Finally she disappeared again, only to return with a carafe in a stainless-steel wine cooler and the empty bottle. At some point the empty vanished. Was all this fuss so the $34 Kerner Novacella could breathe? So a few glasses could be siphoned off at the bar? So we wouldn’t be embarrassed not to have sprung for a $64 bottle instead of what was clearly plonk? Or just to divert us from all the diners sneaking out their cellphones to send and receive despite the request on the menu to let us eat in peace?

 

 

For once McDonald’s is bypassing a tie-in with what could be the feel-good movie of the summer — Carr’s is doing the promotion for “Seabiscuit.” Guess I’m not the only one who thinks horse flesh might be more appetizing than whatever’s in a Big Mac.

 

 

Until he went Italian and then Mexican, Steve Hanson seemed to specialize in restaurants that all felt pretty much the same. The burger, the crab cake, the chairs, the wines by the glass and especially the scene are familiar whether you’re wedged in at Isabella’s or at Park Avalon. But lately I’ve noticed what really makes them all alike: I have never had the same waiter twice at any of them.

And after a particularly service-free dinner at Ocean Grill, on Columbus Avenue, I’m actually wondering if BR Guest just puts an endless succession of job candidates on the floor for a tryout so that it never has to hire anyone.

The whole meal was an exercise in ineptitude by the waiter, who did not have a pen, could not remember the temperature for the special salmon and simply vanished after taking our orders. All that would be forgivable, maybe even predictable. But what got jaws dropping was how he poured the wine: he went around the table and carefully dumped one-quarter of the bottle into each glass. Then he proudly announced: “There, that looks like they’re all even.”

But even is not the point. And if the idea was to sell another bottle, and fast, off that greedy list, maybe someone should have trained him to pop by once in a while to take the order.

 

 

A couple of Oregon friends taught me an excellent mantra: “Free is a very good price.” But it has a flip side.

Consider Cape Cod potato chips, which have always been the higher-priced fat. I’ve never thought they were particularly good, but I was happy to grab a bag at the Barnstable fair on Cape Cod when I came to a booth where two guys were handing them out by the thousands for free. Then at lunch the next day, I spotted the same little bag alongside the lobster roll and coleslaw at the Flying Bridge in Falmouth. Aside from making the meal look American Airlines-worthy, the packaging sent a clear message that name counts more than contents. And it left me wondering: If the price really only covers packaging and branding, why pay ever again?

 

 

At the risk of sounding like an ancient aunt recounting the blizzards of yore, I remember when the only tortillas in New York came in a can. Mexican ingredients were alien when I moved here (a big chef once confessed to me that he thought cilantro “tastes like Zest”), and about the best you could hope for eating out was not to get alcohol poisoning at some bogus place like Caramba. Now there’s a chile emporium on just about every corner not befouled by a Starbucks, and every chef looking to cash in on marked-up margaritas is moving into Mexican.

Having been weaned on tortillas in Arizona, I’m happy for the salsa tsunami. I just wish finding real Mexican was as easy as stumbling over designer knockoffs.

The new Suenos, in an eerie little alleyway in Chelsea, is case in point. Apparently every food commentator and critic who got the press release bought into the concept of Sue Torres elevating Mexican food through fusion the way Jean-Georges Vongerichten did Vietnamese and Floyd Cardoz is still trying to do with Indian. But eating there in the first week the doors were open, I could only think this particular wheel didn’t need to be reinvented. Some of the food was good, but what I wouldn’t give for a real enchilada, not tricked up, with that wine list.

 

 

The tabloid restaurant critic I read just for the strained similes has topped herself yet again: “… Scallops are like babies: We like them plump.” Grilled, too? Eat for yourself.

 

 

File under thank the government for small favors: Now we’re going to know exactly how many trans fatty acids are in our processed food. And I notice we’ve all gotten downright svelte since we started reading how many calories we were consuming in our Haagen-Dazs, and how much fat.

In related food police news, Kraft has announced its “obesity initiatives.” One is rather radical: a single-serving package will henceforth contain only one serving.

Now if only the same fear of lawyers (food is the next tobacco, after all) would infect the people who package all the tortilla chips. Try to find a 7-ounce bag anymore. Try to find a 2-ounce bag that isn’t slicked up with a Twinkie’s worth of caloric flavorings. I went looking the other night and came home with a bag big enough to service a small restaurant. Somehow, I kinda doubt knowing the trans fatty acids is going to help. Especially since the metric system is as mysterious as it ever was. Is 2 grams like 15 degrees Centigrade? I’d love to meet the lobbyist who sold Washington on talking in Old European units in a country hooked on Imperial measurements. Imagine what damage could have been done using apothecaries’ weights (8 scruples per serving, say).

 

Not to belabor the point with a Doritos hangover, but no news report I read ever mentioned the obvious answer to the whole problem: don’t eat processed food.

 

 

One more reason not to believe everything you read in the New York papers: The Daily News has declared the Union Square Greenmarket passe. The hot shoppers, it “reports,” are buying from FreshDirect now. Local, seasonal food is so last summer? It’s really cooler to buy peaches and corn without seeing them or touching them? You couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?

 

 

If I had thrown money at Krispy Kreme stock on a Monday, after reading Fortune magazine’s embarrassingly gushy ode to a company that is clearly spreading like SARS, I would have been suffering fiscal indigestion that Friday, when the Wall Street Journal reported a conference scheduled for Boston called “Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic.” All the grease and glaze must have gone to the Fortune writer’s head. He forgot to type one word, and it isn’t litigation. It’s diabetes.

As a mistress of hyperbole myself, I almost hate to point out the other crippling flaw in the story. Fortune says everyone loves Krispy Kreme except “nutritionists, Dunkin’ Donuts franchisees and compulsive liars.” In reality there’s another category who revile this white-trash fodder: anyone who has ever tasted a real homemade doughnut, hot out of the brown paper bag where it’s been tossed with a coating of cinnamon and sugar to transcend any oil. My mom made them from scratch all the time when I was growing up. Hers were yeast-raised, like Fortune’s favorite, and deep-fried, like FF’s. But they were to Krispy Kremes what Crisco is to Plugra. Every one was airy but sturdy, heady and greaseless and a healthy dark brown, not the color of 300-pound thighs like a certain brand I could name. When you bit into one, even after it had cooled, you knew you were tasting excellence you could never buy in a million strip malls.

There’s a reason savvy investors should be looking past the too-sweet forecasts and thinking insulin and syringes these days.

 

 

As a kitchen Luddite who has avoided the Cuisinart like the monkeypox, I always suspected electric can openers can lead to brain death. Now Williams-Sonoma has proven me right: it’s selling a “can strainer,” a $15 gadget to slip over an opened tin to separate solids from liquids. My first question: Can’t you just use the lid as a strainer? And my second: Williams-Sonoma shoppers eat from cans?

 

 

Tom Colicchio’s new ‘Wichcraft is the oddest new food dispensary to open in New York all year. It actually makes Craft seem voluptuous.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think you’d walked into a hair salon, and a badly designed one at that. Aside from a minimalist drink case, and a couple of scones and pastries behind a glass barrier on the counter, there is not a sign of anything resembling anything edible. The kitchen is open, but the walls come up just far enough to block any view of cooking, or sighting of ingredients. The day I stopped in, there were no aromas, no sounds, nothing to indicate a rather sensual activity might be the point of the place. It’s almost anti-food. And I guess it’s no surprise that the sandwich I chose off the menu wall — braised flank steak with onions, peppers and Gruyere on grilled country bread — was about the most flavor-free assemblage ever foisted on me outside an airplane.

 

 

Now that Bloomberg has been so successful at wiping out smoking that you can’t get to a menu posted on a new restaurant for the clot of women greedily inhaling in front of it, maybe he can tackle a more insidious health hazard: din. A.O.C. on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village was just the latest place determined to break the sound barrier with bad music — the bartender had the stereo amped up to Meadowlands level in a space with one bathroom and about a dozen tables. It was the second meal we’d suffered in a week where the idea seemed to be to keep the staff energized at the patrons’ aural expense.

Luckily, the food and service came through. A Venezuelan chef who trained in France is in top form in a kitchen the size of a home entertainment center: the Flintstonian veal chop was juicy perfection with a lavish mound of fava-level vegetables; the duck breast was undeniably duck. The concept is angled toward A.O.C. or D.O.C. ingredients, like the Manchego on our shaved artichoke salad, but the O on the short wine list stands for ordinary. If only we could have heard the waiter, I might know more about the chef’s and owner’s resumes. But then that may be why the music was pounding: Even after asking, I didn’t realize the veal special was $29 — $7 more than the duck on the menu — until the check arrived.

 

 

My nominee for false labeling of the month goes to the “five-napkin” burger at Nice Matin. It comes with cheese, onions, aioli and plum tomatoes, which sounds drippy enough even with ridiculous radicchio substituting for nice juicy lettuce. But cooked “medium” the way the waiter insists, it comes so dry (after a 40-minute wait) that the meat is like a dog’s fresh chew toy. It wouldn’t mess up a single Wetnap.

 

 

With Mexican restaurants opening seemingly every hour, I’ve been letting hope triumph over experience. I’ll try anything — even Flaco’s Tacos in Greenwich Village. I knew the guys behind it also run the mediocre City Crab and the grim Duke’s Barbecue, but then I’m so bad all I need is guacamole and a dream.

I should have fled when I saw the tequila list was almost as long as the menu (translation: this food is meant for sopping), or at least when I noticed that some dishes were brazen knockoffs of Steve Hanson’s two Dos Caminos (Mexican chopped salad is not something you’re going to come across at a restaurant worth its poblanos). Otherwise the menu was so dispiriting that I actually settled for “taco soup,” which sounded like at least a distant cousin of tortilla soup, and chorizo flautas. The former could have been ladled up off a steam table in an abandon-all-hope cafeteria (ground beef in watery broth with a little cheese and a few chips), and the latter was filled with Mexican mystery meat, apparently untouched by seasoning. The kiss of muerte, though, was the toothpick I bit into in the center of one. For once I would have preferred to have found a hair.

 

 

Just back from Italy, I have a new appreciation of the risk in relying on the kindness of locals. I should have learned on my first trip to New Orleans years ago when I was steered to a restaurant that could have been airlifted from Manhattan, with the same all-over-the-map menu I could get at home. It may have been the hottest place in town for the townspeople, but I had come to New Orleans to eat New Orleans food.

Which is why I spent my last meal in Palermo kicking myself at I Grilli, suggested by a native who had set out the most dazzling dinner in his apartment the night before. The place was definitely an insider’s deep secret, hidden away on the second floor of an apartment building like a paladar in Havana. The candlelit room was gorgeous, the service as personable as it was professional. But I knew we were in for an out-of-Palermo experience when the bread basket arrived with imported water crackers instead of the great Sicilian bread and, even worse, when the antipasto platter proved to be three ramekins of prissy dips: Gorgonzola, basil mayonnaise and tuna in a sort of salsa.

We stupidly skipped the pasta course, since we had already learned Palermo people choose only two out of three when confronted with antipasto, primi and secondi. And so we wound up our last dinner in that singular food city with plates of overwrought fish that would have seemed fresh in France in 1985. Mine was spargo, which I had seen in the markets, but it was wrapped in lettuce and drowning in a heavy sauce with supremely un-Italian pink peppercorns; Bob’s was tuna cooked leathery and smothered in a spinach sauce with more of those silly dated peppercorns. And with markets overflowing with favas and artichokes and asparagus, we both got carrots. Bitter carrots at that.

The night before, our own private restaurant adviser had presented quintessential caponata, octopus salad, risotto with zucchini and shrimp, wondrous spiced chicken and a table full of Sicilian pastries. At lunch, at Santandrea near the main market, we had shared an antipasto of panelle, mozzarella en carozza, fried broccoli, fried ricotta, fresh anchovies and caponata with baby artichokes. I had had spectacular risotto with super-tender squid, shrimp, mussels and asparagus; Bob had had bucatini with sardines, with toasted bread crumbs to sprinkle on instead of cheese. We were blown away. But then we didn’t have to eat that stuff every day. If you did, I suppose, gimmicky fish would be just what the chef ordered.

 

My other insight from Italy is why it’s so hard for me to sell the trips I plan and pay for myself. The freeloaders are everywhere. A “press” trip for a few old-face names was winding down in Calabria, just a short hop from Sicily, when I got to Palermo. And in Trieste, a massive table of junketeers who included a very familiar white-haired restaurant icon (or one of his clones) was clogging the most famous place the night I ate there. Now I have to compete with 16 of them?

 

 

Stephen Glass has nothing on this guy: The June issue of Food Arts features a fascinating attempt at rehabilitation by the most overextended restaurateur in town through much of the late Nineties. He swears he has learned from “the debt burdens I sustained” that were “too much for the businesses to bear.” And of course he shamelessly cites 9/11 as the trigger for his downfall. It would be a little easier to take seriously if the photo of the allegedly humbled but wiser entrepreneur were not one of those annoying glam shots from back in the days when he seemed to be doing more modeling than cooking. And it would be less incredible if he didn’t end his confession with a litany of all the red-hot new irons he has in the blazing fire. Investors must be born every minute.

 

 

So who was that porcine character wedged into a high-visibility booth at Ouest, destroying my appetite by lasciviously gnawing the last bits of greasy meat off the huge bones left from his massive dinner, as if he would not see food again for another week? Oh, right. The self-appointed arbiter of the finest in New York dining opportunities.

 

 

Better side-chair shrinks than I will have to analyze this: One critic of the female persuasion finds the lobster har gow at 66 “so attractive you are more inclined to pin them on your jacket than put them in your mouth;” another is so smitten with the fragrance of the lamb ravioli with orange and sage at Nice Matin that she actually says “you’ll be tempted to take a pillow home to put in your undie drawer.” Personally I’ve never been tempted to wear my food in or out. And I hate to think what they suggest “you” should do with sausage.

 

 

Just back from two weeks in Australia and a week in jumbo jet lag, I have one more theory on why restaurants in New York are so timid and tame these days. If a trend rises in a kitchen and no one’s there to evaluate it, how does anyone hear about it?

In New York, a couple of 800-pound gorillas with a flawed gazetteer (does no one really eat at Nicole’s, for instance?) have pushed all the restaurant guidebooks clean out of competition. In Sydney, the first bookstore I walked into had a choice of serious food Baedekers with full sentences and critical smarts.

I had landed in Oz with endless recommendations on where to indulge in my all-consuming interest, but I would have been lost if I had had no way to sort through them. What I used for cross-referencing were not just musty compilations of newspaper or magazine reviews but fresh and jazzy guides, written with wit and savvy. Even as I picked up more “live” tips, I was able to winnow down the places where the most adventurous chefs might be cooking. No traveler to New York would ever be so lucky.

The two guides I chose were both produced by newspapers with superb (and hyper-newsy) food sections, the Morning Herald in Sydney and the Age in Melbourne. But neither relied on a couple of overworking critics recycling madly. Instead, they sent SWAT teams out to award chef’s hats like stars; restaurants that get three toques have each been visited at least three times by different reviewers. Both also gave point ratings, which I deciphered as I ate (14 out of 20 as often meant “beware” as it did “go”) and which were another incentive for chefs to stay on their stylish toes. And while both carried advertising, neither pulled any punches — we skipped a place in Melbourne that was highly recommended by a top chef because the Age made it clear that it would be like dining at Le Cirque (you’re nobody till Sirio shuns you).

Neither of these books ranks the “most popular” places, which may be their true virtue. You can still get burned in Sydney, and badly in Melbourne, but you’re better off than you would be at No. 1 With a Worn-Out Bullet down by Union Square.

 

The Purple Spleen for most craven restaurant promotion has to go to Guastavino’s, which is sending out cards touting its brunch with a vintage photo inscribed “gather the troops.” With Americans still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, why not lift a mimosa to MREs?

 

 

Balitore is one of the most enticing spaces to open all year. Too bad they forgot to hire a chef. The light fixtures, the arty horse photos, the gray walls, the bathrooms and the general feel are all sleek and right. The service is extraordinary for what’s essentially an Upper East Side scene bar (Gabriel Byrne is one of the owners). One waiter came over to recite the short wine list since the printed one was not ready and then came back to give us a taste of the Firestone sauvignon blanc we chose for $26. The busman was more attentive than the best waiter anywhere else, keeping our glasses topped off rather than dumping the whole bottle in in three gushers, keeping the table tended and thanking us just profusely enough as we walked out.

But a great room and staff do not a restaurant make. The menu is a bland hodgepodge, the kind of rote list that bizarrely makes you lunge for the tamest offerings: a burger, Caesar salad and macaroni and cheese. The burger was small and dry, the Caesar the same. But the penne, allegedly made with Irish Cheddar, was more like chunky cream soup, baked in an absurd deep cup that pretty much guaranteed it would still be too bubbling-hot to eat long after we’d lost interest. And considering the place is named for a town in Ireland, you would expect something more evocative than “Irish fries” that are just poor relations of McDonald’s. The place has been home to a succession of losers, but if this one fails, the owners shouldn’t blame the location.

 

 

Another illusion shattered: My goal on dropping out of college in Tucson was just to travel around the country, living and working in 50 states, never settling down until I had to be cremated. I only made it to five before getting waylaid in Manhattan, but that silly idea still infected me with serious envy of the distaff side of the nation’s most famous mobile food team. I’m sure she had to swallow her share of roadkill, and she made me very aware of the bottom-line risk of riding rather than walking between meals. But what a life: another day, another diner.

So it’s a little unnerving to read the excerpt from her requisite midlife-rebirth book, posted on the AARP web site. Describing her depression at age 52, the icon of the Interstate writes: “I spent my days walking around the house . . . it was hard to find the energy to get dressed, and quite frankly, there was no pressing need. As a writer, I worked at home.”

