In other Twitter feedback, I noted how fascinating it was that the Murdoch Daily gave space to let a columnist pimp a sommelier and got: “Correctly guessed byline. What do I win?” Accolades from the Bitterman, maybe?
Post Category → back scratching
Add 1.8 percent for gullibility
Long ago I decided my last meal should be in France, but I never imagined it might precede euthanasia. Or that it might flash before my eyes before my cappuccino. Could the salvation of the cuisine have been made any more soporific? A good writer meets a great topic and readers nod right off. It was still better, though, than the latest installment of Butt Boy for Eli. When the kicker turns out to be “never mind,” you wonder why the damn thing even ran, except to provide just what he intended, a promo for a store where prices are already so absurd I have often calculated it would be cheaper for shoppers to take a cab across town to the real Zabar’s. But the guy, to his credit, does pony up for an awful lot of advertising, especially starting right about now. High holy days, indeed.
And they called it moussaka
One of the hoariest of chestnuts in the food writers’ patented Cliche Collection is staff meal, a k a family meal. I’ve experienced it, in restaurant school, and I’ve succumbed to it, for my infamous feature on Mexicans in high-end restaurants. But whether you call restaurant employees staff or family, they always — always — eat much better when a reporter is in the vicinity. In short, eight courses is the new loaves and fishes, the new water into wine. I’ve alway known there are no new stories, only new reporters. Who could have anticipated the internets would be just as gullible? Or that Keyser Soze is really a chef downtown?
Ghost repeaters
Then again, how desperate would you have to be to take a flack up on an offer to live-blog a press stunt? People are really going to clog the series of tubes with twits on tea in return for the chance to be a star handing out business cards in the age of Facebook? Sounds like the cyber casting couch. Then again, that kind of comfort work is working out okay on the Bam front. Ad Age “caught up to the celebrity chef on the set of a Crest commercial shoot” and asked, “How do you stay authentic?” Not coincidentally, the accompanying photo showed him in an organic tomato field. Presumably up to his knees in manure.