We took ourselves pretty seriously in DI/DO right after 9/11, and I think we did pretty well — not a single sheet-pan recipe was developed. But I’ll admit to feeling a twinge when Ben Collins over to the happy place posted about a 9/11 commemorative front page of the Onion, which featured one mock story headlined “Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake.” It was lasagna, damn it.
(And that’s not my hed. Just the most famous one the Onion maybe ever ran.)
And I’m gonna keep hammering who is really getting hurt as Republikan tax cuts for the rich savage SNAP: supermarkets and bodegas and farmers’ markets. There’s a reason Kroger and Walmart sales are way down — by design, those “dollars” can only be spent on food. And when you cut them, you silence the ka-ching.
I’ve probably posted about this before, but when I was a kid we would regularly go visit a relative in Phoenix who had survived the Depression but was so traumatized she kept huge garbage cans in her kitchen overflowing with staples, like boxes of cake mixes. I mean, she had a pretty luxe suburban house and her husband had a good job, but she was terrified they might go hungry again. So it’s kinda sad that my former consort and I now have a set of shelves over the refrigerator that we’ve been stocking for the last 6 1/2 years with backups of everything. We call it the Depression Cabinet, and we aren’t kidding. It was bad enough in Trump 1.0, when we were hoarding during the pandemic cuz even toilet paper was hard to come by. But now we’re stockpiling everything we can — olive oil, flour, hot sauces, tuna, beans, tomatoes, sugar, chocolate chips, cocoa, farro — and marking each package with the date we bought it and the price we paid. It’s bad and getting worse, but we are ready for 2020 times 2029. As someone far smarter than I just said, when you take a couple of parts out of a car, it doesn’t go slower. It falls apart.
Sometimes I break away from BlueSky & venture out into the real world, which is even more unsettling. And how I wound up at the Guggenheim on the closing weekend of a disappointing show but still came home with some indelible images: Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” the banana duct-taped to the wall, and one young woman in a “Daddy’s Little Meatball” Epstein-eyebrow-raising crop top and another in a “Make Produce Organic Again” t-shirt. A) It is. B) And if it isn’t, it could be because the cost of certification puts the organic label out of reach. (The banana, BTW, has to be replaced on the regular, and not because it’s stolen like Cattelan’s Trump-prescient golden toilet was. Real food rots.)
Somewhere there’s undoubtedly a Republikan plotting how to take credit for saving poor Americans from diarrhea lettuce by whacking SNAP. (If you can’t buy the fecal greens you don’t need health care, either.) But given how bare the toilet paper shelves have been at Holy Foods since the outbreak showed Project 2025 turned the CDC into an outhouse, you almost wonder if Big Biz would be diabolical enough to have greens and tissue producers colluding.
(We went in search of an Aperol spritz after the Guggenheim and wound up at a sidewalk table on the Upper East Side across from a Taco Bell, where the log-in for free WiFi said “you’ll thank us later.” Yes. Everything is shitty right now.)
Martha Stewart’s game-changing “Entertaining” was $50 when my co-workers on the NYT’s national desk pooled their pennies to buy it for me as a going-away gift when I quit to go to restaurant school in 1983. Today I spotted a copy at Home Goods for $39.99 — when inflation shoulda kept it up to $167. Maybe the wrong people go to jail for insider trading?
EpiLog is digitally dead & I kept no copies of my contributions. But I remember writing about Julia Child & her contemporaneous take on McCarthyism. Worth revisiting her letters with her editor as Republikans turn to their very stale red playbook…
So Walmart stock just hit an eight-month low, & Kroger is limping, too. Who coulda predicted cutting SNAP benefits would hit the retailers most dependent on that “public trough” program for both workers and shoppers? (And farmers, too.)
I knew when I saw Jean-Georges’s tight smile on the cover of the premier issue of a slick new real estate magazine (many months back) that he was about to get shafted. And by the end of that very Monday the Tin Building was indeed shut down. My former consort and I were clearly in the minority, because we were huge fans even though we only went twice. We had two pleasant bistro lunches, great coffee, enjoyable shopping (especially for Momofuku seasoned salt). Somehow I doubt what killed it was the lack of parking. More location, location, location.