Wait. Who was packing away all that pork and all those pies for Gourmet and NPR, not to mention sending all those weekly “postcards” to epicurious? I know from crippling depression, but still. Next someone’s going to tell me Chef Boy-Ar-Dee was not Italian.

 

 

We had just suffered an abysmal lunch at Pigalle: lost-in-translation service; a salade “gourmande” with exactly five shreds of desiccated duck confit; coffee too bitter to finish. And then the waiter brought the bill with the inevitable promotional card mapping the owners’ other restaurants, prompting my friend who was paying to check them off: “I hate that place. And that place. And that place, too.” Guess that’s why they never give you the cross-marketing card with the menu. And why Godiva doesn’t advertise its Campbell’s ownership.

 

 

Lessons from Moomba? The first I heard of Capitale was when a friend came for turkey and Calvados last Thanksgiving and spent half the afternoon bitching about having to call the police every night over the noise and frenzy across the street from her apartment (and that’s saying something: her own parties can make a club look like a retirement home). Now I can only guess that the public nuisances have inevitably moved on to the next hot scene. To read the coverage lately, you’d think Capitale was born yesterday, as a decidedly adult restaurant. And maybe there is a way to beat the club curse — although the idea of a $45 entree on the Bowery makes me want to reach for the Ecstasy.

 

 

Australia is not a tipping society, but I found myself leaving 20 percent often because the service was the antithesis of what you get in New York even in good restaurants. Since I’ve been home, though, I’ve been tipping like the stereotypical female cheapskate: 10 percent at Blue Fin, where our wine arrived after our (long-delayed) entrees and the waiter almost spit when we tried to get his attention, and 12 percent at Mama Mexico, where the entryway was hung with not one but three huge “diamond awards” from the “American Institute of Hospitality” and where the waiter, when asked what white wine he had, said, “Merlot and Chardonnay — I’m not sure which is which,” and then never brought either.

 

 

Maybe Oz restaurants are flush because they’ve moved beyond hustling water. At Wildfire in Sydney, the waiter had barely handed me a menu when he was asking whether I’d like bread. Sure. Plain or flavored? Plain’s fine. Too bad I didn’t know that either way it would cost me $7.50. And a few herbs might have made that pathetic loaf palatable. (Mark Miller should hang up his chilies for his part in the whole overdesigned, underachieving tourist snare.)

As much as I dreaded the six-day flight to Sydney, it turned out that only the food on Qantas was torture — penne bolognese should not conjure thoughts of intestinal distress, and salmon should be slightly more succulent than the tray table. Luckily, I had the ideal antidote: Robert Hughes’ “The Fatal Shore.” His descriptions of “salt horse” and moldy beef and other delights foisted on the first Australia travelers certainly put those imitation MRE’s in perspective. I recommend it over Ambien for anyone eating across the International Date Line.

It’s not over till the dumb chef bombs: In the first act, a charming chef, poised to be the Nigella of Oz, recommends another chef working in the most theatrical setting in the whole wide country, at the Sydney Opera House. We naturally swallow his advice. (And the guidebook’s.)

In the second act, we get tickets to a play and reservations for dinner beforehand at the shrine, Guillaume at Bennelong. We stop for lunch at another three-chef-recommended, five-toque-worthy joint, but we barely swallow. We want to save room for the gastronomic pyrotechnics.

In the last act, just as the sun is setting out the cathedral-height windows overlooking Sydney Harbor, we walk into the world’s most spectacular nursing home. The prix-fixe menu is obviously designed for denture wearers: boring fish, boring osso bucco, boring risotto. Even the steak with bearnaise is pre-sliced for easier gumming. Qantas would be thrilled with the salmon terrine.

Dejected, we ask the headwaiter what the deal is as we pay the absurd check. And he snootily informs us that Star Chef believes that what matters is that his 170 or so covers get to their red plush seats in time, and so he keeps his best food for later, after the curtains go up in the Opera House. “If someone wants to try his real menu, they’ll come back,” he adds.

Yeah, just the way we would rush back to hear Christian McBride in a jazz club if he’d bungled Muzak in the elevator.

Slogan of the fortnight: “No Stars. No Bucks. Just Awesome Coffee. (Cafe in Sydney, where the evil green logo is inescapable.)

On our last night in Sydney, my consort turned down dinner at a new friend’s home because we had long-arranged reservations at Tetsuya’s, the Charlie Trotter’s French Laundry of Australia. We wound up facing down 18 little assemblages of overhyped, overhandled food in a stuffy room, and we’re both wondering what we missed.

I can’t remember any dinner outside the Beard House where I so wanted to yell: Make it stop. We actually skipped the third and last dessert out of stupefaction. Until then, it was one dainty dish after another, each element sedulously explained by the waiter again after the whole meal was forecast in exhausting detail by the headwaiter when we sat down. Because the entire restaurant was facing the same food in the same order, it was hard to get excited when the scallop carpaccio with foie gras arrived with great ceremony after other tables were well on their way to the roasted squab with buckwheat and mushroom risotto.

We also took the “wine option,” with half-glasses poured with each course for $65Australian extra apiece, which was not the smart decision it was at Trotter’s. About halfway through the ordeal, a waiter came by to say the kitchen was waiting for us to catch up on our wine. “If you were university students,” he added, “I’d advise you to slam it back.”

So how was the food? Suffice it to say that I remember the green salad served with Tetsuya’s signature ocean trout confit the best. A couple of his creations were quite good, like the scallop carpaccio, and a sliver of venison rolled around foie gras with rosemary and honey, and a little shotglass of beet and blood orange puree. But it was all too much, with too few of those fusillades of flavor that brilliant chefs can send out without even trying. I actually saw the butter presented with the bread as an omen: it was tricked up not only with black truffles but with Parmesan. A chef who would gild the tuber just doesn’t know when to stop.

Boycott Best Cellars: I walked out after a Frenchwoman walked in to protest the inflammatory red-and-blue sign in the Lexington Avenue store. As the clerks pointed out, the “Boycott French Wines” headline did end in a question mark. But the fine print was more craven than the display type. After singing the praises of French varietals, the store went on to list more politically correct alternatives from other countries for buyers who just had to take a stand. Talk about having your brioche and eating it, too.

Chef shilling is one of the more interesting sideshows in food. I thought the pastry chef with an affinity for filo who endorsed Crisco — butter-flavored Crisco at that — was the lowest of the low. But now I see the newly hirsute Rocco DiSpirito teamed up with Rockport for a day: Try on shoes at Macy’s, get a tin of his “custom-made” spices. Maybe it’s because I sold shoes in one phase of my life, but there’s something queasy-making about the combination of feet and food. And souls must be really cheap these days.

It’s hard to imagine, considering supermarket salsa was involved, but Rosa Mexicano across from Lincoln Center pulled off the biggest bait-and-switch I’ve experienced in eons. The press party for the new Pace line was actually classier than my lunch three days later.

Usually I can tell launch parties are not real life — I didn’t rush back to Daniel after eating frozen food there, or to Danube after being introduced to a supermarket magazine there. But Rosa M. made me want to try the non-Pace experience, partly because of the great service and dramatic room but more because a new culinary director from Fonda San Miguel in Texas was introduced and he was serving duck “zarapes” in a habanero-yellow pepper sauce that were sensational. I should have been more suspicious when he translated the name as “the blankets Mexicans pull over their shoulders.”

When I went back, it was the same restaurant, different planet. The hostess kept me waiting 15 minutes. The wines by the glass were listed orally, meaning my friend wound up shelling out $12 for each tempranillo. (Why are prices always secret from everyone but the person paying?) The waiters were scant to AWOL — we had to flag one down for tortillas for the queso fundido, another for coffee (too burned to drink), another to clear away the plates we had stacked in a desperate plea for a clean table, yet another for the check. And there were no zarapes, let alone serapes.

The food was actually good. But now I see why Pace is so hot to market “cooking sauces” to “recreate the Mexican restaurant experience at home.” Who wouldn’t want the flavor without the abuse?

What a difference a new owner makes. America’s most down-scale, just-folks food magazine, Taste of Home, is now hustling platinum MasterCards. Before Readers’ Digest gave it that touch of incongruous class, the only plastic it was pitching was knives for iceberg lettuce.

 

 

Building brand confusion, one gaffe at a time: The scene is Barolo, at a peculiar party with boozy sponsors. The request is for Champagne. The choice? “Click” or, as the baby bartender offers on second try: “Click-kay.” Don’t ask about the Skey vodka.

 

 

In a week of particularly inane food stories (people go to restaurant bars just to drink! Cuban food is catching on!), the Wall Street Journal takes the dolt prize for its investigative piece on chain restaurants like Applebee’s “going upscale.” Bad enough that the writer repeatedly spews the adjective gourmet as if it signified something. Bad enough that she helpfully translates ceviche for all her poor unsophisticated readers as “raw seafood salad.” Bad enough that she actually dragged food “experts” around to analyze the “gourmet touch” on each menu. But the real idiocy was the very idea. A press release touting the hiring of a chef who used to cook for Richard Nixon (isn’t he dead?) should have been shredded, not puffed up into a trend story pointing out that Bouley serves oysters with pedigrees beyond Hooters’. You lie down with Bennigan’s, of course you’re going to wake up with heartburn.

What if you gave a party and everybody came? If you were a big important magazine, you might run a bit low on food, and fast. Five marquee chefs could not keep up with the hungry hordes looking for better than the catered tidbits at this soiree (luckily, the bold-face sponsors kept the wine pouring). I got a bite of Tom Colicchio’s new ‘Wichbar’s white anchovy sandwich (a work in progress, I hope), and two slugs of Dan Barber’s soups (lettuce: good; whole mussel: calling Linda Lovelace), and one all-butter gnocchi from Marc Vetri of Vetri in Philadelphia. But the line looped around at least twice in front of whatever Nobu was dishing out from a cast-iron pot, and the scrum at Artisanal’s table was demeaning (really, it’s just fermented milk). A reporter from a restaurant trade magazine I ran into had the right idea: he was heading over to the Empire Diner for a cheeseburger. My consort and I wound up soaking up the Ruffino at the bar at the Red Cat with Parmesan fries: a little cheese, no standing, no waiting.

What if you gave a party and it snowed? If you were a Mexican restaurateur known for being able to feed a village in a townhouse, you might find yourself with an exceptionally well-edited guest list on your 20th anniversary in New York. The weather wimps stayed home. The interesting people got to revel in heaping plates of greatest hits like sensational crepes filled with spinach, ham and cheese, pork braised in ancho chile sauce, and the best green bean salad (with tomatoes and jalapenos) ever dished up on a buffet. The bonus was a civil sound level — there’s no party favor like being able to hear another guest and not just shrieks in your ear. We were spared, in the words of a guest at the magazine party, “shock and awe music.” Even with margaritas flowing faster than Ruffino.

A terrible thing has happened to Giorgione in Soho. Theo closed. Now that crowd has apparently found a new haunt just down Spring Street. And it’s not pretty: super-skinny girls slinking about until their scuzzy guy friends show up. The backwash has also slimed the service. Once again, odd was the cruelest number: five of us were shown to a four-top in an almost empty dining room, and we got an argument when we asked for at least enough room for 10 elbows. Maybe the waifs could pick there comfortably. But not grownups who think the food is the thing.

It must be spring. The first cretins are popping up in Union Square. At the Wednesday Greenmarket, a guy determined to buy only the freshest eggs from the Amish farmer was demanding to know: “When were these hatched?”

With mint, or on the rocks?: It was my own fault for ordering hot tea in a gay 24-hour steakhouse in Washington, but it was still peculiar to be told by Buff, my waiter, that there was no Earl Grey. “Only Orange Pekito.”

New York, New York: At the opening party for Charlie Palmer’s promising Kitchen 82 on Columbus Avenue, a waiter proudly presented an elegant little cup of rich soup garnished with what he said was “giuliani of celery root.”

And I noticed that while no one was answering the phone at WD50 (even though Citysearch already had it rated, at 5.5), Wylie was still taking care of business. He’s stripped down to his Vitaprep in the new Food Arts.

Sommelier is a word with about as much credibility as compassionate conservative these days. I know because I just had encounters with a “hot chocolate” sommelier and a “celebrity” sommelier within three days.

Chocolate won.

He was at the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia, standing at a bar in the lobby and advising guests on the differences among exotic chocolate like Venezuelan and Tanzanian, then suggesting toppings and additions like house-made marshmallows. A couple of guys stood behind him to half-melt the chosen chocolate into half-and-half and gussy it up to order. It was all very gimmicky, but it was a good excuse to try Cuban chocolate (tastes like chocolate).

The HC sommelier was both savvy and patient, unlike the “celebrity” at @sqc on Monday who pushed the most expensive bottle of white on the list on half-price night. Any crudely coiffed salesman in a Today’s Man jacket and Nineties glasses can recommend a Meursault. It takes real knowledge and communication skills to respond, when someone asks about the Chablis, with a condescending: “Chablis is a place. It’s still chardonnay.” And terroir is?

One of the mysteries of New York is how a gaudy restaurant better known for its Italian owner than its French food packs in the crowds despite the surly “service.” The first time I went there, when the ringmaster’s fanny was the only welcome at the door, was just like the last, when his underlings were chimping his attitude and posture at a dreary magazine party. Makes you wonder if host and hostile have the same root.

Weirdest name for a restaurant: The Green Gateau, in Lincoln, Nebraska. A French friend wondered if it connoted Irish/French fusion, but to me it just conjures mold.

Pierogies may be the greatest thing Polish since vodka, but who would think to add them to your “shape-up strategies”? Mrs. T’s, however, has set out to sell its potato-and-Cheddar lead sinkers as “a great fit for a healthier lifestyle” because they’re “low fat.” Somewhere, I hope, a copywriter is wearing a bag on his head. And drinking vodka to forget what he typed.

Diminishing returns: Consistency seems to be the hobgoblin of little Manhattan restaurants. Sosa Borella, on my third visit, had devolved into a diner at lunchtime, with grilled sandwiches on cotton bread heated barely long enough to melt the flavor-snatched cheese. And Celeste, which had become a real favorite for the smooth handling of throngs at the no-reservations door, had adopted serious attitude on a Monday night. We arrived at 7:20 to find no fewer than 16 empty seats but were told we would have to wait 20 minutes for a two-top to open up. The usual host had been replaced by an arrogant airhead who not only had flunked math (tables for four are divisible) but did not seem to realize that two cash-carrying bodies standing in front of him were worth any number of parties of four in his fantasies.

The most amazing sight at Ariane Daguin’s lavish party at D’Artagnan for some top women chefs in from France and Spain was not the two pans of cassoulet nearly as long as she is tall. It was all the Americans reaching for what looked like rounds of cheese on the saucisson platters and coming away with butter all over their fingers. Rather than have the grace to look embarrassed, I noticed, they all took the Rumsfeld approach: mock the French for eating fat on fat.

No Wonder It’s the Bunker Capital of the World: Despite my whining over a weekend that felt like a month in Washington, I actually had only one bad eating experience. And that was when we trekked to Bob Kinkead’s newish enterprise, Colvin Run Tavern in Tysons Corner, Va.

The reservationist advised us to take the Orange Line on the Metro to the very last stop, and like rubes ignoring the subway concierge in the District, we did. Our flummoxed cab driver then had to whisk us back toward the city for 20 minutes and as many dollars before we found the mecca in a mall. We hit the reception desk spewing bile, but the snotty kidlet who checked us in evinced not a flicker of interest. While an older woman took our coats and clucked in sympathy, Mini-Manager simply typed a message into the computer to update the subway information: it extends way out to Vienna.

The best food in the world would not have calmed me down, and this was grasping desperately for mediocre (the amuse bouche was a four-mouthful soccer ball of risotto; my salad actually combined grilled Gruyere and pancetta on brioche with deviled eggs, and I had to get out my glasses to find the underdone monkfish on my plate with tired clams, chorizo and a pallid potato gratin). But a little service would have gone a long way. Most of the dreary evening was spent either fuming or flagging down anyone who could bring menus, pour wine and water, or deliver a check. Even the cab the managerette called almost drove off in frustration before we could get to it.

Kinkead’s in Washington is obviously the owner’s real restaurant. Colvin Run is for suburban suckers. And judging by the fury of the woman in the adjoining booth who was also the victim of bad directions and worse service, it will be for one-time suckers only.

The Anti-Antidote: Since a cheeseburger (with a bloody Mary) is always my favorite cure for a hangover, I’m hurting lately. The New York media feeding frenzy over one-upmanship on the grill has killed my appetite for grease and Cheddar on a bun. I blame myself for indulging in the burger bull, which interestingly enough dried up about as fast as you can say crockpot. I may eat another half-pounder with fries one day, but right now I’m feeling as if chefs got a free ride on the burger train. Now let them cook real food.

That appalling sound you hear right now in New York is not just reverse flatulence. It’s Escoffier spinning in his crypt with Marie Antoinette. Neither could probably have ever imagined a French chef would set out to make news not with a brilliant dish but with a let-’em-eat-truffles burger. And both might consider the chef more persuasive if he were serving this decadence for lunch at his namesake restaurant. But that Hearst Castle gave up the midday ghost more than a year ago.

As Yogi Berra would say: If people don’t want to come out to a restaurant, no $50 burger is going to stop them.

Just back from Madrid, I have a new rule: Ignore Johnny Apple at your own risk.

Before heading off I had pestered the great RW Jr., the man who really ate everything, for restaurant suggestions but got cold teeth once we landed there. The places in his last opus on the city were listed in the Eyewitness Guide, which not only happens to be a major resource for the kind of travelers who like to talk about their hometown with strangers over dinner but also actually advises visitors to that sophisticated city to “always carry toilet tissue with you as it is often not provided.”

