Dining seems to be slipping back into its cavalier attitude toward photojournalism. I spotted an enticing shot of a train with a caption mentioning “tours head up the Hudson River,” but the story implied they were actually going by bus. Worse, that train looked to be on the Manhattan-bound track. At least it was more locally carrot-correct than zucchini with pasta in late October. I counted three vendors with the squash at Union Square that afternoon, and one was selling Flintstone-size specimens. If the pasta police bothered, I do hope they ticketed for throwing rice sticks into the ziti.
Post Category → birdcage liners
Gold in the four food groups
The day after reading that food banks are running on empty in New York thanks to the federal government sweating the small stuff out of the budget, I was lured to Petrossian for an early (for me) press event staged partly to introduce its new private tasting room, complete with caviar omelets. Crazies can call Paul Krugman shrill till the Wagyu cows come home, but something is wrong with a country where the super-rich cannot find enough ways to dispose of their income and the working poor can’t even get vegetables to puree into secret ingredients for their macaroni and cheese. But if you really want your head to explode, start following the WSJournal’s coverage of the investigation into the suspected fraud and corruption involving some of the country’s biggest brand names (Kraft, Conagra, Sara Lee). Every day it gets worse. Nothing, of course, has been proven in a government that does not admit torture, but the gist is that companies and middlemen supporting the troops’ need to eat are jacking up prices to obscene levels. War profiteering once would have been considered treason. Now, where have you gone, Jimmy Dean sausage?
Supreme bile
Biff Grimes’ review of the Clarence Thomas spleen-venting noted that he started out in “poverty so extreme that the children did not put sugar on their cereal.” Whether that was meant sarcastically I’m not sure — at least they had cereal. But it could explain the craving for that little something extra. Pubic hair on a Coke, say.
Big night in a microwave
I see from the Guardian that Jamie Oliver is launching a chain of Italian restaurants next. And his partner is promising it will be “completely authentic, rustic Italian.” Also “fast, urban casual dining.” Is there a contradiction in there? Or are they just happy to knock off McDonald’s failed Hearth Express? But at least the chickens will be free range, so maybe they won’t get too flattened by Slow Food in the fast lane.
If strippers had ramps
Now I’ve heard everything — I’ve been accused of going too easy on Panchito. But I think one of my e-correspondents is right in noting that ignoring his own recent takedown of inaccessible restaurants while favorably reviewing a new one does look like “sucking up” to a boss temporarily in a wheelchair. Ten whacks with a crutch for him for not raising his consciousness for real.
Supposedly fun things . . .
Speaking of airborne gravy trains, the WSJournal tried to stop the presses by reporting that restaurant bloggers take freebies. Wait till they hear how much gushing travel coverage in mainstream media comes from something more insidious than an opening party. Consider the advice I just turned up on the google — one warning read: “. . . word travels fast if you take free trips and don’t publish. Your free travel will end very abruptly if you don’t follow through on your end of the bargain.” Serious money is involved now that junket is spelled FAM. Beyond friends in convenient places, even Portland was not discovered by accident. Next hot spot: Colombia. There’s apparently a gastronomic fair there to die for.
Sleeping dogs
Bullshit detectors out in the newly ordained Eden on the Willamette are emitting some curious signals. Five years out of close proximity to the making of sausage, I don’t quite know what to think. But there certainly is a lot of A & P overlap when you google blogs.
Nose to tail
Maybe if Panchito had not been so distracted by towel snaps on the butt we would not have had to wait all these years for Vicente Fox to reveal that the Chimp is afraid of horsies, and the world might have been spared a fraudulent Cowboy in Chief. The detail is not surprising, but just imagine how far Molto Ego would have gotten if anyone thought he was scared of pigs.
Gag me with trans fats
And okay, I’m awful. Why do the people ordained to hector us about eating better always have such weird vices themselves? I thought surimi was bad. But Diet Pepsi? A real revolutionary would get that crap off the nation’s table yesterday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)