Nets by the gross

I’m also so ancient I remember when the first thing you did on entering the kitchen (at least in restaurant school) was slap on a cap. Hair in the food is a preventable sickness. So every time I see a cooking video with un-netted facial hair, I have to click away. Especially now that someone on Twitter has started a debate on how cheek-and-chin fur is cleansed. Attention, Brooklyn cooks: After a certain length, maybe it should be shampooed. If for no other reason than to work out the loose hairs. The ones that wind up in the tilefish. Which reminds me: I once knew a guy, who actually dated a restaurant critic, who had one of those wild thatches off his chin and found a spider in it. Here it would be a roach.

Stamina is his middle name

Thanks to Twitter, I see one of the early Krazy Rhymes-With-Lunts I worked for has finally gotten her recipe shit together and is about to inflict a cookbook on stores. When I was slaving for her, a poor beaten co-author was suffering mightily trying to extract information while she was dervishing around two kitchens like the ghost of Palin foretold. I’m just hoping the latest collaborator can include all the juicy bits, like how to shake roaches out of aprons before tying them on. At the very least I hope they’ll share how to tell when bread dough is properly risen: “It should feel like a 40-year-old woman’s boob.” Then again, I’ll believe the book when I see it. Googling her age to see if she really could be 66 now, I came across an NYTimes profile pegged to the forthcoming release of . . . yes, her cookbook. And that was in 1996. I suspect the acknowledgements are going to be quite something. Or should be.

Chicago, the non-musical

I know even broaching the subject is going to get my character assassinated, because his best defense is always an offense, but you gotta wonder how the “restaurant guy” gets away with it now that blogs and Tweets are tracking his every non-move for the check. My favorite part of the latest episode was the squirrelly letter from his editor, whom a friend described as “one slippery little fish.” Apparently it all depends on what your definition of pay is.

Or lunch in Beard’s bathroom

I have to admit I felt a pang when I saw that fans of my pal the Not So Tyro thought I was dissing him for his innocence of old crap in the food world. Things are spinning by so fast no one can keep up anymore; another young friend was marveling at lunch the other day that her even younger brother has no conception of Al Gore as inventor of the internet; he only knows the guy who made “An Inconvenient Truth.” (Oh, to be so ignorant of the evil the Villagers can do.) But I really felt a pang when the kid decided to educate himself by way of Craig Claiborne. Even the old pharts in the food world have not quite gotten over that particular memoir. My advice: Do not Google Frugal Gourmet.