I’d sooner tote my own Charmin than eat with Americans, so for our one serious meal in Madrid we found a relatively new restaurant, La Broche, that had turned up in both an old Travel & Leisure and the latest Gourmet. How could we go wrong with a chef who was inevitably described as a “disciple’’ of Ferran Adria? If the food was bad, at least it would be light as foam.

Shock number one was of the sticker variety: one appetizer at lunch was 42 euros; entrees topped out at 47. Shock two was that the restaurant was in a hotel but the waiters spoke only poquito ingles — and the menu was in high Chefese. Everything from morels to cuttlefish was translated as “excellent.”

We blundered through without either ordering pig’s trotters or spending more than 160 euros with a half-bottle of excellent Rioja, and the experience was not without its high points. The room was hipper than anything in New York: stark white, with a little folding table for Bob’s fanny pack and my purse; a tea cart loaded with leaf-filled test tubes, and so many waiters you got tired just watching them bustle. Both the menus and the check came in little white wooden boxes; to read the former, you pulled out a booklet like a CD insert.

One amuse bouche was inspiring — toasts topped with onion marmalade, Cabrales, chanterelles and a fried spinach leaf — and the other was like a bar snack by Antabuse: Campari foam with peanut foam. My first course was blowaway, a bowlful of thick morel “pudding” coated with an airy ham mousse and ringed with tiny curried fried snails. Bob’s was like nouvelle cuisine from a mad lab: bits of sardines and whole mussels interspersed with raspberries and cauliflower florets. The flavors communicated with each other about as well as our waiters did with us.

Jackson Pollock could have designed Bob’s next plate: ethereal little meatballs and baby cuttlefish with garlic-parsley and thyme sauces, which was a wild study in black and green. I was the sucker who bit at the 47-euro entree, a nasty slab of turbot cooked in its own slimy skin with a truffle sauce plus a few fried oysters on the other side of a mango demarcation line. It was the perfect setup for a shared dessert of peanut foam in curry sauce with cocoa crisps over the top (I don’t know how we resisted the licorice-gin-black beer ice cream). But the coup de gross was the truffle-infused white chocolate wafer on the petit four plate. There may be worse taste combinations, but I’ve never come across them. And maybe the spelling of desserrs on the restaurant’s web site is not a typo.

In the end, Johnny of course was right. In one email, he warned me that the Michelin was not helpful in Madrid. And of course I later learned that La Broche and its chef, Sergi Arola, have two stars. [November 2002]

So much for survival of the fattest: Grotesque cinnamon buns and the tourists who grow huge on them would seem to be a match made on 42d Street. But when we recently left the AMC Theater in Times Square that’s designed to dump moviegoers into fast-trash heaven, the food court was gutted. Even the signs were gone: Cinnabon, California Pizza Kitchen, Jody Maroni’s Sausage, Ranch 1 and all. One of the porters behind the “do not cross” yellow tape said the owners had just called it quits.

The surprise was not that it failed but that it lasted as long as it did, even in such close proximity to the NY Times, where worker wasps like me would eat anything to avoid the steam table in what I called the Cafe Regret. This alternative was designed for the old 42d Street, when the goal of any bunslinger (and any hotel with a lobby on the sixth floor) was to keep the bums out. On the new 42d Street, it kept the tourists out, too. Faced with trekking two flights up, even on a moving stair, who wouldn’t rather just waddle on by?

Call it premature exultation: Magazines always love to shoot first, let the restaurant open later. But Time Out and New York just outdid themselves. Both ran slick photos of what appeared to be an up-and-serving place called Jefferson in Greenwich Village; Time Out even showed it full of drink-clutching partiers. The Saturday before both magazines landed on my doormat, though, we had walked by Jefferson to see a virtually empty space with a worried-looking chef on a cell phone.

Cameras don’t lie. Heat-seeking PR people do.

For much the same reason, it’s easy to see why Wylie Dufresne still hasn’t opened WD50, the most-hyped, longest-delayed restaurant since Beppe went into extended labor. He’s been busy posing for every publication short of the National Enquirer. Guess it’s easier to say cheese than say when.

 

File under “the emperor has no sense:” Oysters coated with pepperoni and coconut, thrown together by the chef from Wish in Miami. Who also sears his watermelon.

Breasts and big livers are apparently just too ordinary. I was sure the waiter at Les Halles was confused when he rattled off “loin of duck” as a special the day before Thanksgiving, but maybe not. A chef on Long Island is now cooking with duck cheeks.

Beware the temperamental chef. That was the sad lesson of Butter in NoHo. We had to fight the “host” to be seated because “the kitchen will only take all orders at once.” In a half-empty restaurant that never filled all night, you would think three grownups could sit down and order a bottle of wine until the fourth showed up moments later. Worse, the waiter insisted there could be no substitutions on any dish. Our friend who despises eggplant was sentenced to a ratatouille relation with her lamb; mashed potatoes filched from the skate would apparently sully the kitchen god’s unique vision. And I was informed, after choosing tuna, that “the chef prefers to cook that extremely rare.” I had to say: “I have to eat it. And I prefer it closer to medium.”

Of course there were no jolts of juxtaposed flavors, no frissons of contrasting textures. There was not a whiff of genius to justify the rigidly silly rules. The chef, like any autocrat at the dinner table, was just a crashing bore.

Lunch at Toqueville on Saturday (for work). Only two other tables are occupied, one by a graying foursome of whom two were impassioned foodies, blathering on about restaurants they had tried and chefs who had impressedthem and cities where they had found both. The husband got so excited at one point that he started uttering, very importantly, the name “Alain du Carlo.” Think he meant the chef of Monte Christo?

Odd is the awkwardest number. Anyone who eats alone knows one person always gets the worst table and worst service. But lately I’m noticing any group that does not square off nicely at a four-top suffers the same indignities and worse. Restaurateurs will cram five people, or 11, into a table fit for four or 12. In the last couple of weeks I’ve suffered it at glorified fast food joints like Patsy’s and, worse, at allegedly sophisticated places like Craftbar. We met good friends from Chicago there recently and arrived late to find the three of them crammed onto a banquette at two shoved-together two-tops. Since we were dropping $50 a person, couldn’t the place spare a scosh more room? But maybe the only thing worse is a table that’s too big.

The Wall Street Journal is one amazing newspaper, but it really should stay out of the kitchen. Since the launch of the Personal Journal, reporters more familiar with balance sheets have been sent out to demystify menus. And they come back with some very strange factoids. My favorite lately was the item on salt cod that said it “had a good run until the 1950s, which gave us refrigeration.” The 1850s, maybe — that’s when the first patent for mechanical refrigeration was issued.

Late summer 2002

One of the more self-worshiping culinary columnists (notice how no one says “food” anymore?) has apparently finally met his match, which undoubtedly means we can all look forward to the usual tales of the blessed events, written in his arch and stilted style. First will come the arduous search for the ideal caterer for the wedding, with the winning candidate of course trading nuptial fare for publicity. And next will be the “my baby eats like me” pablum. Is it just me, or do all conventionally happy food writers type alike?

 

 

I barely passed chemistry in high school, but I feel pretty certain Splenda is not a substance that occurs normally in nature. That hasn’t stopped a cluster of name chefs from happily jumping on the money train to promote this calorie-free sensation and its “sugar blend” cousin. Most puzzling is Michel Nischan, who is such an articulate advocate of good food and real food. Hasn’t he heard the Evil Dick talking about how to make money in this new economy? Get on eBay and sell those old Heartbeat menus. It might not be as lucrative as a living-worse-through-chemistry check, but it’s gotta be easier on your soul.

What if you gave four stars and nobody cared? This was like a pedestrian evaluating a Maserati by typing one deep thought repeatedly: “It looks cool and goes really fast.” (To be fair, maybe the whole embarrassing ooze got more insightful after the jump. I wouldn’t know.)

 

 

Why it’s dangerous to write your own epitaph: By all accounts, Arthur Schwartz stormed off his longtime prattle gig on WOR because he was worried about “journalistic integrity.” And then he apparently went straight home and posted this on his web site: “I leave you with a wonderful recipe that I developed for a promotional program I was going to do with Food Emporium and WOR.” What was the problem? They wanted him to shill for D’Agostino’s?

 

 

This was one of those rare scenes that give you hope for the future of New York food at a time when the official entree appears to be a nonthreatening burger: I was waiting in line at Mani Market in my neighborhood when a woman in full dress (Indian? Pakistani?) came in with her young son and asked the two cops getting sandwiches if there might be a good restaurant nearby. The owner and the cops first made sure she didn’t just want McDonald’s (she didn’t crack a grimace) before suggesting the diner up the block. She pressed them for something ethnic and they all thought and debated and finally came up with what really was the best recommendation: Saigon Grill. As I was paying, I noticed she was clutching a Zagat guide. What an uplifting feeling to know you can fool some of the travelers some of the time, but the savvy ones know two cops on a coffee break are worth a whole volume of suspect ratings.

 

 

Philadelphia and I go way back. I went there first while on a job tryout at the Wilmington newspaper in 1978, and I moved there later that year, to work at the Bulletin. The next three years meant glory days for restaurants, and while the city has had far more sorry downs than transcendent ups over the decades, it has always been about so much more than the reflexive cliche hauled out by food writers from every other city. Most recently the Wall Street Journal devoted half a page to documenting the novel notion that cheesesteaks are not all you will find there, and I could only wonder: Where have you been eating? Philadelphia has never had a “one-dish image” except among “experts” who have never explored it. I don’t get press releases from Stephen Starr, but I also have to wonder at how much of a gourmand draw a rooftop bar with swinging chairs and stuffed ponies really is. Kobe cheesesteaks with Brie, maybe.

 

 

Big points to the Journal, though, for the excellent story on the Soup Nazi who refuses to go by his TV name or play by the rules of the sellout game. Al Yeganah made his franchising deal with partners who agreed to his demand to omit all social niceties from pitch letters: no dear or thank you for Mr. Surly. More important, he’s insisting on total control over his product and image even though self-designated wiser heads snidely point out that he is moving from the soup business to the marketing business. The whole tale leaves you rooting for a man you would not want to have to dinner (and whose soup you’ve never even tasted). What a concept: the food is the thing.

 

 

One of the more entertaining time sucks is poking around in foreign web sites translated into something struggling to be English. Sometimes they’re no less nonsensical than you might read in big papers whose reporters and editors can’t tell a tortilla from a taco and think a poussin is a game hen. Other times they’re so silly they border on lyrical. My current favorite is the cyber-speak by the Montpellier twins, the three-star Pourcels at Le Jardin des Sens. “The thin slice of net of roast pigeon on the bone, its crystallized and frozen thigh, ragout of corn to morels, juice of pigeon to the crystallized grottes statement of liquorice” is one example. But “the zucchini in puffed up flower crawfish tails, sparkling bubble with the truffle juice” is just as tantalizing. My favorite, though, was “young people asparaguses.” It’s bad to laugh, though, because just the other day I saw “masculine salad” on menupages.com. And New Yorkese is ostensibly its first language.

 

 

No wonder the Bush handlers think this election will be a cakewalk. Apparently this is a country so dumb Williams-Sonoma expects people to spend $16 for a jar of “turkey brine blend.” It’s mostly salt, for Chuck’s sake. And the “simply add water” instruction says it all.

Talk about an invitation you can’t refuse. Little ortolans keep telling me a well-known if not high-profile restaurant reviewer who is marrying a writer who also covers the food scene has asked a cluster of select Manhattan chefs to provide refreshments for the blessed event. And this is no intimate affair — the guest list is said to be 200 strong and thirsty. At least it’s an easier way to earn stars than writing a book blurb.

 

Playing the class card: A Wall Street Journal story about the products voters associate with the dueling presidential candidates included a pissy comment by a Republican pollster who was “skeptical about portraying Mr. Bush ‘like mac ‘n’ cheese to Mr. Kerry’s penne alfresco’.” As my consort said, “That doesn’t sound very French.” (And it’s just as silly as those surveys showing most people would prefer to have a beer with Bush over Kerry. They never seem to remember the cowboy can’t drink, unless it’s O’Doul’s, the breakfast of wimps.)

 

 

In an unprecedented moment of humility, Bobby Flay has admitted he doesn’t know enough about Latino food to carry out the concept he announced for the old JUdson Grill. Instead he’s going down that well-traveled Larry Forgione road, with American regional cribbed from his TV scripts. Funny, since nothing stopped him from faking Spanish.

 

 

Details, details: The Wall Street Journal weighed in on the crumbling of the Krispy Kreme scam (oops — empire) but chose to illustrate it with a cake doughnut. Maybe the newsroom didn’t get enough dropoffs of freebies to know the chain sells only grease and air. And the NYT really should run any food reference through one of those online sense-checkers. A snide little convention item on the “essential food groups” at one party wound up with this combination: “cherry-glazed roasted figs with mascarpone pistachios.” Is there an “and” missing or did the reporter/backfielder/copy editor not realize the Italian cheese is not an adjective? Unless it’s eaten Alfredo, of course.

 

 

My wanderlustful friend Don Groff forwarded a release I would never get: an announcement of a fear-of-flying support group’s meeting at Calle Ocho, “one of the most remarkable restaurants in New York City.” Given that I haven’t eaten at that “spectacular” joint since three co-workers called in green after a pre-review meal, it might be just the place to cure what ails that crowd. Taking off couldn’t be much scarier than sitting down to “braised short rips” followed by “pollo criollo fufu stuffed Cornish hen.”

 

 

My consort, who seems to spend half his life on planes, came home outraged at having to buy food for the first time, on a long American flight to Denver. Eight dollars for an Au Bon Pain corn muffin with yogurt does sound like airborne robbery. But at least, I thought, it’s better to have the airlines cutting corners on food rather than fuel. Unfortunately, the Journal reports pilots are flying on tanks so low they have no spare to wait out a storm or divert to a more far-flung airport. As Bob said, it’s not either-or at all. They’re scrimping on all fronts. Maybe we should all be meeting at Calle Ocho.

 

 

Julia Child is barely cold in the California ground and already the frenzy to cash in has begun. A woman who almost alone in the food business never sold her good name for a cheesy product endorsement has just been named as the marquee attraction for the James Beard Foundation’s next orgy of self-celebration. And of course the announcement includes the requisite list of all the “underwriters” that make the extravaganza one big TV commercial. She probably never realized the monster she was unleashing in suggesting buying the home of the biggest shill in culinary history. Let’s hope her own will stands up to protect her — and us — from a Julia Child Front.

 

 

I want to blame Republicans for this somehow, but I think it’s just another sign that Manhattan is becoming the Mall of America: A Capital Grille opens and gets press all over town. The same people who mock Olive Garden are falling over themselves to plug a chain steakhouse with no national profile. Maybe if we hope real hard we’ll get a Wolfgang Puck place one day. Or an Emeril. Now that would be front-page news.

Walking past a Village restaurant I’ve seen countless times but never really noticed, I was reminded of that old Gary Larson cartoon of the deer with a bull’s-eye on its side (caption: “Bummer of a birthmark, Vern”). La Scatolina might have seemed like a charming choice for a name, since it means “the little box” in Italian, but its root sounds suspiciously Greek. Or, in the words of our inimitable Orator in Chief, as quoted in Newsweek: “All human beings begin life as a feces.”

 

 

Don’t expect corrections, but the NYTimes is on a details roll. 71 Clinton Fresh Food was described as “Wylie Dufresne’s restaurant.” And an article about a protest near the mayor’s homestead said the demonstrators had brought Krispy Kreme doughnuts while the photo clearly showed . . . a Dunkin’ box. It’s those little things that can add up to a Wen Ho Lee. No wonder it feels safer to keep shucking that Silver Queen corn.

 

 

Krispy Kreme has its own issues lately, trying to blame its mess of a quarterly report partly on the low-carb fad, which is clearly fading if you read the LATimes. As the Toronto Star pointed out in a great scathe, Dunkin’s sales are certainly not falling. All those boxes and boxes of gross doughnuts showered on newsrooms everywhere could help KK keep up the charade only so long. Eventually a reporter had to snap out of the sugar haze, and investors were sure to follow.

 

 

Let’s say you’re a major American newspaper, one that considers itself the noblest in the land while still licking wounds from an ethics scandal. You obviously need a story on how open tables are likely to be during the invasion of the Republicans into your hometown, a time when the base is fleeing for the bridges and tunnels, a time when restaurateurs could wind up as lonesome as they did for four days in Boston. And so you find just the right contributor to send to the phones for a truly fair and balanced report: yes, the one who wrote the promotional cookbook for the tourism agency that so desperately needs a positive spin going into the lockdown. You know. “One of the most respected food writers in the country.” The one allegedly sharing the proceeds with the very organization she’s covering.

 

A friend seized on something else strange about the story: For the first time in her memory, a restaurant roundup did not mention the usual saint, Danny Meyer, who just happened to write the “foreward” to the book with NYC & Company prominently named on the cover. She wondered if it meant he wasn’t “hot” anymore, and we both agreed that could not be the case since he has this fall’s big project opening at MOMA. Have he and the 800-Pound-Gorilla-turned-Op-Ed-pontificator had a falling-out? Was he unavailable for defensive comment? Or is it simply that everyone is overcompensating for the lost Montrachet star by overquoting from Myriad? (Did someone say not hot?)

 

 

As odes to the French Chef continue to pile up on the internet, in the cyber-equivalent of the garish shrines that sprout everywhere for dead princesses and drive-by shooting victims, a telling detail has emerged. A surprising number of the great woman’s disconsolate admirers don’t seem to know her name. They love her so much they call her Childs.

 

 

Wouldn’t the plural of crudo be crudi? (If so, the first vowel should be short.) Or can an adjective be made plural in English?

