Author Archives → regina

I saw Spitzer outside the produce show venue

High on my “hashtag know hope list” is the notion that enough serfs will finally realize it ain’t immigrants and melanin-superior people holding back everyone. It’s gazillionaires, who pay no taxes while feeding at the public trough. So I’m enjoying everyone making the yacht set nervous by suggesting we just do the obvious: Eat the super-rich. Although I know they will taste terrible, I also know we can both brine & season. (Pro tip: Chelsea Market has a very good knife sharpening expert on weekends. If you catch my drift. Hashtag “C U in the gulag.”) 

F for Feral


Over to the happy place, I keep noting that we had the most American experience ever on our last foray to Philadelphia. We were in the Italian Market and stepped into the crosswalk and a Lexus wasn’t going to stop. My former consort yelled, “Don’t pedestrians have the right of way?” and of course the driver was a jowly white guy who yelled back: “You fucking idiots — If hit you, you get hurt and I don’t.” More proof since Covid that what didn’t kill us made us meaner. But then we walked on, and he was trapped in traffic, inching along, as we looked back and laughed. 

Goya on the label

While dry-brining a turkey breast the other night I could only think about both how Kamala Harris is right about the proper technique and how we could not even have Thanksgiving four years ago, cuz people were dying in droves in #trumpandemic. I was gonna boycott Squanto Day in despair this year. But it might be our last. And eggs will never be cheaper with avian flu. 

Listeria: It’s what’s for lunch 

This insane campaign has me daily remembering the IRL friend who, way back in the Bushwhacking, would joke that candidates are “always promising chicken or beef when we’re all gettin’ tofu.” This year, to be serious, the choice is between beef and Boar’s Head. And we don’t need no FDA…

$9 artichoke, $24 duck confit, kikkks for free 


We get Fox in Print, aka the Murdoch Crier, so I read krazy people. Saturdays are true treats, because Ginny Noonan is given half a page to spew her Boodles. Most recently she was going on about crime and immigration and people sleeping in tents outside train stations. But I was just in her Upper East Side neighborhood twice in three days for medical appointments, and it was as sterile as it ever was. Maybe it was the sandwich board outside Eli’s that freaked her out: Breakfast burritos, touted in Spanish. 

Snark, reaped

Sought out #RayBradley at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket the other day and he was all: “Oh, the writer. Are you still doing that bullshit?” Really was 13 years ago… Also kinda appalling that #Edible cares so little about its archive that it lets hackers hijack bylines. But any biz built on ad $ was always doomed to fail & take everyone else down with it.

No seats on the public toilets


Pretty rich that Dash’s joint ran a screed on tourists ruining Bologna just after we were there and met a shopkeeper who said the Chamber of Commerce was reveling in having gotten the NYT (and Forbes) over to hype it as an undiscovered destination. We’re pretty proud that we realized the first mortadella cafe we saw was bogus. But then we’d only gone cuz it was one of the few big cities in Italy we hadn’t eaten our way through (NatGeo and travel and corporate photography gigs were once a thing, alone with workshops). And we have a longtime friend who lives there who shared a spreadsheet of restaurants. And, and while we stayed in an amazing Airbnb in a superb location, I did feel for the locals…

“Mais Quebec” on the corn, too


Four years ago this month I thought we would never travel again. Our coop had emptied out with neighbors either fleeing to or working remotely from their country homes, the park was totally people-free and so many humans were dying in droves in the #trumpandemic. As Sir Richard Attenborough was documenting, the global temperature had even lowered with planes pretty much grounded. Now we just take it for granted that we can go back to our bad old ways. And this child-free couple is certainly taking advantage — our most recent jetaway was to magical Montreal. Where almost every cultural institution now has a plaque near the entrance acknowledging that it sits on ancient native land seized by colonizers. So it’s only fitting that prized tomatoes on menus and in markets are labeled not “heirloom” but “ancestral.” (Speak English, damn it.)

Mayo & TP in same aisle in hypermarket


And I’m certain I’ve ranted about this before, on this website started a year after the Bushwhacking brought us the TSA and public groping for anyone who’s ever had a hip replacement, but one of the most depressing things about “homeland security” “keeping us safe” is what it’s done to artisanal food tourism. You’re walking through a market in Montreal (or Torino or CDMX) and you now just skip the aisles with any bottled products cuz you can’t bring ‘em home if they’re more than half a cup unless you check your bag for $35 or more. So many tastes perdu, so many small entrepreneurs screwed. The Big Food terrorists really did win.