THE GURGLING COD

Away from my desk

Holed up at Yaddo, working on my  Alice Waters/Grace Jones fan fiction:

While many of you think of San Francisco as the temple of Alice - farm driven, local sustainable, worshippers of seasonality, slaves to the rhythm of ingredient purity - SF is also about transformation and challenging established ideas of food.

In Episode One, the gals team up to make a delicious salad of mizuna, almond blossoms, and cocaine.

ps- Is there anything to eat in Portland, OR? Should I pack a lunch?
pps- If you can't tip, you can't eat out. It's not that fucking complicated.

Swings and Roundabouts

Ups and downs in the morning pixels -- on the one hand:

Once again, here are some notable eaters who answered the question: If you jump on a plane right now, all expenses paid, where would you go eat? And once again, we’d loved to hear your dining fantasies.

Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, Berkeley, Calif.:

“I love the Ballymaloe House on the West Coast of Ireland and the cooking school there. They have been doing sort of what Chez Panisse has been doing.* They are just obsessed with these people making little sausages out of this pig or that pig and collecting wonderful eggs and going to farmers markets and getting lobster from the lobstermen.

99 times out of 100, questions like this give a chef the chance to make some gesture at their gustatory range -- Eric Ripert praises his favorite dim sum place, Daniel Humm rhapsodizes about the frites at some Alsatian roadhouse, etc. Instead Alice gazes across the Atlantic, and finds a reflection of herself immensely pleasing. If they did not invent narcissism in Northern California, they sure perfected it.

In better news, Lost City, via Eater, reports the presence of hard boiled eggs on the bar at Keen's. I am persuaded that each hard boiled egg on a bar postpones the coming apocalypse by at least 90 seconds.
*Let's hope not exactly.

Prehistoric Waters

Basically, like the Flav says, I can't do nuttin for ya, man. If I worked in a restaurant, I would be "in the weeds" figuratively speaking. Sadly, I do not, and the weeds are literal, and seem be growing through GCWHQ. But Max gets rooty with the Lexis/Nexis, and trawls up a third adulatory NYT profile of St. Alice, this one from 1981, and from Craig Claiborne. Craig spends some newsprint discussing Alice's hands, which are small.