THE GURGLING COD

Hasty, ill-considered gameday menu - breakfast ed.

It's poppin' across the football landscape, breakfastwise: 

Exactly! Elsewhere, Chad Ochocinco is taking a stab at cooking his own breakfast: 

The Cod would give a lot to see what Chad Ochocinco's kitchen looks like. Beyond the Kitchen-Aid mixer painted like a Bengals helmet, I mean. 

Otherwise, the local eleven is in action at the unconsionable noon hour, but we hold out hope that the visitors from Chapel Hill brought some of their goodies from the triangle, so we can crash a postgame tailgate featuring kale described reverently. Because, that's what they do there. Eat kale. From CSAs. It's Durham, not Chapel Hill, that's the Brooklyn of the South, but same general idea. 

The marquee game this evening is Badgers v. Spartans, or the foodshed of inexpensive cheese v. the foodshed of dried cherries. I'm stumped. Steal one of those Golden Corral chocolate fountains, and fill it with cheese? Anyway, play us off, Domino:

 

 

Quel crock! Or, crock pot time machine?

We've been on the Williams-Somadness tip for a while here. (Making fun of kitchen shit you don't need at prices you can't afford is what we do best here.) The aforementioned crock-pot, has been marked down an additional $30, and can be yours now for only $199! If you were looking for a reason to go on living, there you go. 

On the other hand, look at the picture: 

Bok choi AND square plates. Is the reason this crock pot is so expensive because it also allows you to travel back in time to the 1980s? If I could return to a world where Bob Stinson was still alive, and John & Exene were still married, THAT would be worth $199

Hasty, ill-considered gameday menu, Thursday ed - Arizona/UCLA

Spencer "EDSBS" Hall on this evening's Wildcat/Bruin tilt:

Tonight's may be the new low: a headless Arizona team playing a UCLA team headed by a truly desperate Rick Neuheisel. Like two starving bedraggled wanderers in the desert, they'll meet, think about fighting, and then spend the better part of their encounter flailing at each other hopelessly not until one wins, but until one decides fighting isn't worth the price of continuing a squalid, desperate existence.

Luckily, thanks to Eric Von Stroheim, you can watch highlights RIGHT NOW of a game that does not start for another 45 minutes. 

Menu? Beats me. Bresaola, if you got it, and a salad of pocket lint if not. 

Richman Trollgaze -- stop the presses!

The GQ feature on Brooklyn as the "Coolest city on the planet" is remarkable. The mind reels to imagine the offsites, late-night editing sessions, sweat and tears that went into writing a feature that reads exactly like it came out of the in-flight magazine of a regional airline.

A veteran troll like Richman recognizes the trollerificness of the Manhattan/Brooklyn troll (tedious as it may be to everyone in the world who does not have a dog in this fight), and he declares that the Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare is either the most interesting or the best restaurant in NYC. Either way, it seems like an effort by Richman to establish himself as the people's champion contra Sifton, who is too busy hobnobbing with plutocrats at Per Se to remember the simple pleasures of a $165 before wine dinner at a spot he gave a three star review to back in April, man. 

As with the lauding of a spot Sifton reviewed months ago, there is very little trailblazing here. The spots GQ praises are all ones familiar to even a casual Eater/Grub St. reader. Because it's Brooklyn, and they aren't cooped up with a bunch of suits in Manhattan, the writing has some unfortunate idioms. Fatty 'Cue, Vinegar Hill, etc. etc. are featured under this rubric:

 I'll pass on the salad, thanks. Also, did something dramatic happen to the food at Char #4? Folks seem to like it, but last time I was there, not long after it opened, they were serving kinda ambitious Ruby Tuesday food. 

Worlds collide- or, ixnay on the "ussypay," Eater

So once in a while some of the blog's peanut butter gets in the day job's chocolate. Part of the Cod's corporeal host's  work duties involved changing our journalism minor into a media studies minor, the thinking there being that training kids to work for newspapers was maybe not so responsible. There are larger questions, too, like what exactly a "professional writing" class should teach. (Hint -- if a college senior begins emails to profs/prospective employers with "Hey," that's on how the kid was raised, not on a professional writing class.) And then, free advice! From the internet! 

I'd wondered about the headline myself (interestingly, it was "wimps" in the Eater National email). But it turns out that teaching professional journalism is as easy as telling the kidS "DON'T USE THE WORD PUSSY!" (They can figure out the difference between "your" and "you're" on their own, and when they do, they can tell the "Director of Coffee for Irving Farm Coffee Company." 

When you say Butcher, I say Bee...

