Author Archives → regina

RTs

When you’re out of tortillas, you’re out of breakfast, lunch and dinner. // Cannelloni are Italian enchiladas. // Heard a woman in Chipotle asking for rice in her hard-shell taco. That shit doesn’t even belong in burritos. // Someone could do a whole graduate thesis on @alexstupak’s crab nachos with uni “queso.” College dropouts like me can only marvel. #trailTK

Houston, you have an un-problem

My consort is definitely the sharpest blade in this rack these days, as I am consumed by the shitshow no one has the guts to impeach so I can get back to food. He was flipping through the Murdoch Crier and noted yet another tourism ad that put chefs front and center of the skyline. And it is a sea change. Art is dandy as a city-sell. Food is quicker.

Plastic or Platinum?

News that the global seed bank established in a climate-change-proof site had been flooded as the glaciers melt and the oceans rise was bad enough. Now I know we’re truly in end times, though. The other day the tasting bar at the corner liquor store was offering samples of Veuve Cliquot’s latest: sparkling wines meant to be poured over ice. Ice, I said. And they’re also meant to be “garnished,” whether with a berry or a sprig of mint. I’m assuming they’re meant to be drunk on hot days when the melting cubes will cut the syrupiness. But at $64/$65 a bottle, they ain’t exactly a quencher for the poors. So it all just feels like Evian for a new century. And how did bottled-or-tap turn out for the world?

Bazaar, misspelled

I also read a whole story that came off like a PR stunt to promote a book. Then read a review of said book that proved you can so easily shortchange your work by promoting it. There’s an actual hook there, about the rights and wrongs of supermarkets. Instead we got the oldest tale in the Kroger’s — the poison is in the center, the good stuff is around the perimeter, it’s all processed crap and blah and blah and more aisles of blah. So much for the “skillful portrait that might make you want to catch a flight to Cleveland.”

Puppy. Drum.

Big scandale down NOLA way might have an easy answer: Locals can’t write “see it like a local” stories cuz they have no idea where to sleep. AMA about Manhattan, and I am clueless on where to drop $300 a night beyond our own AirBnB. . .

Tattoo handouts with those phones?

The Chinese must be laughing at us all for living in such interesting times. Immigration authorities are cracking down even harder even though immigration is way down thanks to the Kenyan Muslim. So in one day you will read that Tyson Foods is so desperate for workers willing to do hard, dangerous jobs that it’s actually (OMFG) raising wages. And that food pantries and other social services are finding immigrants are going into hiding, too terrified even to seek help, let alone sign on to suit up to whack up chickens. I guess safety through unaffordable food was always the plan?

Chocolate cake, unmolten

A whole beat could be devoted to covering how the Taint affects big-name chefs who made deals back when he was just a weasel who stiffed contractors. Meantime, I’m enjoying the pushback. First our true national hero persisted. Then the high point of the #sciencemarch came when hundreds of people in the cohort I was among stopped to boo, at four-star levels of loudness, in front of Nougatine/Jean Georges. I go up and down on whether hitting the streets matters, but if it cuts into business for those who lay* down with vermin, I’m all up in it. (*Past tense is a form of forgiveness. Who knew how evil the orange might go?)

Is that a cigarette or are you just glad to cup-size?

I know I’ve said this many times in the going-on-15-years here, but an old Redd Foxx joke increasingly comes to mind. It was about the waitress (as they were professionally correct to be called back in the Sixties) in a skimpy uniform/costume who was serving coffee in a Las Vegas cafe. “Sugar?” she asked, pulling out a couple of packets from her bosoms. “Cream?” she proceeds. Punch line? “You wouldn’t dare!” Starting to think of that every time I see tops teasingly tweaked open to sell cookbooks. I might wonder who really did the recipes, but I do not need the dairy.

$46 service, chicken included 

I never know quite what to make of this kind of stuff but am certain of one thing: The most money I ever made in my life before I landed a job at the (now dead) Louisville Times was as a waitress in the summer before I dropped out of college. People, even down-and-outers (or especially down-and-outers), could not leave enough on the diner table to encourage this working-her-way-through-college striver. Unfortunately, I moved on to Nebraska and learned in a single day how the serving pros are perceived. As one of those, I made exactly 15 cents in tips on my first and only day. There’s a big argument lately over whether everyone should go to college. I vote yes, if not just to feed your head by expanding your horizons. The attaboys at part-time jobs will keep you going.

Van & “Days Like This,” maybe?

Today in “how to keep your head from exploding:” My consort and I were happily chopsticking through another typically great lunch at Jin Ramen on Amsterdam when “Stand By Me” came on the sound system. Noodles and soul — what could be American-better? Next day Bob’s studio manager came in after a week of skiing in Vermont and said she and her husband had mostly cooked (after provisioning from their fancy Brooklyn meatmonger) but every day would have lunch from a food gondola run by a Japanese woman and her American husband. Because it was ramen and because it was good. And that hummus-and-guacamole reality reinforced how unpossible it is that the #MAGA crowd can really take a country backward when it is so consumed with moving forward at the table. Overcooked steak or no overcooked steak, this pot will always be melting. Ketchup, after all, is un-American . . .

“Mad Men” in large Jersey women’s sweaters

It was an Albanian waiter in a fancy Italian steakhouse who first made me wonder if dark days might be coming. This was back in about October, at lunch with a client. An officious tip-dependent fuck took it upon himself to lean in as my client and I were finishing our mediocre meatballs and volunteer: “How about that xxxx! He’s got the right ideas!” Client and I both politely kept our pieholes shut until we were walking back to the train and marveling: “That guy thinks he’s going to be better off? That guy?” We’re certainly paying for our arrogance now. I’m not a Christian, but I still think it would be wrong to hope he pays even more. He could be deported in a stone-cold heartbeat.

Won’t be working on Carter’s peanut farm

And I’m still waiting for the check that will cover my Audi for showing up at three demonstrations so far, but I can see why the “paid protesters” BS has taken off. On the late afternoon of the women’s march, the stalwart I went with suggested we stop for a drink and snack at the bar at the Modern, her previous canteen but kind of out of my league in my all-Twitter/no-cash life. I worried we would not be dressed appropriately, but as soon as we were seated I could see almost everyone around us, with their expensive highlights and haircuts, was in jeans and sneakers. The woman on the next barstool, and on her fourth sparkling wine, was babbling about having come out for her first protest ever: “Everyone here was at the march!” Some of them even still had their signs with them. I was lucky because Mary insisted on picking up the tab for our shared (excellent) foie gras and tarte flambée and my white from Lanzarote, which looked downright affordable when we remembered service was included because some people believe in equality. Surely, surely, everyone else was covered by Soros, though. That would be easier for the biggest loser to accept than the sign we spotted in a resto afterward: “DT: Your hometown hates you.”