Post Category → jgold wannabe

Tarte flambée salvation, coming up

I’m sure I’ve recited one of my mantras many times: You can refuse to grow up, but you still grow old. And the downside to that is that your cranial sieve collects all the wrong bits. In the case of the JGold Wannabe’s review this week, that would be the fact that the shift-shaping restaurant of the week has had many game-changers over the decades. Who needs to reach into the way-back machine for Stieglitz and O’Keeffe when the JBeard Wannabe is so recent? Face it: If a name chef and a reinvention could lure New Yorkers into that desolate canyon, Mr. Artisanal might (might, I say) still be there.

Barista headgear, straight out of the Onion

And speaking of “no new stories, only new reporters,” it was rather telling that the hometown paper ran yet another section-front piece on the magic of the Microplane without noting that it, too, had been part of “the press fueled the hype.” I remember the planning meeting well, in 1998. But it took a political blog to point out the creeping crud in the latest feature. Why did the company’s worker-stiffing negativism have to be sold as a positive in the food pages? No one opens a factory in Mexico to benefit the local economy, or America’s. I’m glad I’ve already learned the original grater cannot be improved. Because I’m not sure I’d buy another. To the paper’s credit, though, it was amusing to watch Mimi speak and the JGold Wannabe obey: The food moved to the head of the four columns. And the hed, at least in print, did double duty: Winning by Not Trying So Hard.

Priceless memories, indeed

I do hope there are no razor blades in the afterlife. Poor MFK would be slicing her wrists big-time on reading her mentee’s “savory taste” and “a delicious one at that.” And I could not get through the where-are-the-hosts-of-yesteryear BS and so had to rely on Twitter followers to confirm what I suspected — the likes of Zarela went unacknowledged. But I did read just far enough into the review to wonder where TF the editor was. I guess now that “real America” has decided there’s no money for 9/11 responders it’s okay to fantasize about explosions and fires outside an East Side restaurant. I still remember getting censored in reviewing then-rational James Lileks’ immensely entertaining “Gallery of Regrettable Food” in about 11/11 for mentioning one dish looked like something had blown up in the kitchen. We are all insensitive now.

No WiFi, no cry

The digital ink was not even fading on the Elaine’s death notice when the snideness started. And somehow I suspect more bile will ooze out, not just about the notoriously lame food but also about how the legend treated “host” as shorthand for “hostility” for anyone not in the club. I still laugh thinking of the inimitable Seymour Britchky’s description of her waddling through the restaurant hoisting up her underpants — it always made me realize her devotees perceived her more as the help they had to tolerate than as one of them. But of course those devotees, and their children, are perpetuating the myth. No wonder the employees took out a big homage. The ding-dong doesn’t sound quite so celebratory when it was the witch who signed all the checks.

Pilgrims’ pride: Cholent

Now for a bigger question: Was the cat away for the Thanksgiving Eve edition of the section formerly known as DI/DO? The lede story was was so tedious I couldn’t even read it to count errors (although I did detect a punctuation glitch in the caption). The off-lede was so painfully overwritten I wanted to scald my own eyes. And the hoariest cliché ever was actually pressed into crude service for the hed on the review. Or should I call it the turd that finally plunked into the punch bowl? What other restaurant has had so long to get its act together before the starry hammer dropped? From there it was on to the outsized narcissism of a restaurant critic ordaining himself the expert on home cooking, and then the clunky verbiage on alleged restaurant openings. How absurd is “ingredient-driven food” when your lede story is on . . . beyond-esoteric ingredients? And WTFF does “pushes the sports bar envelope” mean? Pigs in a jockstrap blanket?

Move your hyphen, pls: Do not want goat in cheesecake

Way more obsessive diners than I, people who have eaten more Italianesque in New York than Italian in Italy, can have the final say on whether Da Joe-Mario deserves four stars. I could only throw the paper down on reaching yet another “food that leads to gasps and laughs.” I’ve been eating a long damn time and am still unfamiliar with this weird phenomenon, Roget’s 876.8. And I have certainly never heard ha-ha-ha, crudo, let alone ho-ho-ho, spaghetti.

Dice those chives

Lately I’ve been thinking and Tweeting a lot about Richard Thompson’s prescient song “We’re All Working for the Pharaoh.” Who could ever have imagined pennies would wind up as the new dollars, if you were damned lucky? Food aggregators are apparently offering $12 a post, which is $12 more than the Huffington Post is paying as its founder flogs the Big O to do more about job creation. But things could be worse for the gainfully unemployed: We could have big jobs.

In both my stints at the NYTimes, the restaurant critic was always a protected species, a creature devoted mostly to one vital gig, finding and rating the best places to eat in a city with more than 15,000 choices. I’m still stinging from the acid flung the morning I had to call the PS to plead for a critic’s notebook when we were light on copy. It was way too much to demand (although we got it). So I guess it’s no wonder the JGold Wannabe appears to be so overstretched he’s cranking out stuff for the magazine that would take the Bulwer-Lytton trophy. That may have been the most pretentious lede in the history of food writing. Obviously, you can’t answer readers’ questions, chuckle over your fud and round up recipes without something having to give. Straining at stool can be lethal. Ask Elvis.