Via the unstoppable Princess Jinx, you can file brand new Late nite BYOB sammich restaurants under things the Cod is definitely not mad at This one's in Charleston, called Butcher & Bee. They give zero indication of effing around. And they are doing a little bit of pickling too. From the looks of the space, expect a room that feels like a mix of Cochon Butcher, the Helsinki airport, and Snake & Jake's.  There they are on the Twitters, where you can track the schedule for opeining.

Sifton Soundtracks bonus beats, or Swagging out with Uncle Punch

Speaking of Sifton, a bit more on the valedictory review of Per Se. I'd wondered a bit about why Sifton chose to go out with a stop the presses number along the lines of "Good Restaurant Is Good." Thinking about it a little bit more, it makes perfect sense.  The photograph at left of Hawaii FB Mike Edwards helps to explain. Why repeatedly drop about a grand per couple to confirm your hunch that Tom Keller knows a thing or two about this restaurant racket? Well, because you can.

More importantly, because other folks can't. Barring enormous personal resources, it's impossible for you to review Per Se the way that Sifton reviewed Per Se, because Sifton's rocking on Uncle Punch's dime, and you're not. It's a way for Sifton (and DI/DO editor Pete Wells) to close a chapter in DI/DO history with a reminder to the Cheese Sandwich Militia to know their role. Close inspection of a recent photo of Sifton confirms this hunch. Props to Penny Pascal, as always.  Play us off, swag us out, OFWGKTA (lyrics totally NSFW, obvs): 

 

Bruni gets it twisted at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

Bruni drops an op-ed that reminds us of why we will miss Sifton, and makes us miss Andy Rooney a little bit less. Bruni and his date drop in at Romera:

Romera is Manhattan’s newest culinary oddity, an elegant hideaway whose conceits include the pairing of each dish in an 11-course meal with a lukewarm flavored water in a lidded grappa glass. One water might be infused with leek and radish, another with jasmine and dried seaweed. Most taste like indecisive teas, commitment-phobic broths or pond runoff.

For Bruni, this joint is

The craziest example I’ve encountered of the way our culture’s food madness tips into food psychosis, at least among those with keen appetites and the means to indulge them.

But it’s hardly the only illustration. Surf the cable channels and clock the time before you spy a spatula, a strainer, someone chewing, someone oohing or Gordon Ramsay. I bet it’s less than 11 seconds.

Diners at the latest hot bistro or trattoria snap loving pictures of everything they eat, seeming to forget that it’s dinner, not “America’s Next Top Chicken Breast.” In New York, even the meatballs have paparazzi.

Well, sure. There are a lot of cable channels with a lot of food programming, and a lot of folks have phones with cameras, so it's not that hard to do. The Cod stands with Bruni in imagining a world where there is less chance of seeing Gordon Ramsay when you turn on the TV. But then Bruni palms the pea and moves the shell around:  

Steaks come with discourses on breed, feed and dry versus wet aging; coffee with soliloquies about growing regions, grinding methods and the optimal pour-over technique; beer with overwrought tasting notes.

We’ve tumbled far, far down the organic rabbit hole.* And with Romera, which opened a month ago in Chelsea, we may have finally hit bottom.

Romera sounds like an incredibly pretentious and overpriced restaurant. If I were shooting a remake of Coogan's Bluff, I'd use it as a illustration of the way that NYC sometimes tolerates/supports/embraces pretentious follies. But there is a difference between ill-concieved restaurants with avant-garde ambitions, and caring about where your food comes from. Tossing off discussion of where your steak or your coffee comes from as if it were tableside blather at Romera is nonsense. Bruni is either foolish or disingenous if he uses Romera as an example of the kind of thing that inevitably happens if you ask questions about what you're eating. 

*I'm not sure if this is sloppy writing or sloppy thinking, but usually the idiom "rabbit hole" implies that you would be better off on the surface, rather than that there is some ideal depth in the rabbit hole. So, for Bruni, the whole organic thing is a crock? 

Guiteau Monday rolls on -- love and theft with Herman Cain and John Lennon

And Guiteau Monday rolls right along, with the GOP Frontrunner(!)* donning a white robe(!)** and singing a parody of John Lennon's "Imagine" that simultaneously pisses on the laudable yet mawkish sentiment of that song, and in its delivery suggests Stepin' Fetchit doing a Paul Robeson impression.

*The GOP is so desperate not to have a Black president that they will stop at nothing, including electing another Black president?

**Historically, not a popular look among African Americans. 

Add Guiteau Monday: Colonel Sanders hates YOU

So, KFC has this thing called the Famous Bowl, which is basically elective gavage for people, as far as the Cod can tell. And now they added bacon: 

 

Short of The Colonel getting on the roof with a Barrett M107, hard to imagine a more antisocial menu offering. With the razors, it took Gilette close to a decade for them to make a razor with as many blades as the fake razor in an early Onion. Real fast food has caught up to 30 Rock's Cheesy Blasters in less than half the time.