Author Archives → regina

Cin cin

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.

No cheeks tonight

Another party, at a new restaurant, left an indelible image. They were serving whole roasted (and stuffed) suckling pigs, sliced to order in the center of the dining room. Given that the chef is French and a tete is just a tete, the head of each little guy was displayed right on the carving board under the heat lamps, complete with either grin or grimace, depending on how each had gone off to curse its maker. And the second one I saw whacked off was so fresh from the oven its ears were literally steaming. It reminded me of those brains my consort once ordered in France, the ones that, when the waiter whisked off the silver dome, were actually quivering. Even Bob hesitated to slice into them as he said, “They’re still thinking.”

Almost Blue

After serving two sentences there, I know the NYTimes lets nothing into print without at minimum three sets of eyes having run over it: backfield, copy editor, slot. So how can it possibly explain what ran under “Avoiding a Heaping Helping of Disappointment” unless that headline was meant to be a warning to the reader with nothing better to do on a Saturday morning than stare slack-jawed at the most poorly organized, sloppily written, careless, confused and simultaneously self-aggrandizing and rube-ish piece of filler outside of a couple of restaurant blogs I could mention? A regional reviewer is presuming to advise New Yorkers on how to find a good dining experience at an upscale joint by touting someplace down the Shore? And she advises looking at a restaurant’s web site? We live in the age of internet chatter, goddamn it. Talk about a classic case of the sauce lapping over the sides of the platter. A smart food writing teacher would let a class take it apart, right down to the misspelled Ariane. After all, you can’t do good until you really see bad. This accomplished the unthinkable: It made Panchito look brilliant. But at least I’m clear on one thing. Salads and “well-made vegetables” are not brain food.

Chipped beef on toast by any other name

We always knew he had no brain. Now the Chimp is proving he has no heart. Every shameless photo op lately seems to be in a cafeteria line with troops as camera fodder. The implication is that he’s sacrificing for the cause in eating what they do. But everybody knows he prefers chow to cuisine, tube steaks over Kobe beef. Have the perks of power ever been squandered on a more juvenile appetite?

Albondigas, si

Over at the Injustice Department, meanwhile, apparently no one is in danger of encountering an MRE in time of war. Television news was all over an audit that found $13,000 was spent on cookies at one staff conference; at another, Swedish meatballs were catered at nearly $5 a pop. That would be the same event where extravagances like coconut lobster skewers and butterflied shrimp were dished up. It all gives new meaning to the phrase “feeding at the public trough.” And isn’t that just what the party that hijacked the agency claims to disdain?

Bend over

Given that I have not eaten a Mrs. Fields cookie in 20-some years since learning just one packs 260 calories, I was not surprised to see New York City back off from forcing fast food chains to play by the numbers. The truth hurts the bottom line. A bigger mystery is why the powers that wanna be Big Brother saw fit to commission a redesign of the famous choking poster. The old one was graphically graspable from across a crowded room. The one I’m seeing everywhere lately is all small blurry gray pictures and tiny text; you could stand three inches away and not know the first thing to do if your dining partner swallowed a fish bone and suddenly turned blue. Maybe someone can “update” the old “I Heart New York” slogan with: “This individual standing in front of you talking is experiencing a deep and strong and very abiding affection for the five boroughs and in fact the entire state.” It’s the kind of improvement you expect from bureaucratic bunglers in Washington, not Mayor High-Tech. Plus it must look like a muddy mess on the backs of the staff down at Schiller’s.

Good for the goose

So Martha Stewart is now doing wine. Bottled water must be so over. But her latest venture is still a reminder of who pays for sins in the land of equality. She got caught in a lie and went to jail. Scooter was convicted of multiple national security whoppers and walked. In a just world, he would be baking pretzels in hell. I guess we have to settle for seeing her keep on cashing in with Gallo.

Frittering away

I forget where I read the gossip about the editors on the book review at the NYTimes who once saw a co-worker on the Sunday magazine being taken out by ambulance and guessed that “someone must have had an idea.” But I know where I read the proof that it was not a joke: On gawker, which bared the recovering Botox addict’s pathetic plea for help in coming up with trends to obsess on for T for Twaddle. Here’s a suggestion: Food editors who persist in dropping their friends’ big names. If it ain’t one J, it’s another. And next thing you know it’s an oily mess.

