Aug 11
I’ve been so preoccupied the past few days with work work and impromptu trip planning that I forgot to mention my guest post on Gowanus Lounge. My finger isn’t quite on the pulse of new Brooklyn developments (I never know what’s going on even in a three-block radius from my own apartment). Luckily, others have that covered so I can spend more time on the mundane and me-centric.
Breaking news: women eat meat. Who knew? Next thing I know, you'll be telling me that females are wearing pantaloons and driving horseless buggies. I thought all ladies were subsisting on Wish-Bone® Salad Spritzers™ and fro-yo (oh boy, that's an even fouler word than clot). If it weren't for the Times's style section I'd never be privvy to such universal absolutes, “Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson.” You think she means "fat" Kate Hudson?
Apparently, I had a little (they chopped it in half) eco-friendly round-up, “10 Best Websites to Get You Started Going Green” in Friday’s New York Post. It’s online but I didn’t see it (or any of the other eleven “green” articles on their site) in the paper so it’s a mystery to me when and if it ran. I do feel the need to mention it, regardless.
Last month I was convinced that the last thing the world needed was another Red Hook ball fields article. Or so I thought until I was asked to write one (actually the second for the same publication but whatever). Allow me to present you with “Stand and Deliver” (I’m not putting their quotes around Stand). Ok, I’ll be the first to admit the round up breaks no new ground (I wrote way more than what’s included and the photographer took hundreds of photos). But short and snappy is what the ol’ New York Post is known for, so no surprises.
(Paraphrasing because I was only half-watching) “Which section of the New York Times allows critic Frank Bruni a $350,000 annual budget for expenses?” (And my own question, who’s flying him first class to Moscow?)
No one on this evening’s Jeopardy knew the answer (ok, Tim Abou-Sayed from Florida did eventually come up with “what is restaurants” as a sheer guess, right at the buzzer and after a miss from the ultimate winner Monica Lenhard of Michigan answered, “theater”).
Not that Jeopardy contestants are representative of the nation at large (more informed yet more socially retarded) but it relieved me that clearly no one outside of New York reads the New York Times dining section. I like to be reminded that NYC is not the center of the world, even though I admit to feeling anxious and out of touch with local media when I’m out of town (which is why I was reading “Off the Menu” on vacation in ’05 and learned about Fatty Crab. This was pre-food blog glut by the way, when I relied on print for restaurant openings. I swear I’m not obsessed with hating/loving Fatty Crab—I think I just like typing the word fatty).
Sometimes I wish I didn’t know things, the kinds of things in the New York Approval Matrix. I don’t want to know who The Splasher and Boerum Hill Crapper are (ok, maybe the crapper is alright), yet I do. Why? The person I live with has no knowledge of any of this non-importance (though it’s not as bad as the sixth grade dropout boyfriend raised in an orphanage who had never watched TV in his entire life. Honest to god, he had no clue who Tom Cruise was and that’s a hard one to avoid). Easily 85% of the people I come into contact daily for business and pleasure are not familiar with useless New York-ish pop culture talking points. Should I stop reading self-referential blogs for sanity’s sake? It’s not like I impress anyone with witty, informed banter. In fact, I often go all day without uttering more than a sentence or two, which likely contributes to my urge for spewing nonsense here.
Last night I saw an ad for a job I’d be perfect for. Not a cool job, library work, but definitely not hip as all (northern) Brooklyn librarians apparently now are. It involved food marketing. But it was in Virginia. I’ve seen Chicago ads and seriously think, but Virginia? Uh uh (it doesn’t help that James’s parents live in that state and would kill for him to live closer to home). It’s really out of the country or not at all.
Saturday I was informed that Manila might be in a business trip future. I’d love to go to the Philippines and have been interested in the country (well, the food) since I was a teenager. Shanghai was also tossed out as a possibility for the fall, maybe both. Could I stop reading the New York Times and placeblogs, whatever the fuck those are, for at least a few weeks?