 

 

Jean Carper is usually one of the rare voices of reason on the subject of eating to beat Methuselah, so I guess I should blame anyone but her for the packaging of her latest feature in USA Weekend: “The 6 Healthiest Recipes in History.” I can only imagine the poor sucker who also had to compose “The Best Religious Movies Ever Made” just lost it when it came to the food and went straight for “spinach and berries with nonfat curry dressing.” Faced with “The Passion” in a full-page ad, who wouldn’t think only five other dishes were that good for you in just the 11,000 years since sheep were domesticated.

 

 

No matter how long you live in Manhattan you can never underestimate all the ways a restaurant can ruin the out-of-house experience. I went back to Nice Matin with a friend after one impeccable lunch and of course the I-don’t-see-you service was back, too. Which would have been painful enough, but all the windows were thrown open to the street when a truck pulled up outside, the driver stuffed a hose into the basement and the most hellacious sucking racket ensued. The sign on the truck didn’t say anything about rendering, but I suspected the worst. When my friend asked the waiter on one of his rare visits what was going on in the middle of lunchtime, he just shrugged and then, when I blurted, “They’re pumping the grease out,” smiled and walked away. Suddenly the French fries didn’t look so appetizing.

 

 

Wherever the guy whose name the Cowboy in Chief never mentions anymore is hiding, let’s hope he cannot get his hand on what I just spotted at Barnes & Noble. As a symbol for a society gone brain dead and vulnerable, could there be anything more damning than a whole cookbook on deviled eggs? You take the yolk out, you stuff the yolk back in, you use your imagination. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told an idea for a book is only worth a magazine article. Deviled eggs should merit no more than a Hellmann’s label.

Is it just me, or do jokes about foam sound as tired as foam itself did even before Biff Grimes retired?

 

 

In one of those little ironies of pack journalism, newspapers and magazines are busting out all over with syrupy odes to heirloom tomatoes just when reality bites. Buying heirlooms this weird, rainy summer is increasingly a crapshoot, even now that the price has dropped to $2 a pound and every Greenmarket has them by the crateload. The fat yellow-streaked ones that were so luscious the last few summers have been half-mushy, half-woody half the time. All the dark red ones have too often been not a lot more intense-tasting than the regular old field-grown specimens from Cherry Lane Farms at Union Square. My cynical side also notices even growers I respect are suddenly selling bloated plum tomatoes labeled “from Polish heirloom seeds brought over by a friend of the family.” Plum and Polish are two adjectives that don’t exactly harmonize with tomatoes, but then more and more “heirlooms” seem to be nothing more than Olympic-pumped beefsteaks, bred for the long haul. It’s a sad summer when you need Paffenroth bush basil to make a tomato taste like seasons past.

 

 

Funny how people who think Martha Stewart should have gone straight to jail without passing a judge (“the law is the law”) are now defending Whole Foods for sneaking a wine shop into a supermarket. The law in New York State may be an ass, but it’s pretty clear about the separation of booze and food. At least down the line something good could come from this brazen flouting, though, as more supermarkets realize how easy it is to bend the statutes and just have discrete entrances at street level, as Premier does in that bastion of innovation, Buffalo. Why should a Manhattanite have to descend to Whole Foods for one-stop shopping?

 

 

Aside from the occasional scan-scam, I don’t often get taken on groceries. But the other day I was in the express line at the Food City when I noticed a tempting strip of packets of spiced peanuts labeled cacahuates Sabritas and just assumed they were imported. They were only 25 cents each and so tiny they could not possibly be American — nothing in this country is ever packaged in .62 ounces when a half-pound will do for one serving. I actually hesitated before taking a bag, though, because there have been so many stories lately about lead from chilies in candies from across the border. And of course the joke was on me. The threat was not from the spicing but from big business — after eating the whole little bagful, I read the back label: “Made for Frito-Lay.” What does it mean that we now face snacks of Mexican deception?

 

 

When good restaurants go really, really bad: Since 1999, I’ve eaten at Cafe Frida probably more than at any place on the Upper West Side. I’m an asking-for-it sucker for Mexican, but this kitchen consistently turned out great guacamole, nuanced salsas and superb quesadillas. A couple of times it might have hit a few bumps, and the noise could be painful, but otherwise it was the quintessence of old reliable. Ever since it renovated, though, putting the bar up front like every other tequila hustler in town, Cafe Frida has deteriorated to the point that my consort could only mutter two words on smelling the fajitas landing at the next table: Chi. Chi’s.

 

The whole place now reeks of those bogus moneymakers. The service is so lame that describing it as bumbling would be a compliment (a table that arrived after us got our order, and after it was finally delivered to us a third waiter immediately arrived to whisk it away). Seating on the banquette in the former bar area is as stifling as the Sonora desert. And the guacamole is no longer an indulgence but a penance. There is no way bounceable avocados and supermarket tomatoes will add up to anything worth dipping, especially when the mixer apparently is paid by the molcajete and churns it out as fast and as grossly as Taco Bell. Parting insult to lasting injury, the check arrived with a tip chart that inflated every percentage. The couple to my left was from across a river, the couple to my right from over an even bigger body of water, of the Atlantic variety. Buena suerte to Cafe Frida in trying to make a go of it on those frequent diners.

 

 

How do you know when you’re turning vintage? When you’d rather drink than inhale. All the coverage of the new-age Breathalyzers in clubs certainly left me feeling hopelessly old-school. I can see skipping the liquid part to cut the calories, but any grownup knows you spend 20 minutes over a drink for the taste, too. Of course I’ve never had a Cosmopolitan, so maybe I just don’t know the nastiness I should be vaporizing.

 

 

The brouhaha over Mike Wallace’s arrest by the TLC actually illuminated a Leslie Revsin insight. He went bonkers while his takeout meatloaf dinner was going cold in his limousine, and I could only think: All his fame and fortune and he settles for Hamburger Helper? In an interview with a trade magazine, though, Leslie explained it all. How are the rich different from you and me? Given a choice between Roquefort beignets and Caesar salad, they’ll go for the bore every time. No wonder it’s so hard to get anything seasoned to life on the Upper East Side.

 

 

One thing you might get in that restaurant wasteland is a half hour’s worth of entertainment, at least if you stop for lunch at the bar at Payard. I had a respectable potato and mushroom tourte with salad while listening to a cross between eBay and a chat room, with the bartender working deals to sell a brother-in-law’s car and assorted ravaged patrons trying either to assuage hangovers or impress said bartender. The shades-adorned dolt next to me, who ate his soup while complaining about how his daughter’s boyfriend wanted to be a writer but didn’t know what a hyphen was, was bragging that he had eaten “Grand Marnier souffles and Parma ham at every meal in Spain,” which led the bartender to recall a paella scene in a well-known movie. “Ah, yes, ‘Dona Flor’,” the guy said pompously for all the bar to admire. “That was written by Giorgio Amado, a very famous Brazilian writer.” (My friend Don Groff had the perfect reaction: “Actually, it was Jorge Armani.”)

 

 

After 20 years of typing about the most ephemeral art form, I’m the first concede it ain’t easy coming up with new ways to describe food, but a little item in the Daily News struck me as hitting the formulaic gong particularly hard. The lead gave corn the old explain-the-exotica treatment: “This sweet vegetable, whose teeth-like kernels are nestled in rows along a woody ‘ear,’ is native to the Americas . . . . ’’ Never let this Pinball Wizard come in contact with a potato, or a banana. But what do you expect of someone who starts a recipe for corn flan (serves a very manageable 10) with “clean the corn”? What the shuck is she talking about?

 

 

I should have known we were in for a surreal week when I woke up Monday to a consort reeking of dead snapper and bearing ominous news along with our three morning papers: “They’re shutting down the bridges and tunnels.” He had been up all night shooting at the Fulton Fish Market and had a question much on the minds there: “How are the food trucks going to get in?” Next morning I woke to photo-op evidence of the First Lady of Stepford and her evil twins having a fine time swilling coffee at one of the alleged terrorist targets and knew our elevator operator had nailed it from the git-go: “The only thing that scares me is Tom Ridge.” Unfortunately, Bob’s question is lingering like the fish stink. The absurd lockdown/campaign stunt was a fair warning of what convention week will be like. And much as I hate to think like a bureaucratic threat-monger, I suppose he’s right about stocking up on canned beans and pasta, the staples that got us through the blackout. Help may be on the way, but meat and fish will probably be waylaid in Jersey for security reasons.

 

 

Washington could take some lessons in scare tactics from Procter & Gamble, whose motto seems to be “the only thing we have to sell is fear itself.” AmNY took the bait in touting the new Dawn Wash ‘n’ Toss dishcloths with: “We’ve all heard about all the bacteria living in our kitchen sponges.” Of course we all should be worrying about more silly disposables clogging up landfills, but there’s no money in that. And to paraphrase our misleader, who cares about the future? We’ll all be gone then.

 

 

You know the Olympic tie-ins have gone too far when the Greek wine poster in your local liquor store reads just like the headline in your hometown paper.

 

 

A week when the sky was falling seemed like a good occasion to go get a spiritual lift at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, especially since I was already stuck in midtown at lunchtime. The place is so gritty and timeless and so wondrously New York you can’t imagine anything bad happening as long as it — and the gorgeous terminal — are around. It’s also one of the few places in Manhattan that is so democratic with its counters, and so efficiently old-style in its service. (My waitress was juggling orders from a Japanese guy, two French women, four businessmen and three lost souls with an American Girl shopping bag.) Unfortunately, the time-warp magic does nothing for the food. The Maryland she crab soup had big chunks of undeniable crab in it, but it was mostly white glop and celery that even sea salt and Tabasco could not shake to life. This is soup the way they made it when my mom was a kid here, back before cream was invented.

 

Note to Bar managers: It might be time to invest in some fresh dish towels for napkins, too. Nothing lasts forever.

 

One more indicator America is going to hell in a handbasket with no outside help: Land O Lakes is now wrapping its unsalted butter in wax paper rather than the foil that gave it the shelf life of an MRE (or of salted butter). For the second pound, what I tasted was right on the edge of rancid, despite the 11/04 sell-by date, and so I called the 800 number on the box. After a long wait, a nice chirpy voice informed me that consumers had insisted on the change, primarily because they wanted to put the butter in the microwave. On every level that’s a depressing explanation. Is it because they forget and have a meltdown? Are they too lazy to unwrap it? I’ve always been wary of microwaves — how obese was this country before Hungry Mans were ready in minutes? — but now I know they’re a menace.

 

 

I was shocked that butter was up to $5.49 a pound at my grubby neighborhood grocery store. Then I priced it at the sleek spot three blocks down Columbus: $6.79. No wonder I spotted a guy in a red Dagostino’s shirt in the checkout line at the Food City. It must be like Walmart: the help can’t afford to buy there.

 

 

Connect the dots in a web posting by a restaurant publicist who does it for free and you’ll see why it’s smart to have friends in the payback business. If you get sick the week you eat at one of their client restaurants, they’ll bring you restorative chicken soup from another one.

 

 

Whitehouse.gov almost rivals whitehouse.org with its web chat with the retiring pastry chef, Roland Mesnier. It’s not quite as patently bogus as the one with the show twins that could have been typed by simian androids, but the man has clearly learned from masters of deception. First he offers to “give you the smartest answers I know” and then he blows off a request for the secret to perfect creme brulee with “it would take too long to explain.” How do you get dough for cinnamon rolls to rise? “I would suggest a bicycle pump.” He also has a thing for Crisco, which you don’t want to overanalyze in that town. And he reveals Barney is like so many in the George II coterie: a bootlicker, although even that tale is suspect considering he says the dog comes to his shoes for the chocolate. Isn’t that a weapon of canine destruction?

 

 

The saga of the virtual cookie war will not end. Teresa Heinz Kerry has now come clean in saying the “nasty” recipe Family Circle ran under her name was not hers at all. No one is taking blame for it, but the magazine says its test kitchen could not get the recipe “she” actually submitted to work. Of course the glaring question in this latest episode of First Lady Fakeoff was not considered news fit to answer: What the Cheney are Yummy Wonders?

 

 

Someone should take “Laura’s” recipe for cookies — and “Teresa’s,” too, for that matter — and convert them to microfilm. And then just inadvertently destroy them. Otherwise so-called journalists are going to continue to squander energy and air time on an absurd spoon-fed debate over which is better, chocolate-oatmeal or pumpkin-spice, when each has about as much to do with the name attached to it as Alain Ducasse does with Mix. Laura Bush is firmly on record saying she does not bake. Teresa Heinz Kerry has obviously not been near a sugar canister since well before her ketchup dough started flowing to charity. Why do outlets like NPR continue to buy into this trivial charade? I know it’s just a tiny lie, but the last one the media allowed to mushroom is not exactly looking like a reality show these days. Why let falsehood reign?

Maybe I’m hypersensitive because the first bathroom I ever experienced was an outhouse, or because I grew up sharing one bathroom with two parents and six siblings, but I have a thing for clean toilets. Especially when food is involved. And I cannot imagine why any New York restaurateur would not be just as obsessive. There’s no turnoff like plumbing under siege, nothing that makes you think more graphic thoughts about the kitchen. But when I stopped into City Bakery the other day and decided to avail myself of the facilities, I would have sniffed a problem even if the woman waiting ahead of me had not warned that one of the two toilets didn’t flush. I had to leave, no matter how tempting the tortilla casserole looked on the way out. When I’m hungry, I don’t want to go home again.

 

 

The good news about Blue Hill at Stone Barns is that it’s not as dull as it sounded in print. The better news is that the one visionary you might conjure while eating there is not Alice Waters. Reine Sammut in Provence, maybe, or even Thomas Keller in Napa wonderland would be a closer inspiration. It helped that I was lucky enough to eat during previews with a Hudson Valley baby, one whose father (I was embarrassed to learn after dissing local wines) is a notable vintner, and one who was clearly excited about recognition for an untapped region.

 

The concept would have been unthinkable only five years ago. David Rockefeller has paid to have his family’s old barns turned into a beautifully designed gastro-complex where the kitchens rely on the fields and gardens right out the back door. (Eventually they will, anyway.) Dan Barber, one of the few chefs I run into Wednesday after Wednesday at the Greenmarket, is the designated sorcerer, and when his formula works he does make magic. One of my tablemates wondered if the countryside (that well-developed Westchester County countryside, even) is ready for “precious” food rather than big slabs of pork and potatoes, but it was easy to get caught up in the moment and hope for the daintiest.

 

My first course was certainly a bit fey: one spear of asparagus coated in sesame seeds and presented like topiary in a wooden block alongside a plateful of five or six halved spears sprinkled with hazelnuts, with a poached egg on one side and a gorgeous, tiny herb and greens salad on the other. Some of the food can be muted: a perfect little lobster claw just would not talk to the Jerusalem artichoke cannelloni on which it rested. And much of it can be sublime: amazingly flavorful Duclair duck was poached, a technique that transforms the meat, and teamed with a spaetzle gratin. All this was in rehearsal, so it’s unfair to judge it, even too kindly, I guess. But I would go back in a heartbeat if someone else were driving.

 

And that’s despite the potentially crippling flaw in the whole enterprise. Country restaurants tend to be staffed by country bumpkins. Anywhere else in the world, service is a serious profession. Here, it’s a way to make some change, and rarely enough to squander on a meal where you get to see how the other half eats. It was hard not to laugh after the driver in our group ordered a glass of San Pellegrino at the bar where we were shunted to wait until all six of us arrived and then someone materialized at the table 20 minutes later to plonk down the going-flat bottle with a curt: “You left this at the bar.” Then again, she might not have been a bumpkin but someone I’ve run into super-selling water in the city.

 

 

Who says there are no second acts in American lives? A chef once pegged with bizarre behavior in the kitchen is now shilling in a meditative pose in a fruit ad. I guess if a war president can become a peace president with just a change of speech, why shouldn’t a serial biter find his inner Dalai Lama for a fee?

 

 

If you thought anyone could be a restaurant critic these days, you could wind up with as much red sauce on your face as Republican convention organizers. In a rare fit of reporting enterprise, the NYT disclosed that Rudy Giuliani’s Top 10 list has been disappeared from 2004nycgop.org, where it had been posted along with similar favorites suggested by Bloomberg, Koch and Pataki (a real go-to guy for food advice). The official reason is “space reasons” (yeah, on a web site), but the Times noted the embarrassing reputed mob connection to Mr. Righteous’ No. 1, Da Nico in Little Italy. It made no mention, however, of the Village Voice’s earlier muckraking look at the Health Department inspection records for his hangouts. Somewhere in there is a message, and I think it involves vermin.

 

 

My candidate for the starring role in “Chefs Gone Wild” has to be the absurdly uninhibited guy at Counter, the sleek but overpriced vegan wine bar in the East Village (a k a the most odious restaurant neighborhood in Manhattan). Reading the menu is like tumbling down a rabbit hole: ingredient after ingredient after concept after concept. It’s mental whiplash — you’re riding along thinking cauliflower “risotto” sounds interesting and then you crash into seven other ingredients, none of which would ever talk to the other. Could this possibly be the same chef whose restrained food we had liked at Voyage in the civilized West Village?

 

Neither of us could make much sense of the endless array of printed choices and so we went for a couple of appetizer grocery lists the waitress rattled off as specials, including a mishmash that ended in pesto cremini (for $12). The slimy/grayish “eggplant caponata pizza” was not nausea-inducing although it was neither caponata nor pizza. But what I faced was surreal: four tiny (as in button) mushrooms filled with pesto and interspersed with dollops of a pure-heat sauce, all arrayed around a disk of something topped with four or five strips of cucumber. We chewed and chewed and could not determine what the crop circle might be, so we had the waitress come back and read the shopping list again. Weird how everything from olives to red onion to parsley to fennel can come together with undercooked quinoa to taste like none of the above. It can’t be just because we had just come from the excellent “Maria Full of Grace,” but my stomach felt as if I had swallowed 62 balloons of cocaine.

