Author Archives → regina

Grayed out

I think the rodents in the Taj Sulzberger are chewing through staffers’ mental computer cables. Who does make the best “ribolata”? (If you want to be snide about youngsters’ obsession with food, at least drop the right name.) Why would anyone stick dental floss in her drivel? (A friend theorizes that that particular brain has caramelized and wonders what she gets paid per word.) But I know the answer to that: Someone who would put asses on sandwiches and expect people to keep reading.

What was more surprising was the role reversal between the daily and the weekly. Every fall New York used to go bonkers in its preview issue listing dozens of restaurants with wildly grandiose plans to open, and every spring I would count up how few actually wound up slinging that hash. Now it keeps the roster short and sweet while the presumably more sober publication goes on a bender. Why do I suspect it has still not sunk in that newspapers aren’t just destined to be scooping up poop by nightfall? On the series of tubes, empty promises are forever.

Now with more BS

The silliest new product has to be yogurt “hand wash.” It even comes in a flavor: honey vanilla. The label says it contains yogurt protein, which I guess sounds better than the rendered roadkill in most soap. What’s so ridiculous is that said yogurt protein is being touted as a “natural skin conditioner.” But the best ingredient for that, Jack Ubaldi taught in butchering classes when I was in restaurant school, is lanolin. Which is already in most soaps. I guess Dial Lamb With Rosemary doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Organic candy for the soul

Campaigns to get Americans to eat better are the surge of the food wars. Marketers will seize on any tiny sign of progress as huge news, and the media will chime right in while people just get fatter and more diabetic. Take Hannaford Brothers’ test of a star system for supermarket food, which it just proclaimed a huge success after a year. The billboard in the NYTimes read: “Sales jump for many foods that get a ‘healthy’ rating.” But the story said the biggest increase was all of 7 percent, for lean ground beef; the other “jumps” were 1 to 5 percent. That strikes me as being as statistically significant as the Chimp’s approval rating. After googling Hannaford to see how many other news outlets swallowed the press release, I’m starting to wonder about that chain. Not only is it trying to persuade shoppers to avoid good whole milk, but a 65-year-old woman was not allowed to buy wine in Maine because she did not have her driver’s license on her. Chain policy is to card anyone who looks under 45. Which, if I’m doing my math right, is more than double the drinking age in any state. See what happens when a grocer turns nutrition nanny? Grandmas can’t get their heart-healthy shiraz.

Four (paws) on the floor

The most surreal dining experience I’ve had in donkeys’ years was lunch with our Siamese. In a restaurant. I won’t name it as “now serving cats,” given that the Health Department is on the warpath these days, but the staff deserves huge points for letting us bring Banshee in after we left the vet around the corner right at 12:30. They even chose the perfect table in the front, where we could stow his carrier and still have room to check on him to be sure he wasn’t having a coronary over this second out-of-apartment experience of the day. He seemed mellow despite having his 23-hour nap interrupted, but I was a wreck. For once I could understand those parents who bring babies into noisy restaurants at 10 o’clock at night. It’s totally inappropriate behavior, selfish to the max. But when you gotta eat, you gotta eat. And as Bob pointed out, at least we didn’t take him somewhere where his kind gets cooked.

All dressed up

In showing his smirk in New Orleans, the Chimp was like a dog eating its own vomit. No true human with a scintilla of shame would ever have foisted himself off on an octogenarian restaurateur who has not been able to reopen for real after two whole years. What’s saddest is that the cheery photo op worked, yet again, for mainstream media — the world saw the smiling faces at Dooky Chase and not the devastation just outside. Potemkin was a piker compared with this sociopath.

Chemicals a day keep the pounds away

The maddest kitchen scientist on the planet has to be “Hungry Girl,” whose diet “recipes” are regurgitated in a certain daily pooper-scooper. I read them for the exercise. You could scratch your head for hours trying to figure out what “sugar-free maple syrup” might be, let alone “no-calorie butter spray” and “Gerber Mini Fruits” (of which one-quarter cup is to be mixed with fat-free vanilla yogurt and Fiber One bran cereal; let your digestive tract wonder where the natural went). The measurements are even more entertaining, like “24 sprays.” Apparently when you’re doling out no calories, you must be precise.

Give it an F+

Speaking of selling out, the New Yorker’s food issue felt, for the very first time, like the food ad issue. Half the copy seemed to have been trudgingly generated solely to break up the paid pages; the usually brilliant Anthony Lane’s in particular was like listening to teeth being cleaned. My consort noted that earlier issues used one photographer for seamless impact; the latest was a salmagundi. Which is sad, because no publication does food on a regular basis like this most unlikely of publications. The recent Burkhard Bilger noodling on matsutake hunters in the Pacific Northwest was “Beautiful Swimmers” in a nutshell, while the short stories excerpted from “Absurdistan” long ago turned me on to one of the most entertaining food books ever written. But I guess any excuse to commission a Wayne Thiebaud cover is worth toasting, and we’ll always have Roz Chast with her kitchen anxiety cartoons. Maybe the Conde Nast pimps should consider a Bon Appetit fashion issue.

Oh. Right.

Raw stories

Unlike dead men, ghostwriters do tell tales. And a couple of very big chefs in this huge city should be a teensy bit chagrined. Forget the coffee stain on one. Considering how many candidates tried to channel a charisma-free legend, I suspect a whole MA group could be formed tomorrow. (“My name is Regretful. I am a Cashaholic.”)

When the SpellCheck is broken

For a magpie of typos, this is harvest season on the series of tubes. The other day I spotted “Chinatown Brassiere” on one site and “terrior” on another. And then there was the commenter who insisted a restaurant reviewer should possess both an ability to write and “a good palette.” Actually, when you’re painting word pictures, the latter should be enough.

Acidic reflux

Back in those halcyon days when I was writing food columns for a protectively brilliant editor at the NYT magazine, a literary agent made an overture and I reluctantly agreed to go meet her in her office/apartment. It was like the worst kind of bad date: I thought she was interested in my unique voice; she thought I was in it for the Lotto. And I will never forget the rumpled legal pad she produced with all her brilliant ideas for books — she actually wanted me to write something off tired lists she had been flogging for years. I thought of her every time the Egotist came to town with his tattered yellow pages and pitched, yet again, a column on “shrimp shell stock.” We always said yeah, sure, and somehow it never materialized. Well, now that’s out of the way. And at least it seems a little fresher than the Juiceator. You know, that bullshit gadget Sunday Business hyped a year and a half ago?

In the middle of contemplating this, I went out to do errands and an elegant old woman stopped me on Columbus to ask timidly: “Is today Saturday, or Sunday?” I told her, then walked off thinking: Don’t feel bad, lady — you could be moving copy. (Ratafias, though? Convulsively better than shrubs.)

Get out your razor blades

Is it too much to ask to be allowed to put away our whites after Labor Day before huge mounds of Halloween crap start showing up at the grocery store? I’m a sucker for candy corn, but not a full month before the leaves even begin to turn below my windows. And with summer squash still dominating the Greenmarket, is it not far too early for a “pumpkin frost latte” at a crapola chain near Union Square? Compared with seasonal greed anymore, global warming looks to be happening at glacial speed. It almost makes you pray the Chimp’s drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub approach helps the Chinese steal Christmas. Lead in the fruitcakes would slow them down.

Call of the Heidi

I was so flattered to be invited to a tyro gourmand’s book party that I feel compelled to warn him he is heading for trouble. You know that old adage about success? Judging by what I had to listen to, he could wind up with a million mothers. It’s way too late, but failure would have meant only the one.