Last month everyone (in the blogosphere, duh–my god, it’s worse than I thought) was doing the let’s live on food stamp allotments challenge (I had food stamps in college and ate quite well–$112/month for a Northwestern 19-year-old in ’91 was a lot of extra money. That doesn’t seem right considering that same state’s average allotment appears to be less sixteen years later). Boring. Maybe I’ll do the same with regional periodicals and blogs. You know, doing without, living like the poors. But then, I’d miss the rare, cool non-NYC-centric chain restaurant article like this one appearing in tomorrow’s print edition.
It’s not like I’m moving (back) to Oregon anytime soon. Wild west or not, the rugged individualist state probably isn’t all that welcoming of outlaw chefs. Jason Neroni will only luck out because no Oregonian has any inkling or interest about what goes on in NYC. God bless them.
I was just struck by the cleverness (usually not a good thing) of the Fage Yogurt ad on the first page of the new New York (do others get their copy on Monday? Mine never comes before Tuesday and last week it never showed up at all). It took me a while to figure it out, too, which I’m hoping is merely due to the extreme heat hurting my brain. Initially, I thought the two pages just mirrored each other coincidentally.
It’s more impressive full-sized because you can see the texture of the yogurt and the phase, "ridiculously thick yogurt," but I don’t have the energy to scan the thing. Ad Rants’s version is sufficient.
I don’t want to end up one of those cranks who constantly finds fault and starts writing letters to the editor (not emailing, writing—that’s when you know you’ve lost it). I’m more of a stewing and festering, then forgetting type.
But I was a little baffled by Time Out NY’s bit on jamon (by their new staff writer) that I read last night (I’m actually reading rather than skimming now that I temporarily have no internet or TV to entertain me into the wee hours). They get all gushy over the hand-cut serrano ham at Stinky Bkln. I like the place, nice enough people, but they can’t cut jamon to save their lives. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned their mangling.
I was excited to see the meaty hooved leg around Christmas-time and had to get a pound. I ended up with a pile of chunks and stubs. I’m absolutely no Spanish expert but I have bought bellota in Barcelona and the cuts were invariably long and paper-thin.
I hoped my first Stinky Bkln foray was an aberration and tried again a few months ago. After watching the hip young man slicing off pudgy squares in a painfully slow fashion, I became nerved out and was like, “just give me a quarter pound.” It was unbearable to watch even for a few minutes. I’m trying to imagine shelling out $400 for three hours of this pleasure.
There are a lot of things I stay out of because I just don’t feel fit to judge. Barbecue and wine are two that immediately come to mind. Serve me swill and Dallas BBQ slop and I’ll hardly know better. But I do have a grasp on Spanish ham and there’s something wrong here.
Suicide food painting courtesy of lukecheuh.com
You know how Mork would occasionally (ok, maybe it was once) show up on Happy Days for no good reason? And I’m pretty sure Laverne & Shirley crossed over too despite the shows being set in different decades. It was misguided and wrong, characters need to stay in their own settings. I recently experienced the foodie equivalent.
Eh, I guess there wasn’t any time travel/messing with eras in this circumstance. Maybe it was more like when you were a kid and you’d see your teacher at the grocery store. That was always unsettling. It was getting late, a little past midnight on a Sunday and I was trying to prepare for a new Monday earlier rise. We were watching a recording of One Plate at a Time and Rick Bayless was in the Yucatan talking about his friend Jacques and how he has a condo in Playa del Carmen and great things happen when Jacques around, and I was like who is this Jacques douche. And then Rick answered my question, "Jacques is, well he’s your other favorite public television chef, Jacques Pepin."
WTF?! I seriously thought I was hallucinating. I'm not sure if it was because I was tired, but this was seriously the most laugh out loud funny thing I'd seen on TV in a long time. Jacques is supposed to be in Connecticut cooking fast food his way, not wearing a tunic and a dude necklace and eating nopales. The cross-breeding was just bizarre. I almost expected Ming Tsai, who’s also fond of the dude necklace, to show up call everyone “guys” and work some east meets west magic with black beans and fermented black beans. Ok, now I’m totally being a public television food geek.