 

 

Call it “When Whores Collide:” The scene is a Champagne book party. The characters are two word people who think they recognize each other “from the circuit.” (Names and destinations changed to protect the guilty.) The dialogue overheard when one walks up to the other begins: “Nice to see you — how are the kids?” “I don’t have kids, just a wife.” “Aren’t you that editor at XXX magazine?” “No, don’t you work for XXXX?” “No, but weren’t you on that trip to Greece?” “No, but didn’t we meet on that trip to the South of France?” And on and on till you wonder how some junketeers have time to take a vacation. Let alone report back on it.

 

 

You can tell true believers in compassionate conservatism are coming to town when soup kitchens are forced to shut down “for security reasons.” The Daily News reports that the Church of St. John the Baptist is a little too close to Madison Square Garden for Republicans’ comfort, and so the 500 hardship cases it feeds every week will go without during the staged festivities. It’s one way of guaranteeing no reality is left behind for conventioneers to witness.

 

 

I’m at least 17 years late to the table, but thanks to my DVD junkie consort I’ve just discovered the world’s most underrated food movie: “Withnail & I.” Booze figures more prominently in the wildly funny plot, but even wastrels have to eat. And so there are great scenes with carrots and rabbit, not to mention eels and teacakes and uncles with unusual appetites. It’s worth renting for one interlude alone: the transformation of live chicken into roasted dinner. Why do I see the inspiration for Steve Raichlen’s overflogged beer can chicken in that same oven?

 

 

Out-of-touch promotional idea of the week: Fifty Seven Fifty Seven’s “Intermission Intermezzo,” a $38 dinner that includes a to-go packet for Broadway-bound diners. I hate to point out the obvious, but if a play is a stinker, water and macaroons are not what you’ll be wanting at half-time. There’s a reason theater owners get away with selling shiver wine at Four Seasons prices

 

 

Why do I look at those creepy Bush twins and think Prohibition could be coming back? Maybe because behavior acceptable for privileged Republicans always seems to be outlawed for everyone else?

 

 

Two observations from the illuminating memorial to Seymour Britchky: Dawn Powell lives. And Andre Soltner is either the nicest guy in New York or the best actor.

 

It was little odd to attend an homage to a man I knew only through his acerbic words, but I was honored to accept the invitation. There was no way I would have met him. Even 13 years after his last collection of reviews was published he remained a faceless voice (to the chagrin of his photographer wife) because he did not really mingle in the food world. His reward, judging by the warm but candid remembrances and the happy hour afterward, was more interesting and less snooty friends. A lively contingent of drinking buddies from Cafe Loup had tales to tell over Tommy Flanagan on the CD player, evoking the Villlage in the diaries, the one before Bradley’s died too.

 

The most revealing eulogy was by Soltner, who was charmingly frank when he said: “I look around and I don’t see any chefs here.” As he went on to point out: Chefs didn’t love the hypercritical Britchky, but they respected him — and they “couldn’t love him because we were not on the same side.” (One other chef did turn up, but I later heard he had talked of doing a book with Britchky as Soltner did.) With no notes, and at the end of a stressful day of moving from his longtime home above Lutece, Soltner was both amusing and seriously moving while inadvertently communicating as much about his own honor as his friend’s. And a lot more about an era before chefs’ blurbs were on reviewers’ books and restaurant flacks had critics on speed-dial.

 

 

All that made it even more ironic that a certain renowned reviewer whom I sat with was leaning on me to review her memoir. “I can’t,” I said. “I know you.” And suggested another food writer. “But he knows me, too.” “Yes, but he’d review you.” Yes, she said. He would.

 

 

My new Wednesday/Friday sport is guessing who the latest replacement for the renowned reviewer will try to channel, his straining-at-MFK predecessor or his gracefully witty one. Too bad he’s not the cook either of them is. He’d know what happens to mishandled cod. It does not turn rubbery. Except maybe on a canceled reality show.

 

 

Most likely it’s because the big-bucks competition is limping so badly, but the Daily News’ food coverage just looks better and better. The restaurant reviews are unfortunately not as ridiculously entertaining now that the regular critic has taken her LOL metaphors on maternity leave, but the expanded coverage on Friday and even Sunday’s silliness actually make you feel as if you live in a major culinary capital with thinking chefs rather than British natterers. It’s almost enough to make me forgive the paper for adding doom and gloom in the guise of health on Wednesday, the high holy day of food journalism.

 

The most recent high point was a chance to be virtually present at the re-creation of the top dish from the Pillsbury Bake-Off. I squandered more time on that page than on the whole Times magazine, fascinated by how inept the winner’s fluted pie crust was (made from a Pillsbury pre-fab), how un-New York the baker was in her matching oven mitts and adrogenous haircut and really how wacky the winning recipe was: a variation on pecan pie, with granola bars as the secret ingredient. (A helpful photo shows how to crush them in the package with a rolling pin.) That’s a recipe for Wednesday Health. Or for cooks who never met Quaker oats.

 

Eons ago I went to a Pillsbury Bake-Off for a magazine story, and I’m surprised it’s become so dull when there is so much more processed garbage that could be turned into prizewinners. Where are the chicken and chocolate enchilada quiches of yesteryear?

 

 

We can hide, but we’re still going to get hit. Even Americans who don’t travel will soon feel how worthless the dollar is becoming, judging by my surprise at the cheese case where I went to pick up a wedge of that industrial Brie sold in supermarkets in France that melts almost as well as Velveeta for chile con fromage. The chunk I used to get for $2-something is now $3-something. And having spoken earlier in the week with a spice processor who is cutting back on Hungarian paprika, I don’t think it’s inflation at work. It’s the euro kicking buck. Figures that the Brie brand is President.

 

 

Forget her cooking skills. Marcella Hazan must be one hell of a housekeeper. Her kitchen in the just-out Saveur looks as gleaming-new as the photos did when I wrote about it for House Beautiful at least five years ago.

 

 

It’s hard to tell what’s a bigger threat to national forests these days, Bush bankrollers or cookbook publishers. Did trees really have to fall for a whole collection of lavishly photographed recipes for grilled cheese? One not even titled “Melting for Dummies”?

Speaking of forests, the tree no one appears to have heard falling was the Beard timber in the out-of-towner’s column in the Daily News. Judging by the collective shrug, this had a real “there are no new stories, only new gossips” aspect. Maybe one day, and maybe soon, someone can definitively answer the question posed by so many chefs like the one I met in Charleston a few years ago: “How can it cost me $20,000 to put on a dinner there?” Or worse insinuations — after all, that much smoke cannot just be salmon. But at least in the short term, the foundation probably underestimates how much it benefits from a very well-positioned finger in the dike. And if financial shenanigans ever surface, it could not be blessed with a more appropriate name.

 

 

Compass, the restaurant that just can’t find its way, is now running a big ad touting cut-rate lunches and dinners “in addition to our acclaimed chef’s menus.” Not only that, it includes stars and blurbs from some of the kinder reviews published before said acclaimed chef packed up her knives and went home. If the owners had any sense, they would have just quietly waited it out, knowing a certain domineering editrix who has considered Compass her canteen since it opened as Marika would surely steer a malleable reviewer their way one more time. The fourth could have been the charm.

 

 

Maybe I’m too busy eating, but I never noticed Whoopi Goldberg was the Slim-Fast flogger until she lost her gig. Savvy advertisers could take a cue from that: Send a shill out to offend the notoriously sensitive ears of Cheney’s fellow Republicans, and you’ll get press you couldn’t buy. Not to mention a chance to shed spokesmodels who don’t exactly conjure the product.

 

 

One of the little ironies of the star-making machinery of the food world is that chefs have become so much more articulate just as their handlers are insisting on pulling all the strings. Half the time you can’t interview the guy who developed the dish, only the clueless publicist with the restaurant account. But a little item in the New York Observer made it clear why chefs sometimes cannot be trusted to speak for themselves. The pastry person at Union Square Cafe, promoting her appearance teaching kids at the Greenmarket about peaches and other stone fruits, went on the record as saying: “I’m a little nervous because I haven’t seen any yet at the market.” A good ventriloquist would have blithely promised pumpkins in July. Or at least asked the chef at a restaurant known for its “Greenmarket menu” to walk half a block east and take a look before she revealed how out of touch she was with a place where peaches and cherries have been on offer for weeks.

 

 

A charismatic Italian guy we spent a day with near Treviso was full of aphorisms, but one in particular resonates: “It only takes one dog to herd many sheep.” The dog in our town, I have just learned, is a web site that is really one click away from being a google ad. While old media pours endless ink into long-winded reviews with tempting photographs, and while restaurants struggle along as if not a word had been printed (can you say Marika/Compass?), it turns out all it took to ruin my attempt at a Tocqueville lunch was two incomplete sentences on a site whose url should be ovine.net. The flack says she worked hard to get the mention, and the restaurant was clearly slammed. Now that I know who gets the sheep in, even I’ll be logging on, if only to be sure my destination is not ranked as the bonbon du jour. You can never eat well in a pen.

 

 

It’s one thing for a hired biographer to swallow fish tales. But shouldn’t a reviewer for the peerless NYT at least raise a skeptical eyebrow? To quote just one absurdity: “Sirio was one of the first to fly in seasonal ingredients from around the globe, and it was Sirio who led the great gourmet cattle stampede to Las Vegas.” The first half of that sentence sounds pretty impressive until you remember there’s no need to fly in seasonal ingredients — they’re as close as the Greenmarket. As for Vegas, I believe a little nobody named Wolfgang was there as long ago as 1992, six years before braveheart Maccioni bet big. At least we know one restaurant critic is guaranteed a good last table at 50th and Madison. If not at the Ivy in London.

 

 

A flack whose client I spoofed has e-communicated to set the record straight. He is not just prostitutin’. He’s procurin’, too. Unfortunately, in laying out the dream team he has assembled to resuscitate a shortlived restaurant he didn’t impress me so much with how high he had reached as by how far the mighty had fallen to be within his grasp. And he does have me wondering why such a useful profession is so often dissed by its own practitioners. Really, if you can correctly spell the names you drop you don’t need to call yourself a visionary.

 

 

Note to the Wall Street Journal: Crockpots are like the poor. They will always be with us. And can they have a comeback if they never went away?

 

 

For four days I ate only my own cooking. On the fifth, after an editor spurned a recipe I had developed, I set out to recalibrate my palate. A friend was persuaded to join me for the Greenmarket lunch at Tocqueville, with a reservation in her name at 1:15 (1 was impossible). I showed up first to find the entry full of upended chairs, two annoyed customers ignored at the bar and a host nowhere to be seen. As I waited, I could see at least one table stripped clean and another yet to be bused. The host appeared, took my fake name, said how nice it was to see me again and let me go off to the bathroom. Which was occupied. For the next 10 minutes. As I perched on a windowsill and waited, my oversensitive antennae for trouble went into overdrive. The room did not feel happy. People were waiting for food at too many tables; a woman was trying desperately to pay her check as dessert dishes sat congealing. My instinct was to bail, and then a guy at the table closest to me called over a waiter to say he had ordered the wine pairing and had nothing as his first course was being cleared. Bladder still bulging, I went back to the front, collected my friend from the chair (not even the bar) where she had been deposited because she was “the first to arrive,” and we fled. Unnoticed by anyone.

 

That’s the trouble with a publicist doing a job too well in sending out a tempting press release: The press might actually fall for it. (What’s that old saying — you can lead a writer to lunch, but you can’t let it stink?)

 

 

Here’s a profession you never saw anyone aspiring to in a high school yearbook: “spokesperson for the launch of Perrier’s plastic bottle.” I wouldn’t brag about achieving it, but a real Aren’t His 15 Minutes Up Yet? character is.

Walking through the specialty food show at the Javits, it was hard not to see America as one country under nutritional siege, or maybe just home to 280 million invalids. About one in three products seemed to have been doctored to be low-carb, sugar-free, lactose-free, fat-free, low-calorie or gluten-free. The silliest was the lactose-free mortadella (sorta like gluten-free pastrami), but I even saw low-carb Chinese noodles, from the least likely old-line producer, not to mention “no-soy” fake caviar. For once I had to be very careful what I ate — I accidentally ingested a “less-carbs” tortilla chip and it took me half an aisle to get the chemicalness out of my mouth. Altered crap looks just like real food unless you read the fine print.

 

But at least it was easy to see all the silliness on display for a change — the crowds looked to be the thinnest ever for this celebration of nonessential nutrients. A friend at one booth said many other West Coast producers couldn’t afford to attend this year, thanks to that exuberant economic recovery we keep hearing about from the great pretender with the weakness for pretzels. Twenty-three of the winners for best product, in fact, were not even on the premises. Still, as food gets more and more political, the future may lie off in a whole other direction anyway. Everywhere there were booths offering to certify products as kosher, or organic, or fair-trade. In a country where down is up and fear is security, labels have never mattered more. Or truth less. Of course credibility should be for sale.

 

 

Right behind me in the badge line in the Javits press office was a guy who swore he had proper credentials. After all, he hosts a polka program on the radio. In Amish country in Pennsylvania. And “sometimes we talk about food.” He got in, of course. Press is press, and he could not produce a dumber report than any of those that proclaimed trends spotted among 60,000-plus products. Figs, salt and tea could as well be coffee, wasabi and pecans. The show is just a show, and very little of what is shown there ever turns up in any stores near me, let alone in enough quantity to qualify as “flavor of the day.” Roll out those barrels.

 

 

You can fool a lot of New Yorkers most of the time, but not many Italians even once. A big olive oil producer I met in Palermo was at the food show and still reeling from his dinner at Lupa. For eight people, he was staggered to say, the bill was $900 (and he was packing euros). Worse, the food was all wrong. Debasing-of-culture wrong, in fact. For the “meat rolls,” he said with a mix of mystification and disgust, “they put salad in them. On the inside.” At least he could take four Alka-Seltzers and get over the Carnegie Deli. That Batali burn lingers.

 

 

The surprise is not that JUdson Grill is closing. It’s that anyone would think the world needs more Bobby Flay. Or more bogus Spanish/Latino/macho. Comparing the Equitable building to the TWC is also pushing things, but then Metro editors looking to fill weekend pages seem to be becoming easily pushable, especially by marginalized hangers-on who could never get hired on staff.

 

 

Something weird has happened to Where magazine. The copy I picked up at the Javits actually had some restaurant coverage that didn’t seem irredeemably clueless. It’s either got a better class of advertisers to promote or the restaurant “reporter” I once met at a press lunch has moved on. (She was the one who bit into a shiitake and asked, “What is this, baloney?”) The best part is that its map shows no eating options north of Kitchen 82, leaving my neighborhood safe from Republicans. But I still wouldn’t pay $6 an issue for the thing, let alone $56 a year. Tourists who want to “plan ahead” should know there’s a bridge for sale here, too.

 

 

A Montreal restaurant roundup in a formerly prestigious publication actually included the phrase “screamed my taste buds to attention.” I know a prison in Baghdad that might be interested in that maneuver, and not for an oyster shooter.

My eagle-eyed if underemployed friend Heidi Yorkshire faxed along a great true confession from the designers of the first Kimpton to open in New York. At SilverLeaf Tavern, they’re promising a “netherworld ambiance.” Which is just what this town needs: more restaurant hell.

 

 

Speaking of which, I know there isn’t enough room in a whole book to tell a story the way it really happened. So I guess I’ll just have to take up valuable cyberspace to set the record straight. I went to Le Cirque first with a top editor at Allure and we got the Ron Galotti treatment: fawning to the point of slobbering by the circus jerk, spectacular food, lots of freebie extras, face time with Daniel, major fanny kissing on the way out. Snowed, I called for my consort’s birthday and was graciously granted a 9:30 or 10 o’clock reservation. We were greeted by CJ’s rather substantial posterior for some minutes on arriving, and the treatment went downhill from there. We had to wait forever at the bar for our table, then the waiter just stood tapping his pen on his pad and asking, “Didja come to talk or didja come to eat?” I remember nothing out of the ordinary on our plates, only the sight of chairs being upended around us and a vacuum firing up in the dregs of the evening. What went wrong at the Schrambling table was that it was in the wrong restaurant. Great ones honor reservations if they offer them around midnight.

 

 

The good news is that Kalustyan’s has closed its upscale cafe “for renovations.” The sad news is that the chef must be making breads for the store now. The usually excellent vegetable paratha could have come out of Otto’s pizza oven.

 

 

It’s been a long, hard contest, but I think I have found the very worst waiter in all of Manhattan, one right out of “Tommy.” I suffered him when Soho Cantina was brand new and figured he had to have been fired by the third night. But no, he’d somehow found his way back and was bumbling through lunch on a day with all of three tables in play. I stupidly stuck around to try the duck “confit” quesadilla and a glass of cava, which was ordering trouble, because he had me to repeat both, and his hand shook as his brain struggled to connect (it was like watching Bush try to sign his name). Then he stopped me on the way to the bathroom to ask again what I wanted to drink and I had to spell it out: Cava. Sparkling wine. Yes, white. A long time later a trough arrives with a large corn tortilla in it but not a shred of poultry. I flagged down the only animate being, the busboy, and asked about duck. D-U-C-K. Pato. He took it away and maybe 45 minutes later the real thing landed. And this was well after Witless had come by to assure me it would be right out at the very minute one of the three women at the next table was getting up in desperation to go fetch menus. Don’t ask how long the check and change took. He did wipe the $12 quesadilla off the bill, but the place is going to go bankrupt if all Cheney-ups are atoned with giveaways. The guy should be shipped off to Denmark, where anyone aspiring to be entrusted to carry food and drink has to go to school for three years. Not to diss the handicapped, but this is not a profession for pinball wizards.

