Save/get: Carbo-loading in pasta country

While we were having another fabulous lunch* the other week at La Dong off Union Square, one of the most beautiful, well-staffed restaurants in the city, it struck me why Captain Bonespurs considers America a shithole: The richest, “powerfulest” country in the world lost the Vietnam war, while he hid it out acquiring STDs. He’s still big mad, but we the sane majority get to revel in wildly expanded and enriched food horizons. We indulged in that lunch, after all, after a stop at the new Tashkent shop, which is always like a vicarious and savory trip to Uzbekistan (with very good prices on staples like tea and fancy canned tuna). And I don’t want to dwell on how the breakup of the Soviet Union has fortified the American cornucopia. The other night we walked out of the phenomenal “Natchez” documentary on the unsettled Civil War and around the corner to Laliko, for fabulous Georgian food (cheese bread with mint, eggplant rolls with pomegranate seeds, juicy pork kebabs with green plum sauce) and wines. One of which, the charming bartender said, would hit like a blow to the head. One racist xenophobe’s shithole is everyone else’s eating wonderland.

+ it’s very revealing that Black chefs are getting more and more headlines for their phenomenal food while you never hear a peep about the slattern’s cuisine: Slovenian. The one restaurant specializing in it near us, which always looked more like a ruble laundry than an eating destination, faded away and was replaced by just another Greek joint. I mean. It opened during #trumpandemic, after the racist lost, and sans streetery. Clearly too big to fail.

* Get the super-generous crab fried rice as the lunch special. Not least so you can indulge in either the brilliantly dressed salad or the lively mushroom soup to start with no extra charge.

No takers on the buttons out front, tho

How New York is New York? I sent my consort out via text to find poppy seeds and suggested Trader Joe’s first for price considerations, but he wound up at Zabar’s cuz of course the chain conceived as an oasis for the “overeducated and underpaid” didn’t carry ’em. I anticipated they’d be crazy-expensive, especially when he came came home and said they were shelved behind the fish counter, where the caviar and dried morels (and Angostura bitters) are kept. Joke’s on me, though: He had no idea how much to buy, given that I tell him 5 ounces is for fish and 4 ounces for meat and never let him near the spice rack. Two ounces, in short, is a shit-ton when you’re making lemon cookies and not hamantaschen.

And the bullfighters’ rag lives on

Not just because it has been a great outlet for me for more years than I can remember, I was pretty sickened by Hachette’s whacking of Metropolitan Home. The editors there were savvy way before “sustainable” gained currency; the food features were never merely about chefs’ narcissism but about cooking with meaning. Twitterers mocking it obviously never read it. I found our Baggus in its pages and over the last two years have passed up thousands of plastic bags that would otherwise be clogging albatross guts (one B saves three to four flimsies at our neighborhood Food Shitty alone). MH had a sensibility like no other “shelter” magazine. Back when it was Apartment Living, I was a ridiculously loyal subscriber even while living in furnished studios. And I certainly never imagined the night would come when the result of my recipe would be projected on a big screen at the Four Seasons for an anniversary party where most people were as down-to-dirt as House & Garden was not. So this is sadder than the demise of Gourmet. Despondently pulling out my very battered copy of “New American Cuisine,” the faultless, still-relevant cookbook MH put out while under Meredith ownership, before Hachette engulfed and devoured, I had to wonder if anyone in publishing ever has second thoughts. Was there ever a man more aptly named than David Pecker?