The fact that the guy who revolutionized dining on the Upper East Side with JoJo has turned Spice Market into a private club has real 1929 vibes, tho. Catering to assholes is not gonna end well in the age of Tesla takedown just down that very block.
While we were having another fabulous lunch* the other week at La Dong off Union Square, one of the most beautiful, well-staffed restaurants in the city, it struck me why Captain Bonespurs considers America a shithole: The richest, “powerfulest” country in the world lost the Vietnam war, while he hid it out acquiring STDs. He’s still big mad, but we the sane majority get to revel in wildly expanded and enriched food horizons. We indulged in that lunch, after all, after a stop at the new Tashkent shop, which is always like a vicarious and savory trip to Uzbekistan (with very good prices on staples like tea and fancy canned tuna). And I don’t want to dwell on how the breakup of the Soviet Union has fortified the American cornucopia. The other night we walked out of the phenomenal “Natchez” documentary on the unsettled Civil War and around the corner to Laliko, for fabulous Georgian food (cheese bread with mint, eggplant rolls with pomegranate seeds, juicy pork kebabs with green plum sauce) and wines. One of which, the charming bartender said, would hit like a blow to the head. One racist xenophobe’s shithole is everyone else’s eating wonderland.
+ it’s very revealing that Black chefs are getting more and more headlines for their phenomenal food while you never hear a peep about the slattern’s cuisine: Slovenian. The one restaurant specializing in it near us, which always looked more like a ruble laundry than an eating destination, faded away and was replaced by just another Greek joint. I mean. It opened during #trumpandemic, after the racist lost, and sans streetery. Clearly too big to fail.
* Get the super-generous crab fried rice as the lunch special. Not least so you can indulge in either the brilliantly dressed salad or the lively mushroom soup to start with no extra charge.
Killing time while waiting for a table at the always awesome Mawn in Philadelphia on my birthday getaway we had a real Civil-War-the-movie experience in a kitchenware shop. A couple of guys were having a lively conversation about Minnesota. But about the weather. Not ICE. Kinda lost my interest in gadgets…
Former consort braved the newly reincarnated Absolute Bagels & bailed when he found 45 people in line, in the cold. One of our oldest friends, who retreated to the Bay Area long ago, always used to say: “The more New Yorkers get fucked, the more they like it.” Now with more Instagram…
And I was worried when I didn’t see a South Asian pal for a few weeks who works in a swanky bakery known as an Instatrap in a tourist area. I thought they’d been deported. But. Nope. “My hours were cut way back. Business is dead.” How do you bankrupt casinos, anyway?
I finally figured out why the super-rich love caviar so much: Cuz it’s eggs. Once the sturgeon are born, they’re on their own.
Everything seems terrible, but sometimes you read a mess of a story in Fox in Print (paywalled at WSJ) & you get a glimmer of hope. This was in a P1 piece struggling to explain how steakhouses are struggling to stay afloat with beef costs ballooning under the guy who won reelection promising to bring down egg prices. And these are restaurants charging $150 for a prime New York strip. Which costs $50 wholesale: “One error in the kitchen, and $50 ends up in the trash.” Overdone is unfixable; underdone & re-seared is gonna piss off someone deep-pocketed. Cuz the most essential ingredient in steak dinners is … a supremely skilled cook. The Latino ones are getting deported, and AI is not gonna replace ‘em. He’s running the food economy like it’s Trump Steaks.
My former consort has been bitching that I’m squandering my “gift for snark” by focusing on politics and not the food world. When I’m not quite sure what the latter even is anymore. Influencers? (AKA “Instatrappers”?) So I thought I’d weigh in on the bat-guano insanity of Dash’s joint running a huge spread on what people eat at the Met (opera, not museum) in the middle of a government shutdown when desperation was rampant at food banks and pantries. Was it because the recipe app with an agenda sold an ad for a Broadway show? Whatever. It all had the feel of a Gatsby-themed party: “Let ‘em vicariously eat crab cakes.” Which makes my point on my former consort’s other complaint: “Regina makes everything about politics.” Because everything is about politics.
And if you don’t believe me, consider what a bad penny turned up at Mar-a-Pedo the other night: the Butter Guzzler. Once she was shunned for being a brazen racist. Now she’s in with the thin crowd.