 

 

The FCI is nothing if not sly. Its tiny front-page ad touting a new program — learn to be a restaurant reviewer — ran on just the day some readers might be wishing for Alan Richman.

 

 

Lately when I open my e-mail I can’t tell if it’s PR or if it’s parody. One day it’s a restaurant promoter boasting of a sushi chef combining eel and Boursin (even a shark would hesitate), and the next it’s a liqueur flogger insisting that celebrities I’ve never heard of are pouring the stuff in their hair for “extra richness and shine.” The Onion is paying the wrong writers. Flacks do it with a straight face.

Here’s how bold-face the Le Cirque party was: they let me in. A few stars did stud the many rooms, if you see luster in the likes of Joan Rivers and Rudy and Judi, but it was easy to suspect Sirio’s problems are not just with location and landlord these days. What one straight-faced guest called the In Crowd looks dangerously close to interment, despite all efforts at surgical denial. I’ve never seen so many tight faces over such sagging flesh (rule of decay: once your nipples graze your navel, you might want to cover your assets). I’ve always found the place a little gloomy for parties, but on this night it really had a “Shining” aura.

 

It was also no Gotham. The good stuff must have been far back in the kitchen, which I was never able to penetrate beyond the salt cod fritters and the zeppole by another name; closer to hand I saw nothing but little crab cakes and miniature quiches being passed and big steam tables with ravioli in one room and the dregs of a seafood soup in another. Aside from the hyper-efficient bartenders, who were apparently bent on emptying the Champagne cellar into flutes the size of tubas, the waiters had that patented dismissiveness bordering on contempt I remember so well from my last self-financed sit-down at Le Cirque, on 65th Street. “Watch your back” was as pleasant as they got.

 

The real lesson of the night is not to believe what you read in the papers. The Times, once again, comes off like the Chalabi Crier, helpfully passing along one side of the story for a restaurateur with a book to promote. (One article pays dishwashers $29 an hour, another tells you there might be a lower figure involved but you won’t be seeing it in the Corrections.) A fellow cynic had the best response when I threw out my second-hand insight that Le Cirque was limping because it had not had a bold-face chef or pastry chef for so long: “Maybe that was Sirio’s mistake: having name chefs in the first place.” Siegfried could have told him what happens when the spotlight shifts to the tiger.

In the frenzy of mourning and forgetfulness the Reagan Wannabe has had his underlings ordain batter-dipped frozen French fries as a fresh vegetable. Which would seem absurd until you consider that it’s actually good for Kerry. No one can eat freedom fries without that other compassionate Republican vegetable, ketchup. And Heinz is the one American brand still proudly displayed in just about every country we travel to.

 

 

Manhattan looked like the Reagan years over the weekend. Only this time the long lines for food were not at soup kitchens but at festivals, one Indian and one barbecue. Bypassing them both reminded me of one of the more disheartening experiences in my first go-round at the Times in the Eighties, the night a top editor had a meltdown over a story about congressional staffers driving around handing out sandwiches to the homeless. “We can’t run this,” he yelled. “It makes Washington sound like Calcutta.” Then as today, reality was not going to get in the way of morning in America.

Reverence for Reagan must also explain the bizarre clothing choices of so many patrons at Rosa Mexicano last week. Half the restaurant seemed to be wearing the same skimpy shorts and T-shirts all those slobs lined up to see the coffin with the frequent flyer miles did in DC. And anyone who thinks dress codes are silly has never tried to eat queso fundido while Stiltonesque flesh is bulging out of scraps of fabric all around.

 

 

Kalustyan’s has hired a PR firm. Which makes sense since the store needs about as much help with exposure as Paris Hilton does. If it were me, I’d take that money and hire some chefs for its lame restaurants.

 

 

Panchito the new reviewer in town gets points for following the foreign correspondent script: stick with what’s already been printed. His sophomore effort on Five Ninth, though, left me wondering how far you can stretch a metaphor before the reader breaks (or just pupas out).

 

 

The Daily News has done away with the best thing in the Sunday paper, its details-only answer to the pretentiously silly Vows column. I loved reading what was on the menu at weddings — forget how they met; tell me what they serve and I’ll tell you who they are. Now the News sometimes gives the salient details, but the sappy stuff predominates. Don’t they know all happy couples are alike? It’s the cannoli cream filling in the tiramisu cake that makes them worth reading about.

 

 

Usually when I get back to New York I have to spend the first week or so breaking myself of acting pleasant. It says something about Copenhagen that I almost snapped at a waiter at the Neptune Room within four hours of landing at JFK. All he did was hand my consort a card, saying it was from a man at another table who had drawn a caricature of the two of us. Accustomed to street hustlers, I started to snarl, “No, we’re not paying — take it away,” when I saw the artiste himself walking out and smiling. Turns out he was from the neighborhood and does his little couples trick with the illegible signature just for fun. And he does it even though his wife, the waiter said, “knows the woman usually hates it.” Danes must live among us.

 

 

Everyone always wonders if the Beard awards really mean anything, and now there’s an answer. Cook for the awards dinner and you could wind up being discovered by the newspaper in your own front yard, years after you have made a name as a Latina genius with a fabulous restaurant and a solid book on chocolate. The down side? The headline will read as if it wandered off a trend story. And the address of neither of your places will be included in the big splash.

 

 

Look for the Dining section to complete its devolution into the old Living section very soon. The newly named editor sticks out strongest in this ex-deputy’s mind for pitching a story on fajitas. A trend story. In 2001. (The only wackier proposal came from a woman who was also an editor in Sports then, a huge one who rolled over one day to suggest something on how restaurant hosts always seated her where flies congregated. And that at least had the dramatic arc of cause and effect to it.)

 

 

Slow Food’s quirkily translated web site lists “local rootedness” first among the movement’s key goals. Which of course explains why crawfish will be served at the next Slow Food fund-raiser in New York. Last time I looked there were no bayous on this island, only hustlers.

 

 

The doomed restaurant space at 56th and Eighth has finally found a taker, after dying a lingering death as Tapika and a mercifully quick one as Cinnabar. Unfortunately, it’s one of those obscure new banks, and so many are opening around Manhattan anymore that a new S&L crisis has to be headed our way. (Remember when banks were closing and restaurants were taking over the spaces?)

 

 

Just when I was starting to think I was the only old-timer in town who expects an editor to be an arbiter of fairness and not a critic, I got an anxious email from a friend who had just had dinner at an ambitious restaurant opened by a friend of her husband. He was freaking out, she said, because the Diner’s Journal about his place had been so snarky. Wouldn’t that mean the reviewer would have to agree with the boss? No wonder restaurateurs are begging for Bruni, who is either still in Rome or all over town, depending on who’s gossiping. He’s gotta be better than a ramp with two hats.

 

 

The Washington Post apparently just retyped the press release for its report that Poste has a new chef from Guastavino’s, which was “awarded two stars by the New York Times under [his] watch.” How soon they forget Daniel Orr.

 

 

Considering how many chefs have cameras in the dining room, I’ve always wondered why more don’t bug the tables, too — imagine how much better they could do if they knew what diners were really saying. But then maybe they do. The other night I was telling friends how the chef where we were eating had once written me a four-page frothing letter objecting to a story I had done when he was working for a different group. Later he walked over and said: “You know that letter I sent you? It was bullshit.” I knew that. How did he?

 

 

Watching how the porn industry has responded to an AIDS outbreak has been enlightening: Because workers are tested early and often for sexually transmitted diseases, all filming was shut down as soon as two cases were detected. Contrast that with the food business, where poorly paid workers with no hope of health care are turned loose to toss salads and manhandle meatloaf. One prep guy with lethal hepatitis can conceivably infect hundreds of diners, and yet it would never occur to employers to monitor food handlers’ conditions. Typhoid Mary was a cook, let’s not forget.

 

The NYDaily News has added some surprisingly lively and shockingly high-end food coverage on restaurant-review Fridays. Maybe the competion should take a look. It’s a great way to pander to cretins on grocery-ad day and salvage your soul on going-out day — they may lie down with Cool Whip, but they don’t have to wake up with Red Lobster.

Just when you think things really can’t get worse, Time magazine reports that those Healthy Skies wordsmiths working for big business’s federal branch have decided to reclassify wild salmon to include farmed fish released into rivers. Just when Americans are waking up to the risks of farmed salmon, they will have no way of knowing what they are buying or eating. And more “wild” salmon, Time says, will be treated as evidence that stocks are increasing, which means 15 species could lose environmental protection. But hey, what’s good for the power companies is surely good for fish and us. We can always eat beef. Under this regime, if it can’t be tested we know it’s safe.

 

 

I’m still sorting out what to make of the Greenmarket after the public airing of its dirty laundry, but it was not encouraging to see Green Mountain Coffee Roasters on Union Square last time I was there. It’s hard enough to get New Yorkers to understand why there are so few local foods for sale in springtime. Why confuse them with patently commmercial booths? When I stopped and asked what the market connection was, I got a long rap about fair trade and how coffee can’t be grown locally and how noble goals can all be combined and how they were not selling but handing out free samples. It was every explanation but WMD and liberating Iraqis. But the whole encounter made me marvel yet again at what a friend in Portland, Ore., had emailed me: the three weekly markets she’s involved in had 233 vendors last year, and “we’re working on recruiting more (all our locations are technically ‘full’ — we’re just looking for more variety in every way).” New York, a city more than four times as big, has exactly 185 for 30 locations over seven days a week. Something’s wrong with this picture, and it’s not just all those nasty cookies and industrial breads for sale on 17th Street. If there’s room for do-gooder coffee, there should be space for a new crop of artisans.

 

 

A press packet for a series of food guidebooks included a wacky blurb from the inimitable grayest old lady at the old gray lady: Touting the Brazilian edition, she enthused that it “adds Ole! to the kitchen.” I guess I should be impressed that she didn’t babble in Latin, but don’t they speak Portuguese down Rio way?

 

 

More lost in translation: An Italian friend is in town and we drag him to a Theater District restaurant with an all-over-the-map menu but a good wine list. Because his mom runs a restaurant in Tuscany, he knows enough to be impressed by the prices: a Barolo here is half what it would be at home. But he is a little baffled by the food. What is fennel? he wonders, and I luckily conjure up the Italian (finocchio), to which he responds with a story of how that word also means gay, although he has no idea why. Monkfish he translates as pesce de monaco (fish of the monk). But then he spots something really tantalizing: beef salad. Actually, we tell him, that’s beeT, but he has no idea what the ingredient is and the word fails me. We both try to describe it (red, or yellow, which confuses the issue, and shaped like a turnip, which is another alien idea). The salad arrives and he excitedly digs around for the beeT. The yellow chunks turn out to be tomato and he’s soon excavating his greens. And when he spots the mysterious temptation, he just laughs: “Oh, barbabietola! Of all the vegetables, this is the only one I don’t like.” Leaving every slice untouched, he listens closely when we recount the tale of the salad we ordered once in France without knowing what a certain word meant, only to be served slices of gruesome cow muzzle. “Museau,” he repeated, clearly filing that one away with beeT, “a bad mistake but one never to make again.”

 

 

All the news that’s aged to print: When the Daily News weighed in on Chef’s Theater, it sent the drama critic and the restaurant reviewer right away and produced two adamant thumbs down. The newspaper not of record waited until Two Hot Tamales were on Broadway to weigh in on their predecessor, Tyler Florence, which is sorta like critiquing an entree after it’s scraped into the trash. Everyone knows the show is a bomb. Why describe the detonation and not the latest dud?

 

Just before a new restaurant is to throw its launch party, the kitchen catches fire and the flack has to send out an email suddenly rescinding the invites. Not one to miss an opportunity, he mentions that “Thomas Keller will agree that no, this is not a new trend in restaurant openings.” I was appalled, but damned if lazy “reporters” didn’t seize on that peg to run a little item, without even waiting for a third fire to make a trend. If the same guy is pimping for Pop and the Fino family, I can’t wait to read the release: Someone Is Offing the Obscure Restaurateurs of New York.

 

This is why New York needs 15,000 restaurants: You can’t go back to most of them. Places I think are great on first encounter just seem to fall apart on repeat visits. Paprika in the East Village was perfection once and Sardi’s poor on a second try — if the decor were not so distinctive, I would have been convinced we had wandered into the wrong room, or the revival of Candid Camera. Both pastas we tried were so lame I left wondering if the dishwasher and cook had swapped stations for the night. West Bank Cafe was another re-bomination. The risotto was by Uncle Ben, the Asian-glazed snapper was more like jerky and the special of monkfish on more risotto looked and tasted like spats of the sea. And then there was the Cub Room Cafe, where the Cobb salad used to be the very model of a California standard. This time it was mostly onions, light on the avocado and with slime cubes substituting for turkey. Luckily, I had my receipt to keep me mad: with a glass of wine, my pathetic little lunch came to almost $30. That I’ll remember if I ever get the urge to go back.

 

 

Two more signs retailers understand Americans are not getting any smarter: At Bloomingdale’s I spotted Salton’s “quesadilla maker,” a $30 electrical appliance complete with 18-page manual apparently designed for those dunces with no skillet, griddle or oven. And Crate & Barrel is selling an avocado masher. For the fork-deficient.

 

 

In a week when it was depressingly clear we’re becoming one world, I was happy to get a small sign of the light side. My regular email from “the largest Indian food site” not only offered lasagne recipes but also mentioned that the dish in question is a favorite of Garfield’s. Finding Italian in an alien place was no surprise. But I didn’t realize even the cartoon cat had been virtually outsourced.

 

The big argument in restaurants when I worked at self-proclaimed ethics central used to be over just getting a check. At BLT Steak they did something new: sent out extra appetizers and main course and free desserts but took them off the bill with a line marked “NYTimes discount.” Apparently the freebie has gone legit. And it brought back memories of the night a few years ago when I ran up a $70 tab at the bar at Jean Georges. I was with a woman who is rather recognizable in the food world, and the bartender wanted to comp us. I of course insisted, very pompously, “I have to pay. I work for the New York Times.” His laugh still echoes in my ear.

 

 

Never let it be said that the fat cats in Congress aren’t looking out for America at large and at war. Finally confronted with undeniable evidence that we the people are becoming the new dinosaurs, little tiny brains in huge lumbering bodies, our friends in high places have decided the most pressing need is to protect Krispy Kreme. Apparently if McDonald’s doesn’t have to worry about lawsuits over obesity and diabetes, all its patrons will suddenly acquire the Personal Responsibility the bill is named for. Suing Burger King because you weigh 500 pounds is absurd. But so is a Taco Bell burrito advertised as containing a full half-pound of meat and cheese. This is just big business as usual: Leave no campaign contributor behind.

 

And it’s too bad Congress will never pass a real Corporate Responsibility Act. What kind of company would stiff the caterer it contracted to provide meals to soldiers in Iraq, including the turkey dinner seen ’round the world? It wouldn’t be the one still paying Dick Cheney, would it?

 

The oldest question of which came first is not the chicken or the egg but the bad service or the skimpy tip when a woman is involved. Still, who would expect to ask it at Lever House, a place apparently so dependent at lunch on women (the scary kind with the old eyes in the tight-as-a-22-year-old’s sockets)? My poor hostess got her espresso before our dessert, had to beg first to have the table pulled out so she could slip in and then for a check and generally had to put up with the offhand to dismissive treatment that leads to perpetuating the stereotype. Maybe because she lives here only part time, she was livid. I thought it was just another meal in Manhattan.

The food was certainly nothing out of the ordinary. My cod was a nice-enough piece of fish sitting on a pool of sweet onions that looked like cat spitup and completely sapped the Alfredo olive sauce of its salty effect; the pear crisp needed a refresher course from Betty Crocker on the proper balance between crust and fruit (my teeth still ache). I’m glad I went, despite the callousness and the din, but really, it’s just another Kleenex restaurant: good for one use.

 

Lever House actually reminded me of another unanswerable question: Why do so many restaurants set out a bread plate with butter knife and leave it empty for an entire meal? Is it careless or is it calculated?

 

 

More delicious irony: Just as even the Russians are saying they don’t want filthy American chickens, and as the rest of the world is waving crosses and garlic to keep out our weaned-on-blood mad cows, the U.S. government has banned all imports of French processed meats, from foie gras to sausage. Our protectors do care about clean factories, as long as they’re in Old Europe.

 

I go to press events when hope triumphs over experience, knowing most are exercises in emptiness. You leave overfed but underinformed, usually because the usual gaggle of food people shows up for some mutual back-scratching and talks over any presentation while counting on the press kit in the goodie bag to fill in the gaps.

 

But what Sue Torres organized at Suenos was that rarity: a seminar, not a circle-jerk.

No more than 20 people were there, all lined up as if in class, to watch eight chefs cook and teach. Nine little plates were served, most with a complementary single-village mescal, but each was preceded by a discussion and tasting of the key ingredients (five chile purees and the toasted pods they were made from; achiote paste and pozole; huitlachoche and nopales). The Del Maguey mescals were presented long with a clever pass-around card showing each step of the harvesting and distilling of the agave, which spared us the deadly slide show or Powerpoint. Sniffing, tasting and listening, I learned more in a couple of hours than I would have reading 12 cookbooks.

What was being sold was the whole idea of Mexican cuisine, not a single product, and it made a huge difference. As did the realization that chefs who are competing for the same margarita drinkers (Zarela, Pampano, Noche, Paladar, Zocalo, La Palapa and Lucy’s) were coming together just to elevate food writers’ knowledge of what it is they’re putting on plates, and why.

As I left, though, I decided who really should have been at the event: restaurant critics. The level of ignorance in most reviews in New York City is appalling (they mix up tortillas and tacos, complain when chilies are charred, love burritos beyond all reason). Now that anonymity is apparently off the table, why shouldn’t critics take lessons from the chefs they’ll be evaluating?