Oh, just go eat in a bookstore

Back in the real world, the weird news of the week was the big profile of a cartoon character in Dining. Which definitely brought home how far the section and the food world have sunk. Once Emeril could be taken down as the emblem of all that was wrong with celebrity cooking shows on the teevee. But at least he started out a real chef, one so obsessive he made his own Worcestershire at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, one so respected (and subdued) that Julia Child partnered with him in an episode of one of her own shows. By the time he had turned into a caricature, he was ripe for the mocking. But this guy? When Bob opened the paper and saw the travesty, he asked me about the back story and all I could say was that he was known for being known. I would make some sarcastic comment like how the next thing you know Styles will be showcasing Snooki. But . . .

Pretzel illogic

I might not be the only one convinced the hometown paper is killing itself with a 24/365 approach to publishing with no copy editors on board. I read the garbled take on two iPad apps for recipes and went straight to the Google to see if the byline might not be on the take. Instead I saw he had posted that word salad online more than a month before the paper went on sale for $2 a copy. Remind me why I spring for a subscription? (Oh, I know. I like to see the ratio of house ads to paid placements.) But given how stretched everyone appears to be down Señor Slim way, I’m almost saddened to see both the JGold Wannabe and Panchito having to produce even more poorly vetted copy. The former should be able to handle it, fresh as he is to the marathon/megaphone, but the latter is going to be talking to Ralph on the big white telephone on a regular basis. Back to Round One. . .

Too skinny? Eat salad.

This week was probably the nadir for food coverage. The Huffington Post started what has to be a parody, and the end of the Craig Claiborne line did KFC’s dirty work. The vendors whose fish has to be eaten the same day you buy it were touted as selling the freshest in Manhattan. Airline food was reported to be “striving to be tasty” (and Francisco Franco is still dead). The WSJournal pretty much declared wine coverage will now be only about wealth-worshiping and name-dropping, as Dr. Vino put it. (But that ridiculous adjective “delicious” will live on.) And I seem to recall some nonsense about ramps being the new arugula, hold the fiddleheads. But on the bright side, a new generation (of wide-eyed bloggers) has just learned a sobering and essential lesson: The Pillsbury Bake-Off is about nothing but crass commercialism, a relatively cheap way for Big Food to gauge what Americans are stuffing into their pie holes and an even better way to inspire those same suckers to consume even more processed crap. The only thing I’m curious about is whether the editors gathered from “real” media to cover the charade were any slimmer than the ones I reeled at the sight of 20-some years ago. (Those broads could pack it away; breakfast was always like the descent of a plague of very large locusts. And they uncritically, even gushingly, wrote up the gruesome results of Poppin’ Junk topped with raspberry and spinach and dipped in chocolate.) Personally, I think any cook who can turn a canned biscuit into a fish taco is going places. Nowhere I’d want to go, but still.

Party of eight, dinner for two

I Tweeted this, but was that hash brown photo the “before” in the JGold Wannabe’s clarified butter lesson? Those potatoes were not “golden brown” but charred to the point of sending them back. I’d sooner eat Tater Tots. And come to think of it, someone should do a Tumblr on the magazine’s food shots like the one mocking Dwell’s photography — so many pictures have been stripped of anything sensual and just have a depressing flatness. The URL could sub Stylists for Pets in WhoWanttoKillThemselves.

“This is carbonara, a classic Roman pasta”

I have mixed feelings about Mexico asking for Unesco protection for its cuisine: on one mano it’s laudable, on the other I had a kimchi tamal at Momofuku Noodle Bar that could convert a whole new generation to the religion of masa. But then I think maybe all national cuisines should be protected. Consider Italian. Saturday my consort and I wound up meandering around the West Village in search of lunch after the Union Square Greenmarket and were depressed to find the wonderful little shop across from Minetta Tavern selling focaccia col formaggio worthy of Recco now just bakes any old pizza. The guy I’m convinced proudly sold us our first slab looked beaten. And then we wound up at the newish Quinto Quarto, which looks Italian to the Tuscan Sun max but turns out food so bad it would convert your average Milanese to the McItaly. And it’s still in business. At least we evaded the worst New York food: Glasian — gloppy Thai/Vietnamese/sushi.

The dog that didn’t bark in the store

And while I’m trying to break myself of “gobbling digital doughnuts” over on Twitter, I do enjoy getting perspective from disgusted readers far from the hometown paper’s shrine to hubris. Brussels reaction to Paris old-timers? Same as ours, all-cap boring. Buenos Aires reaction to yet another ode to Buenos Aires? Who’s in the tank? Unfortunately, one thing leads to another and soon I’m reading a complaint that anyone trashing Ducasse for saying London’s the best food city probably should be eating in London more often; otherwise he/she looks like the left-behind. Which of course made me wonder just why or how well the JGW knows a snooty club there so well, whether from half of Jay McInerney’s travel rule (speculation) or by hanging out there personally. Which would be less surprising given the lede that ran on another guy’s piece on how “everyone” has childhood memories of suffering through cafeteria meals on field trips to museums. Earth to Señor Slim Tower: Not all Americans grow up with either food-equipped museums to visit or money to eat in them. Among the many things destroying old-style journalism, that blatant disconnect between the comfortable and the afflicted is the most corrosive. Lie down with only Ivy League graduates and you wake up believing it’s always morning with steak and eggs in America.

Wheat sandwiches, also

I’m becoming more forgiving of a reporter who always sent her editors into the archives to be sure she had not written the same lame story using the same lame language in the past. Either brains shrink or cranial hard drives get overloaded, I’m slowly acknowledging. Youngsters, though, have no excuse. You want to announce a huge discovery while promoting your next product, at least be sure it wasn’t already done. Confit sans gras, my derriere.