I've never associated Bayless with Pepin, though a commonality is that they both have/had shows and books where they cook with their red-headed daughters—no one seems to remember Cooking with Claudine from the mid-‘90s. Somehow both One Plate at a Time and Fast Food My Way have developed into our favorite DVRd food picks, though. I’d never thought about Pepin one way or the other, but James is hooked on his show and I’ve been getting sucked in. I was never crazy about Rick Bayless either, we kind of started watching him as a joke because he's so stonerish, but his grown up hippy style has grown on us and now I’m gung ho on going to Mexico.
A Tuesday New York Post with some Braunstein nonsense on the cover has been sitting on my coffee table for a few days but it wasn’t until this afternoon that I actually scrutinized it. Despite being home sick, I was filled with vim and vigor after eyeballing the photo of his victim’s mirror that he had scrawled on before leaving.
“BYE – HOPE THINGS TURN AROUND FOR U SOON” written on a mirror (the same cheapo mirror/medicine cabinet that I have and also had at my previous dwelling. I think 90% of NYC apartments have that tri-paneled, ugly thing with white trim) after chloroforming and performing unseemly acts for 13 hours is like the funniest, flippest thing I’ve ever seen. So upbeat, and a great sentiment for many situations, big and small.
The caring message could apply to high profile crap like the mean daddy Baldwin call or the Virginia Tech rampage or it could be used to smooth over asinine NYC-centric problems. “Sorry you were outbid on a condo—bye, hope things turn around for u soon,” sorry you’re 41 and can’t conceive, sorry you can’t get a table at Waverly Inn. Or better yet, sorry your mom died because the crowds at Waverly Inn blocked her ambulance. Braunstein’s the new Hallmark.
Joel Stein is like a less wry Mo Rocca (I can’t help but mention at any mildly opportune moment that he sat directly in front of me en route to Chicago in February) laced with a touch of good ol’ fashioned Dave Berry. In a word, douchie. And apparently Time magazine has deemed him fit to write a food column. I hate voices of my supposed generation on any topic…but food? Really? It’s much better when they stick to two-liners on I Love the ‘80s.
Foreign fast food chains are a topic near and dear to my heart so I couldn’t help but peek at his first foray into culinary commentary, "The Hungry American." Uh, and maybe I’m misinterpreting his interpretation, but he seems to be of the mind that chains set up in America to try to appeal to us and get it all wrong. That might be the case if he were talking about Pret a Manger overdosing the U.S. with mayonnaise. Yet the examples he cites are California-centric, for one, but inaccurate since they are primarily restaurants catering to expatriates.
Minus the Jollibee burgers, this isn’t really “foreign American food.” I don’t think this Filipino chain is trying to entice the general public with gusto, and if they are then spaghetti topped with ketchup and sliced wieners is a charming yet off kilter business plan. I don’t know that the businesses in his commentary are trying to resell our culture back to us as much as that they’ve interpreted fast food for local audiences and are reaching out to immigrants who’ve settled in the U.S.
I don’t think Guatemalan Pollo Campero, at least in NYC, had made an effort to attract non-Central American customers. In fact, the one in Sunset Park went out of business for that very reason, the neighborhood was more Mexican and Puerto Rican and didn’t identify with the brand. Practically all cultures like fried chicken, we don’t own the concept.
And for Stein to posit that Beard Papa is interpreting donuts for Americans is insane. They’re not mimicking our fried dough, they’re making cream puffs. Japanese (and Asians in general) love French shit. I had great pastry in Hong Kong and Singapore.
And his conclusion is frighteningly self-revealing: “To them, it seems, we're a happy, efficient, fun bunch of guys, even if we act like total jerks when it suits us. They've figured it out: we're frat boys. And we like to eat like them.” Yikes. I wonder how those crazy Filipinos might re-create the beer bong, don’t you? And Nicaraguan jello shots? Just a matter of time.
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