 

 

New York’s Greenmarkets are almost 30 years old, but I never knew they existed until the summer of 1984 or 1985, when my consort was assigned by New York Magazine to shoot photos for a gossip item on how the farmers there were allegedly price-fixing. I tagged along and came home with a big bunch of basil and tomatoes the likes of which I’d never seen before and I think some really ripe peaches (but that part I may be romancing). I’ve been hooked ever since, to the point where heading to Union Square twice a week is like going to church for me and where at the height of summer I’m in a market virtually every day, on 97th Street or up near Columbia, in Tribeca and in the West Village. Always, though, I remember the rabid farmers’ meeting I was once privileged to attend, one fall in the mid-90s when Barry Benepe persuaded me to donate some copy on squash for a brochure he was planning to distribute (never happened). It was like watching a rock overturning and the bugs crawling out, but with microphones. The place has been contentious as hell for as long as I’ve been shopping there, and the Taliban could not be as harsh on rules of behavior.

 

All of which makes the NYT op-ed piece by the Greenmarket’s recently canned director that much more fascinating. She let a lot more bugs out, but many of them were pretty harmless (anyone who goes to farmers for pies is making a margarine mistake, and it’s right there on the label). Some of her facts were shaky (it’s unlikely there were heirloom tomatoes on sale in 1976; the turkey farmer has not been in Union Square for years), but she is right that the market could be far, far better. Still, nothing she wrote justifies the reaction among what the Times would call “the food elite,” all the bluster about boycotting the market. Sure, you can find ramps for $18 a pound in the Chelsea Market, but it isn’t quite the same as coming across the first of the season on the west side of the Greenmarket for $2.50 a bunch one chilly morning in April when the only other green things come from greenhouses. Flawed as it is, the market is just the closest New Yorkers come to seasonal awareness. And as long as it’s not abusing little boys, I’m going to keep going there.

 

 

As for the companion piece in the Times, the head of Slow Food USA might want to read his organization’s own web postings. He argues that the hard-fought advice to eat locally should be abandoned in favor of saving livestock breeds by trucking them in from specialty producers in the Midwest until local demand grows. But in Buffalo, one of the most economically bleak places on the map right now, a farmer was persuaded by Slow Food to grow three heritage varieties of turkey last year and unloaded all 54 birds for gilded-pheasant prices. It can be done, now. The old arguments against long-haul food haven’t changed (including the fact that oil is squandered in the process). They’ve been joined by a new one: If you grow them close to home, they will sell.

 

 

The autopsy would have been a success if the patient had only been dead: The team the Times assembled in Arts & Leisure to dissect Rocco’s the Restaurant Wreck was almost as much a joke as the series itself. Try to find the logic in bringing together the Mamma Leone of theater district pub owners (and how many readers were surprised to learn there really was a man behind the logo?) with an off-the-radar restaurateur with much to say and little to impart and the oddly out-of-terroir California chef now turning out pasta to $25 & Under second-guessing. Finally, and most demanding of an email flood to the paper’s new public editor, there was the big-time restaurateur who left a particularly acidic trail across Page 6 with his opinions of the star chef well before this exercise in banality was ever conceived. No wonder the photo took up more room than their insights. The whole exercise plumbed new depths of vacuity.

 

But it was good for one reason. After going on 23 years in New York, I do sometimes idly wonder what it would be like to be living in Lincoln, Nebraska, again and fantasizing about the big city. This piece would have brought it home: you ain’t missing a thing. Although the editors certainly are.

 

 

In another sign of the decline of the gray empire, the Sunday magazine has now dropped all pretense that its food column exists except to attract the occasional token ad for Colavita olive oil. It’ll shove anything in that space, even cranberries in April. If it really cared about reader service, it would at least advise us to start freezing ramps for the November story.

 

 

While California almond and pistachio promoters were blanketing magazines with advertising and food writers with heavy mailings, the competition in the walnut groves went straight to where growers’ dollars really make a difference: what used to be the federal government. The FDA has just ruled that walnut packages can now carry a health claim, carefully couched and borderline meaningless but a health claim nonetheless: “Supportive but inconclusive evidence shows that eating 1.5 ounces per day of walnuts as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.” Substitute any nut in that nonsense and the same would probably apply (although not peanuts, despite the nattering about them on NPR — those are legumes). It almost makes you long for the days of oat bran. And Big Brother where it belonged: in the agencies overseeing food. (Don’t get me started on the beef processor who is forbidden to test for mad cow because it might hurt business for the big producers with the big bucks for “our” representatives.)

 

 

Newsday’s new handout amNY proved it was worth the price with a pickup piece from the Washington Post on chervil that was graphically illustrated with a sprig of . . . flat-leaf parsley. Must be the season, though: The blackboard in front of the bison stand at the Union Square Greenmarket had a sign promoting Sirlion Brisket. (Salute when you order that bizarro cut.) Another sign in front of a little place I passed on the Bowery called Orange Valve was touting Stir-Fried Frank Steak. (For a second I actually thought they meant a hot dog.) And what can you say about brand-namers who thought Effen sounded smart for a new vodka from Holland?

 

 

Buffalo is the last city where you might expect to find a hotel on the exalted level of the Mansion on Delaware Avenue, a lustrously restored private home from the 1860s with 25 rooms and three suites outfitted with just the right blend of antique and boutique, from fireplaces and a billiard parlor to whirlpool baths and Frette robes. The common rooms are so gorgeous you hate to leave for a day of Target and Tops. It has butlers who pour good wines; it has some of the best teas imaginable (and in silk bags to boot). Plus it hands every guest a little card with imprinted name declaring him or her “in residence.” Both the nights we slept there in the cheapest room I marveled at how far $145 goes in a beaten town.

Unfortunately, the Mansion had one weak link. Every morning the pool table was draped with swanky linens and arrayed with unripe fruit, weird little bagels, over-the-hill cream cheese and enough iced-thick pastries to send even passersby on the sidewalk into a diabetic coma. One day there was a cheesy flatbread encrusted with funky smoked salmon; the next there was a plate of tired cheese including past-its-prime St. Andre (to smear on the bagels, I could only guess). It was the kind of spread you keep going back to hoping for something, anything that will satisfy. Just why came clear when I heard a staffer on the phone, ordering “65 mixed pastries” from a bakery, and not an artisanal one like the excellent Dolci relatively nearby on Elmwood Avenue. This is a five-star hotel with a B&B mind-set in the morning.

 

 

Now Congress had better get cracking on a new law to cover the lardasses at all the women’s magazines who keep turning their pages into advertorials to promote the grossest foods in the supermarket, in combinations even the super-sizers would consider excessive. I would hate to see Comstock cherry pie filling left vulnerable to bonbon-addicted housewives’ lawsuits. Real Simple has been the worst offender, but even lowly Woman’s Day has a 1-2-3 Dessert feature that combines a ready-made chocolate crust with caramels and condensed milk and chocolate chips and whipped cream and pecans in a “no-bake truffle pie.” Each slice allegedly contains only 419 calories, but who among the most Personally Responsible can eat just a one-tenth sliver? (It’s the opposite of super-sizing: If you can’t keep the fat count down, up the servings.)

 

 

Not to keep kicking a limping newspaper, but did anyone else notice a weird similarity in the reviews of Hearth and Chestnut? Each included a graf on the warming effect of a drink at the bar. Call it “a feeling of well-being,” “a promising glow” or just what it is: a buzz. But chefs now know the secret: First you marinate the critic.

 

I have so many mildly offensive eating experiences that I sometime wonder if I could still discern a true abomination. I got my answer at Kalustyan’s new [and shortlived] Masala Cafe, where the menu promises “Indian-inspired cuisine with a French accent.” That’s a long way of saying travesty.

The place is quite sleek and good-looking (the designer did Tamarind as well). The service was exceptional. The wine list is a real wine list, and Champagne and prosecco by the glass are suggested when you sit down (both go surprisingly well with flavors never meant to touch alcohol). But the food was was not even decent enough to qualify as a letdown.

A friend and I split the trio of samosas, billed as one each of goat cheese, turkey and apple and potato. The goat cheese was awol, but it couldn’t be any better than the underseasoned other two. Samosas are one of the greatest things out of India, and why would someone substitute rice paper for the usual flaky dough? These were like spanakopita with all the grease and none of the pungency.

I don’t know what came over me when I decided to order the Indian bouillabaise. I’m not even crazy about the real thing. But this gets an A for abysmal: a medium-sized bowl of mostly mussels with a few shrimp, two bits of fish and two scallops adrift in a broth that had less character than canned. I had to ask for the cumin-cayenne aioli, and when even mayonnaise cannot come to the rescue, you know it’s bland. My friend’s whole fish, the special, came bones and all in a heavy crust and was surprisingly dull (the sauce with it seemed to be the same oniony red blandness that was with the samosas). Worse, the side dishes were broccoli rabe (Indian? French? Misguided?) and potato wedges that could have been fried, could have been roasted but were still about diner level. For $25. (Don’t you sometimes wonder if chefs just pluck prices out of the air?)

The one saving grace was a side order of fruity naan that was what everything else was not: inspired and well executed. Dessert was forgettable. Literally. With three glasses of wine and one tea, the tab was $57 a person.

 

 

Kalustyan’s is one of New York’s greatest markets. The selection, the quality, the prices are extraordinary. Why would it open a restaurant missing the essential ingredient? Before I tasted anything, I was actually feeling sorry for Masala Cafe for being doomed to be a $25 & Under thanks to NYTimes restaurant redlining. By the time I left, I was looking longingly across the street at Curry in a Hurry, envying the cab drivers.

 

 

So which is it?

February 27, 2004: “And for that alone, I might order a glass of sake, stay for the gougères, then feign illness and steal across Columbus Circle to Jean Georges for a meal that never disappoints.”

March 28, 2001: “Although I have always savored cooking for friends at home, a recent break-the-bank experience at a restaurant made it all the more appealing. (Valentine’s Day. Jean Georges. More than $600 for two. We split the check.) Who needs that kind of trauma?”

And by the way, when exactly is the season for miniature pattypan squash? Isn’t it the same as the one for “new” potatoes?

 

 

A waiter said it, not me: Mix is “Alain Ducasse on sale.” But who wants to eat in Filene’s French Basement?

Twenty minutes after my consort and I walked into the place, I started getting a Bastide feeling. One of the worst eating experiences of our long life together was inflicted on us at another Ducasse spinoff, Bastide de Moustiers in Provence, and that whole long, sloppy, abusive evening was flashing before my eyes on 58th Street. There’s no way I could face rabbit stew with only paws in it ever again. Especially if slovenly service was involved.

The inhospitality started at the door, where the coat check was a scrum: gouged guests forcing their way out and us trying to get in while one woman wedged way too many wool objects into far too small a space. The guy at the computer checked our reservation, assured us he was “checking the table” and shunted us off to the bar, where we stood and stood, staring at a half-empty, overlit dining room that looked a little like God’s waiting room. That was the first flashback, to my days selling shoes, when the only women who could afford the really expensive pairs were too old to do them justice. Mix is what Dorian Gray would have thought of as kicky and fun.

When we finally did get seated, it was on a long empty banquette, right next to a table that had not been bused yet (again, in a half-filled room with waiters lounging everywhere). We were soon joined by a geriatric-with-a-capital-G couple moved midmeal from a colder part of the room, him gumming and her braying, but we still had no menu, no water, no wine, no waiter. Those Bastide vibes were getting stronger. This could be a very miserable, very expensive death of an evening. After plastic menus were finally slapped down on the table, Bob didn’t hesitate when I suggested we bail. And as we pushed open the front door, Mr. Oblivious at the computer called out merrily: “Thanks for coming.”

That was at 7:55. By 8:15 we were drinking Champagne at a walk-in table in the bar at rm. We had bread, beans-and-olive spread, water, menus, waiters, and the place was packed on this Friday night. Spaghettini with lump crab and caviar in sea urchin sauce would have attoned for all sins at any rate, as would the bacon-wrapped cod with escargot on polenta cakes, not to mention the $45 Mercury.

Maybe the French just don’t get diner style. Jeans don’t fit three-star chefs anymore than peanut butter and BLTs suit them. And it’s not just Ducasse, who first tried casual Friday at his bastide (where our room was as luxurious as the dinner was a faux peasant disaster). Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Market in France had much in common with Mix when it first opened, but there we were too Americans-in-Paris dumb to leave.

Ducasse’s New York flagship may not have the most dazzling food I’ve ever eaten, but it did lay on the service, to the point of absurdity. Now I realize that’s what you pay for with him. And it’s what’s first to go when the markdown begins.

 

 

On another global front, consider this: While we’re in denial, the Indians are in the laboratory. Bushco is steathily editing global warming out of government reports. Indian scientists are busily developing a rice hybrid that can grow in salt water. Why? Because sea levels are rising thanks to a little phenomenon the oilman in chief would prefer to ignore. Remind me: Which world is the third one?

 

 

I know I should be appalled that Rick Bayless has sold his soul to Burger King rather than Taco Bell, just in time for Day of the Dead. I know I should think it’s a major scandal that he can actually say some scary-cheap chicken sandwiches fit with his “message” of “good, simple everyday eating.” But as long as there are chefs out there shilling for butter-flavored Crisco, and as long as Thomas Keller is paid to say California raisins are the greatest thing since butter-poached lobster, it’s tough to get riled up. This is America. Honor and integrity are mostly missing ingredients these days.

 

Exhibit A is a report by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent that starts off: “U.S. soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops.” It gets more depressing as you read on (search news.independent.co.uk). We’re talking food with deeper meaning.

 

At least Bayless is only sullying his own hyper-inflated reputation. What’s happening on those farms is being done in all our names.

 

 

A food writer trying to cover the Fancy Food Show at the Javits Center is like a blind person trying to describe an elephant. The thing is just too big. Three spottings of wasabi, or of white tea, or of honey might add up to a trend in the real world. In the sensory overload of a bulimic’s dream that is the food show, it might just be the tail or the trunk. Or the dung.

I managed to taste only 143 different cheeses, chocolates, bacons, mousses, nuts, tandoori sauces, cookies, confits, salmons, pates, peanuts, potato chips, dips, mints, bread spreads, salamis, marmalades, mortadellas, margaritas, ginger beers, lemonades, andouilles, olives, meatballs and romesco sauces in my six hours at the show. Usually I have more stamina, but this year the general nervousness of the country had crept into the air-conditioned nightmare of the Javits Center. Most everything had to be sampled off a toothpick or from a plastic spoon; the usual finger-free-for-all dipping and grabbing was not allowed. And it ould take two more hands than I own to juggle my glasses, my pen and my notebook and still be able to spoon artichoke pate hygienically onto a cracker fragment while being jostled by hungry hordes of hydra-handed cellphone users.

What was most laughable was overhearing sanctimoniously fastidious exhibitors and buyers monitoring the toothpick piles. As one said: “We’re concerned about our health here.” This from a guy who, like so many at the show, weighed a good 350 pounds. The morbidly obese have it all over on the mildly queasy: Calories don’t count. Germs do.

 

 

The coverup is now looking worse than the impropriety at the Times.

 

To the paper’s credit, it did finally run an Editor’s Note disclosing half of what the whole food world already knew about the blow job passing as a Spice Market review. But the followup sent out to readers who complained to the Times’ public editor was a piece of unartful dodgery worthy of the White House. An irate friend passed along the response she got secondhand from Dining. Boiled down, it said that Gray Kunz was omitted from the review for space reasons (by my count, his full name takes up less of a line than a single Vongerichten), and the blower simply “forgot” that one of the most important chefs in the country had given her a sappy love poem to splash on her book. No mention was made of the fact that the newspaper of record had never officially expunged Kunz; for all readers would know, what was reported exactly a month before was still true (J-G and GK “are the drawing cards at Spice Market;” the “two kitchen superstars have guided the restaurant’s menu”). And if, as the followup note said, the “restaurateur” who “risks his money” generally gets the credit in the Times, where were the licks for the Monsieur Moneybags without whom there would be no Vongerichten empire?

 

Really, this is the age of the internet and checkable facts as close as a click. Fudging should take a little more imagination than that. If only the Times held its staff to the standards it found the Clintons so lacking in for eight long years.

 

 

At some point the NYTimes is going to have to stop blaming Jayson Blair and just fix the thing. Hiring a real restaurant critic would be a good place to start. After two years of lethargy on the food front, seriously good places are opening all over, and they’re being graded by substitute teachers whose gold stars are worth about as much as their F’s. Imagine the Broadway theater critic’s job being treated so cavalierly for so long. Directors would be begging to have the butcher back.

What makes things so much weirder is that for the first time, the top cursor in the Dining section is also acting as a critic. I’m sure his editorial judgment would never be confused with his critical faculties, but the two hats do seem a little too close for comfort. And it has to put his fill-ins in a conflicted position. He comes out swinging for the potstickers, and what are they supposed to say? What we once overheard a drunken soccer fan telling a policeman in Hong Kong? You, sir, are a wanker?

 

Spice Market has brought the whole mess to a public boil, and not just because of the Rick Braggadocio prose (for starters, you’ll whiff more blood at Food Emporium’s Saran-wrapped butcher counter than on Ninth Avenue). I went in two nights before the review and saw a connected friend at the food bar talking up Gray Kunz in the kitchen, and she asked him to get the four of us a table with no reservation. Suddenly one of the harem at the reception desk materialized to say “the LATimes” could sit down at 8 o’clock. Things went wildly off the track after that, but it was very clear that Jean-Georges Vongerichten was not the only chef turning street food into Gold Card fare. Reading the review, Gray was the man who wasn’t there. (So was Stanley Wong, whose name is actually on the menu.) Guess the arbiter of fairness was distracted, rating cheesecake.