Can you hear me now?

Walking home latish Friday night from the surprisingly excellent “Bourne Ultimatum” (the antithesis of “America, fuck yeah!”), my consort and I felt as if we had wandered back to 1986, when we fled Columbus Avenue in the Seventies for the sleepy suburbs half an hour closer to New England, up in the then-dodgy Nineties. Wine bar after wine bar was spilling out with hammered androids who seemed to have one setting on the volume dial: braying. At least three longtime restaurants were suddenly closed and gutted (and at least three more that should be shut down were still full). The sidewalks were jammed, and we could only wonder who those look-alikes were, and from what part of Jersey they might have disgorged. Columbus always goes in cycles, and what’s good for business is bad for the neighbors, so I could not have been happier to be just passing through rather than living in that old apartment one flight up on 72d. The one where the street noise was so bad I once called a floor refinisher to see about having ours sanded and polished and he asked: “Is someone there working on them now?” The one where we once poured water out the windows onto the barbarians below. “Wine bars” may make it sound as if the street is going upscale. But merlot in the wrong hands is just as much a menace as martinis. Does this city always have to be saved by a market crash?

How’m I eating?

My other trip in the way-back machine was courtesy of the cafe upstairs at Fairway, where I went to refuel after a grueling bout of PT in preparation for braving the body-slammers down below. As I was waiting, and waiting, for my perfect cheeseburger, in walks Ed Koch, accompanied only by another dodderer. He took a table by the window just like anyone else and settled in unmolested, napkin tucked into the neck of his shirt, placidly awaiting his ex-chef’s food. It was just like the old days when he was mayor and we would constantly see him out in the street, wallowing in attention, long before Rudy “made it safe.” I admit the endorphins were still pumping, but it felt sorta warm and fuzzy to find someone so recognizable moving freely at a time when the allegedly most powerful man in the world cannot go anywhere without armed guards and still has to shut down entire cities “for security.” Maybe they’re right that you are what you eat. Who could ever have imagined a hot dog in chief? (Sorry to hammer, but they’re dying while he’s lying.)

Words are all we have

The subscription gods are apparently in retrograde. My New York went missing, so I was spared some Pollan wannabe’s reportedly idiotic attempt at eating locally. Other delivery guys managed to get through with a decent Panchito finally noticing that accessibility is meaningless in the Rbox (crutches are no easier than a wheelchair when there’s “one step at entrance”) but also, unfortunately, with a Mighty Wind that, a far-off friend pointed out, nattered on about a jellyroll pan but depicted the usual casserole. And for some reason the real birdcage liner just will not take no for an answer and keeps sending us the hometown’s worst paper (well, maybe after the Sun, which has only the food pages and oversized photos of photo shows to redeem its waste of trees). A great young friend in Italy with an especially endearing way with his second language once used the term “bust-ballers,” and I thought of it on reading “impeccably serviced” and “designer-clad” (they’re actually wearing the human Armani?), not to mention “corpulent” dumplings. It’s as if this pretentious prattle is being written in Roget’s English and run through Babelfish. And they won’t make it stop.

Every ort his mother’s son

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

My city was gone

A really fresh-feeling vintage photography show at the main library includes a wall with images by Sy Rubin of 14th Street in the 1970s, when it had a May department store and the Palladium and a generally much seedier character. That was all before my time in New York, but I had the same reaction to those shots as I did to the Eater news that the BBQ place on Eighth Street is becoming — what else? — a bank. Nothing lasts here. But if you’re lucky, you get your moment to remember, and ours was hearing Alberta Hunter sing in that space when it was the Cookery, way back in the early Eighties. She was amazing, having made a comeback in her own early 80s after a second career as a nurse, and standing there with earrings down to her proud shoulders she was belting lyrics that might be too hot for Amy Winehouse to handle. She’s gone, the Cookery’s long gone and now more ATMs and surly tellers are on the way. At least it’s not another Duane Reade or nail salon. Or what helped mallify 14th Street and is now wiping out any hint that Mikell’s ever existed on Columbus: a Middle American Holy Foods.