 

As an ex-copy editor, though, my favorite part of probably the most overanalyzed restaurant review since Ruth Reichl got conned by Sirio was the little matter of the alleged inscription on the maitre d’s T-shirt. On the same day the Times ran a correction on David Letterman’s marquee (not Late Night but Late Show), Dining readers were treated to two references to the former. Another reason to have a dedicated editor.

 

A tale of two waitstaffs: After lounging hungrily downstairs at Spice Market for at least an hour, three of us were a little looped and sagging toward passing out in the wasabi peanuts when we finally decided to bail. We got the $62 check, stuck my credit card in the folder and tried frustratedly to find our MIA waitress. Finally my consort stood up, stopped the next uniformed pretty person meandering past and said: “Can we pay this?” Even in a Greek diner a busboy would have grabbed the folder and helped us out. This blank creature just looked at Bob and said: “Who’s your waitress?” How would we know? They all look alike, and it had been so long since we had seen her.

 

A few days later we two stop at Petite Abeille in Tribeca at the height of brunchtime and the host comes out to us on the sidewalk and offers us a menu so we can be sure it won’t be eggs only. We’re seated almost instantly at a table for four in the jammed dining room and have water and menus right away. It did take a while for the waiter to get to us, but neither of us was bothered because we were agonizing over what to order. And after we did decide, he ran over and apologized profusely for taking so long at the table of seven next to us. When I asked for wine, he came back instantly with a brimming glass of $7 sauvignon blanc, set it down and said: “This is on me because you had to wait.” I could barely shut my mouth to eat.

 

Once again, I had to wonder if there isn’t a caste system for waiters. Those at the top are the thinking kind, empowered enough to keep the customers satisfied. Those at the bottom get to wear the cool uniforms, fantasizing that they’re superior to the people they rely on for alms.

 

I’ve had my first taste of Per Se, and it could be my last. This was at a party in Veuve Clicquot’s stunning new offices in the Starrett-Lehigh Building, where pastry chefs from five restaurants were plating desserts to go with the bottomless carafes of demi-sec. When I walked up to the Per Se table, the two young Keller acolytes behind it were determinedly studying super-tiny herb leaves to pluck the closest to perfection for what their sign said was Essence of Spring. I had a spoonful of one little orange mound without quite grasping the flavor and interrupted their mad-scientist intensity to ask: “What makes it spring?”

“What makes it creamy?” one responded distractedly.

“No, what makes it spring?”

“Apricots. And basil.”

But of course. Those are two ingredients you’ll find busting out all over the Greenmarket in March in New York. Even if they were seasonally correct, though, the Essence would taste less of spring than of Old Europe. The texture and the presentation felt as fresh as Escoffier.

 

Front-page news isn’t what it used to be. Case in point was the story about successors to Martha Stewart, all of whom insisted their phones were ringing off the cell with calls for licensing and TV deals. Unfortunately, the reporter drank a little too deeply at the hype pond he was led to. One of the smiling faces above the piece was of a woman who not only had or has products in Bed Bath and Beyond but also presided over a short-lived magazine, with Style in the logo where Living would be after her name. I developed the recipes for “her” Thanksgiving, as a matter of fact. K-Mart, get me rewrite.

 

Now that press agents are finally realizing you can write for a newspaper without moving to the town where it’s published, my mail is getting entertaining again. I just got what I thought was a parody — an invite to the opening party for a restaurant promising “Eastern European Cuisine with a touch of China.” (Isn’t Communism so over?) And another flacking firm tells me it has actually rented out Carnegie Hall (well, Weill Recital Hall, anyway) to promote reduced-fat “cheddars.” You get it, don’t you? “Moo-vements”? I want whatever they’re smoking: Who would bring together a chef from the Sea Grill, a chance to “see the meltability” of the stuff in a music venue and someone from a show called Cooking Thin at a time when protein is in? If they had to despoil a temple of culture, why not go where the fat ladies sing?

 

 

Lost in translation: Penelope on Lexington Avenue calls itself a “comfort station.” It may be meaning to conjure meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but my dictionary says that’s a toilet.

 

More bad ideas in restaurant promotion: A block association that clearly never sees what happens to posters in the subway has made the mistake of hanging a map on a lamppost at the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue exit, asking for write-in recomendations of restaurants in the meatpacking district. When I went by three guys were lined up waiting with pens at 12:30 in the afternoon. As they stepped away laughing, I could see not directions to Pastis or Markt or even Spice Market but vindictive scrawls like “go back to the ’burbs” along with the usual jocular obscenities. Never ask a New Yorker where to go. He’ll tell you.

 

 

While all the right-wing nut cases are haranguing the Spanish for being tapas-eating surrender monkeys, I’ve figured out how to show my support for their throwing their own lying bums out. I’m buying Spanish wines. The Muga Rioja blanco is particularly good if you want to drink to 77 percent voter turnout.

 

 

Dumb things come in small packages. The pocket guide to dim sum that landed on my doorstep is Exhibit A: a missal-size collection of color photos of dishes you might encounter on the rolling carts in a Chinese restaurant. Of the myriad ways to look foolish around Asian food, whipping out a book to try to tell the beef tripe from the shark fin dumpling may be one of the most guaranteed. I couldn’t imagine asking the impatient driver to hold up the cart while I flipped frantically through the pages and pages of explanations. Boning up in advance seems even sillier, since there’s so little chance you’ll find the foods you prepped for (shades of high school science tests). As squeamish as I can be, dim summing in Hong Kong taught me there’s only one solution: point and hope. I actually liked boiled pig’s ear before I understood what it was. Chronicle should do an American fast food guide for the Chinese now. I’d love to see the ingredients in a hot dog laid out so clearly.

 

 

Maybe the secret to life is just showing up. I called Crispo a week in advance for a reservation and was told the only one available all night was at 6. A friend strolled in that evening at 7:30 and was seated immediately. Spice Market tells me the only opening it has for any night for the next month is at 11. And the same friend says the place did not fill up until after 9 when she ate there on a Friday. It reminds me of the old Jerry Della Femina story about a restaurateur who turned away all reservations for the first week or so in business just to make people crazy to get in. There’s no lure like the word no.

 

These are surreal times, and not just because they’re making low-carb ice cream. The other day I overheard a woman getting professional diet counseling in a pizza place, from a guy with two slices and a Coke in front of him.

 

When my lunch date picked up the menu at Stella Osteria, she immediately put it down in dejection. “It’s the same one,” she said. Turned out there were some slight twists, but she was basically right. All the usual tired suspects were there: the same salads, the same pizzas, the same pastas. And I had the same flash I did after stopping to read the lunch menu at the new Landmarc after having just read the one at old Odeon: There must be one central factory somewhere cranking out menus. There’s so little variation anymore. And if you’ve read roast chicken once, you’ve read it a thousand times.

 

 

Amtrak has improved so radically that getting to Washington is probably the best part of the trip (actually, no, that part would be getting home). My Wednesday afternoon Acela was SRO, and I could only wonder why they don’t just add a dozen more cars and turn a profit. Who wouldn’t rather travel without a strip-search at the airport and no bathroom privileges over Shrubya’s air space? Who wouldn’t rather conserve a little oil while kids who joined the Army for college are dying for it? On the ride back to Penn Station, though, I decided Amtrak may be on its own route to profitability. The cafe car now sells a half-bottle of Meridian chardonnay for $8, uncorking included, as an alternative to those little quarter-bottles of shiver wine that have always characterized Metroliner (and airliner) misery. Add another dollar and some real food and David Gunn won’t have to go begging to Congress ever again.

 

 

The Wall Street Journal reports that Chiquita has ’fessed up to paying protection money to terrorists in Colombia, source of 9 percent of its crop. Don’t we have a war on? Or did someone say you’re either with us, or you have no bananas?

 

 

Spice Market is much easier to get into for lunch, but daylight is not kind to the room — as my art director friend said: “It looks like Pier One.” At least the bathrooms have a whiff of authenticity. My other lunchmate said her stall “smelled like Southeast Asia.” A toilet seat was yanked loose in another stall. And not only did one sink have an out of order sign on it but the supply closet was open with a stack of more cards, a hint that the problem might be not be an aberration. I don’t know from bars in Bangkok, but you expect a little nicer from Jean-Georges.

 

 

Sometimes when you know the chef you get gefilte fish (a special; don’t ask). And sometimes you just get weird stuff.

 

Two friends and I are finishing up a very long dinner when the chef ambles across the nearly empty dining room and asks: “Who’s lonely and horny?” We laugh uncertainly and he wedges himself onto the banquette and proceeds to regale us with tales so far out of the kitchen you wonder what planet you’re drinking on. Suffice it to say that the story of his wrestling days when he had to go body to body with an opponent “with a dick as long as a stethoscope” was the least of it all. It was bizarrely amusing, especially with comped ice wine to wash it down, but maybe that’s only because it was the capper to an evening that started with an old man leaning over constantly to ask, “Are you girls going to eat all that?” and peaked with another old man accompanied by three bosom-enhanced bimbettes nearly croaking on a shoestring fry and getting Heimliched by Breasts No. 3 (“She’s a nurse,” the headwaiter later told us — not mentioning a nurse in “Debbie Does the Ward”). No wonder “Chef’s Theater” is bombing. You can get dinner and a show anytime if you know who’s cooking.

 

 

Gotham has never been one of my favorite restaurants, but the birthday party it threw itself was a rousing testament to why it’s reached the ripe age of 20 in a business notorious for abbreviated life spans. The usual huge bar was supplemented by two others pouring limitless pink Champagne while waiters with the agility of tightrope walkers were moving through the room with trays loaded with ambitious hors d’oeuvres (baby octopus, Kobe beef with onion rings), and unlike at so many parties, they were able to get five steps beyond the kitchen doorway without locusts descending, so the food just kept coming, from all directions. Someone said 800 people were either invited or attending, and it was hard not to conjure images of the Happyland Social Club (although with worse music and dancers — the “I Will Survive” vocalist and band were the only misstep). At least that made it easy to wriggle past the snubbers (and be relieved you will never again have to suffer a sloppy kiss from the mad cow husband of one in particular) and easier still to move from conversation to conversation with fun people, like Andre Soltner, sweating his Broadway debut, and Drew Nieporent, wondering which guest was Frank Bruni, and Peter Poulakakos, escorting his dad Harry and talking of his own expanding empire. My two favorite moments, though, transpired when a couple of guys with those bizarre bug eyes that can only come from legal drugs found each other across the crowded room and were soon deep in conversation about . . . Claritin, and when one of the contortionist waiters was jostled while holding a tray with a bowlful of silver forks high over his head. It was like a scene out of “Kill Bill,” but in true Gotham style, he let the entire set shower tine-first over his forehead without so much as a flinch, then, as his compatriots dove to pick up the mess, he calmly touched his face to be sure no blood was spattering his crisp white shirt and glided on his professional way. Now that’s a waiter. Give the place 20 more years.

 

 

Okay, so it’s not the paper of record, and only its readers think it is. So why do its news pages persist in erroneously explaining the obvious (guy in Mexico hacks up a friend and turns him into tamales: “a popular dish of chopped meat wrapped in a softened corn husk”)? Or spelling out the wrong role for a spice (turmeric is not “the principal ingredient of curry” — wouldn’t that be ginger or cumin or mustard seeds)? Coming soon: The Judy Blair Cookbook (or should it be the Jayson Miller Yellow Cake Mix Doctor?)

 

 

Dead men tell no recipes: Food Emporium is now carrying a line of Ernest Hemingway marinades. The brand appeal eludes me, but at least the tacky marketers have shown a modicum of taste. None of the four sauces are hot enough to be labeled suicidal.

 

 

Reports of the death of French dominance are greatly exaggerated. No one in New York seems able to report on the closing of Lutece without nattering about the decline of the Gallic empire. But isn’t just about every top restaurant in the city French? Can you say Daniel or Jean Georges or Le Bernardin or even awful Chanterelle? What does Thomas Keller cook that doesn’t owe its origins to Escoffier? Even the second-rung places shamelessly ape old Paris: Artisanal, Balthazar, Pastis, the new Cassis. Quenelles may be over, but we’ll always have gougeres.

 

 

The other absurdity of all the overwrought obituaries was the reflexive interviewing of a “restaurant consultant” who really should be identified for what he is: a quote whore. Curious about exactly what restaurants he consults on these days, I Googled his web site, and I’m happy to report that he actually may be the best go-to there is on the subject of restaurants that swim with the codfish. Two of the most prominent names on his client list are the Russian Tea Room and Sign of the Dove. Now there’s a track record.

 

The other favorite quote ho of lazy reporters came through with this brilliance on Gage & Tollner: “I think it’s very sad. There aren’t that many restaurants that go back to 1879.” Who outside the Oval Office could have given such a scintillating insight? I could see it in quotes in the Zagat, as a matter of fact.

 

Lutece, to me, has been a dead restaurant limping for years. Maybe if anyone but engulf-and-devour Ark, the Disney of dining, had bought it it might have had a second life (imagine a Wylie Dufresne in that minuscule kitchen), but the place was really the chef. Gage & Tollner is a much harder loss, and not just because there aren’t that many restaurants that go back to 1879. I ate there for a story for the Times right after 9/11, and it was magical at a moment when the city itself seemed on the brink of disappearing. The gaslights were glowing, the wood was gleaming, the waiter wore a coat with decades’ worth of service ribbons (someone else’s, it turned out, but impressive nonetheless) and the food was far better than it had any right to be. The place was also so packed we had to eat at a cramped little table in the bar, which is why it may be one of the few restaurants not to blame 9/11 for its fate. I’m sorry it’s gone, and I’ll be sorrier still to see it turned into an Outhouse Steakback like the rest of New York. Maybe we should all go eat at Keen’s and Bridge Cafe while we still can.

 

Dining, get me Metro: Having served two sentences at the Times, I should never be surprised when one section apparently hasn’t talked to the other (or when even the staff hasn’t read the thing). But it was still pretty funny to come across the Union Pacific review wondering whether Rocco the Wonderboy wasn’t spending too much time on the set he calls a restaurant after having just read an article saying he was being sued for . . . not spending enough time on the set he calls a restaurant.

 

These are tough times for foie gras. First California proposed a ban on the production and sale of engorged livers, on the ground that forced feeding is “an inhumane way to be dealing with our fine-feathered friends,” to quote an addled lawmaker who probably went off happily to a Perdue chicken dinner without a second thought of the scarifying conditions 59-cent-a-pound fryers are raised in all over the country. And then Madrid chef Sergi Arola came to New York with a tapa that can only be described as an inhumane way to be treating guests at a Spanish wine and food event at the Rainbow Room. He was sending out cubes of foie gras enrobed in cotton candy. The experience was like liverwurst at a county fair, just before the roller-coaster. Even this Mrs. Sprat would almost vote to ban the stuff after that.

 

 

No wonder the Times is taking its strange time choosing a new restaurant reviewer. The gossip I heard at a press lunch promoting Australian food was enough to make any employer quail. There’s the notoriously pretentious food writer who “never eats — or if he does, he purges.” There’s the venerable reviewer who went vegetarian for a spell and let his boyfriend pass judgment on all meat items. There’s the legendarily caustic British reviewer who can drink nothing stronger than coffee anymore. There are the two magazine critics who, if a self-anointed “visionary” flack is to be believed, allow a restaurant to designate which of them will weigh in. But the greatest sinner, according to a big restaurateur contributing to the dish, is the kind of critic who takes a poll of other eaters before dissing or praising a place. And apparently they’re as common as cockroaches.

 

Read “The Pedant in the Kitchen” and you’ll see why the rumors about Julian Barnes as the new critic were so absurd. Real writers write.

 

In a week when you couldn’t open a paper, turn on the radio or click on pol porn without your head spinning faster than Linda Blair’s over the bald-faced BS on WMDs coming out of the Bush bunker, it was still stunning to come across this lead, and not in the Onion: “With panic over avian influenza crippling the chicken industry in Asia and fear over mad cow disease in the United States sending beef eaters to the poultry department, the time may never be better to be an American chicken producer.”

Up really is down in this country these days.

The story went on to detail — as uncritically as a press release, of course — all the amazing innovations on display at a poultry trade show in Atlanta. They ranged from a machine that could shoot antibiotics into 3,500 birds an hour to an advanced recovery system that extracts everything but the cheep from a flock of chickens (especially the foul parts that can be fed to . . . cows).

I hate to rain on the fecal parade, but chickens are scary. I grew up with them in the backyard. Even as free-range as those were, eating their fill of whatever worms and bugs they could find, they are always risky business. Raise them in a factory and you take your health in your own hands. Does the word salmonella ring a bell? How about campylobacter, the leading cause of food poisoning in the United States, the bacteria the CDC says is found in more than half of all chickens? Does the world really need the kind of machine that will do for chickens what the mad cow strippers have done for beef?

But then I guess if Americans can lull ourselves into lassitude over a president lying about so much more than a little lip service, we can certainly delude ourselves into thinking commercial chicken is homeland secure. The only good news is that mad cow takes forever. Campylobacter is quick and dirty.

 

Just when I was starting to lose faith in food as art, with a new dinner theater/circus act announced seemingly every week, along comes “Kitchen Stories.” This small Norwegian film has more to say in its own quiet, lyrical, beautifully styled way than any Broadway production ever could. And it does so by staying true to the essence of food as so much more than nourishment.

 

 

That spinning sound is Orwell in his underground bunker: Just when you think Bushco can’t get any more desperate to skew reality, along comes a proposal to change the description of fast food jobs from “service” to “manufacturing.” Finally admitting burgers are factory food is a step forward. But who ever walks into McDonald’s and says, “Make me a cheeseburger”? (Or even, “Make me fat?”) If you take jobs out of column A and put them in column C, you still wind up short a couple of million. Maybe the Village Person in Chief should dress up in a Burger King jacket and stand in front of a “making the economy healthy” sign and see if anyone salutes.