THE GURGLING COD

The Daytrippers

Not sure if apologizing or not apologizing for writing the eightybajillionth post on the Ko reservation system is is worse, but Bruni's passionate, (but gave my word to stop at third) review in the NYT does point to a consequence of this system that has been overlooked, as far as I know. For people who do not live where there are fancy restaurants, one of the attraction of visiting a big city is eating in fancy restaurants. I have no way to confirm this, but I'll bet a significant proportion of the reservations on the book at Per Se tonight are from people from out of town, celebrating a special occasion, or just the chance to eat chez Keller. The six-day window at Ko, coupled with the capricious nature of the system, renders making a plan to come to town to eat at Ko impossible, or very expensive, in that it would involve last-minute ticket purchase, not to mention some flexibility jobwise. With Bruni's raveish review in a national fishwrap pushing Ko awareness beyond the people reading the latest breathless updates from Eater and Grub St. on their iPhones, to people who watch golf on television, it will be interesting to see if the system changes. Of course, for the foreseeable future, Chang could bang the place out with people who live within walking distance, so his answer could well be to suggest that out of towners stick with lunch at Katz's, a matinée of Wicked, and dinner at Tavern on the Green.

The image is from a sleptupon holiday classic. And speaking of which, the best Beatles cover ever:

Bad Brains: "Day_Tripper/She's_a_rainbow.mp3"

The Levee was dry

If he had digits, the Cod would have been scratching his head all day about the most recent DJ, wherein Frank relays the exciting news that there are bars in NYC that make their Manhattans with rye.* As Frank even points out, this is, in fact, the original spirit used for Manhattans. So, it's as if Frank singled out places that make gimlets with gin, or Reubens with corned beef, or, I suppose, BLTs with bacon. Considering the skepticism other Timesmen have for the Internets, I suppose the DI/DO commitment to an online presence is heartening. Still, my best guess is that a Sulzberger minon stood at the door of Frank's office and refused to let him leave until he posted up a DJ.
*To paraphrase the Wedding Singer, Alex Balk gets it.

Bowls of Ramen have more fun

Who knew? But Bruni returns to Momofuku, and opines

With squat stools at communal tables in addition to tall stools at counters, [it] offers a little more comfort. It’s set up like its more lauded sister, Momofuku Ssam Bar, though it has a paler hue and a perkier spirit, playing the blonde to Ssam’s brunette.

There's something creepy charming about the way Frank invokes hair color as an existential fact. Perhaps he has not been following Cameron Diaz' career very closely. In any case, I guess this makes Ko the redhead? Bruni does not say anything about Ko. By the way, I hear it's pretty hard to get reservations there.

Squeeze my DI/DO, til the juice runs down my leg

A few odds and ends that escaped initial online perusal thrust themselves forward during and actual perusal of the actual fishwrap:
1) With close ties to the pickle community,  I guess I'm happy  that the tide of brine lifts all boats, and suchlike, but seems like the pickle sickle either got a raw deal from Flo Fab or needs to tweak its marketing material. I'll blame the "deconstructed" headline on the Times -- my lonely struggle against retarded misuse of this term is well-documented, but it's not as clear where this idea "fresh-squeezed" pickles come from. To clarify, these are preserved vegetables, (i.e. not fresh) shipped by mail order (i.e. not fresh either) -- "fresh" here is not so much inaccurate as irrelevant.

2) Sort of nit-picky and a little bit trainspotty, but this is a blog after all -- in the print edition, the image accompanying the lamb is the only one without a photo credit. Interestingly, this image also turns up on Dean and DeLuca's site, I imagine this thing happens frequently, but had not noticed it quite like this. Someone with a keener journalistic and visual sense than I would be better equipped to address this question, but it seems at least a tiny bit dubious to run a foto of a food item that was styled and shot by the vendor. Considering that the other 3 items in this week's Food Stuff are credited to Tony Cenicola, would it be that hard to get a shot of the actual lamb, rather than relying on D&D?

3) Finally, and continuing yesterday's gripe -- read the damn Pure Food and Drug Act, the legislation (putatively) inspired by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. What The Jungle has to say about animal welfare is what the PF&DA has to say about animal welfare, which is what Daniel Plainview has to say about animal welfare, which is to say, sweet fuck all. So if  actually "someone gave Upton Sinclair a video camera and a Web link," the chances are that he would probably use it to find ways to talk about how capitalism sucks balls, that is to say, chews up families, etc.
To clarify, there are things about the meat industry that are bad for its material (animals) and things that are bad for its labor (people) these are not the same. The dude in the video waltzing the downer cow with a forklift might have a sick dental plan, for all we know, and conversely, there could be some poor undocumented soul getting RSI slaughtering heritage turkeys that got to spend a year at Wesleyan before they got shanked by some poor undocumented soul. Ironically, the article concludes with a hint at its own betrayal of Sinclair with its penultimate graf:

With research, legal fees, production costs and accommodations, an investigation can cost as much as $67,000, Ms. Newkirk said. And investigators who work for the Humane Society and PETA say it is getting tougher to get hired at plants because managers are increasingly suspicious of applicants who don’t fit the profile of the typical slaughterhouse worker, often a Spanish-speaking immigrant.

So, its hard to go undercover to help save the cows, because PETA folk have a hard time passing as meatpacking laborers, because all of the laborers are "often a Spanish-speaking immigrant"? Is there not more than one problem here? I care about humanely raised meat, but I also think that Upton Sinclair was onto something when he showed how Packingtown chews up families and spits them out. I care about cows, but I care about Mexicans, too.

New York I love you, but you're bringing me down

There was something about reading Bruni's bold foray to find restaurants on beyond where his his Metrocard could take him hard on the heels of reading the Wed Chef's struggle to find decent ethnic food in Queens. Maybe there is a word for it in German.

Ps- There is an allusion in this post, not a typo. It would be sexist to think otherwise.

Medlar is gonna knock you out.

Flo Fab announces medlar comeback. However, the medlar has been here for years.

Add Dovetail

The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, with a detour through his understated sense of irony. Not a day after their ridiculed their signature dish was ridiculed here, Bruni drops three stars on Dovetail, which may be some consolation.
From many perspectives, it's hard to think of any portion of the island of Manhattan as a sleepy backwater, but it does seem like the expectations and the hype built a bit more gently than they would if this place was on the Lower East Side. And kudos to John Fraser and crew for persuading Bruni that he's on the right side of that fine line between clever and stupid. Also, the drollery of the dishes is the kind of thing that seems as if it would have summoned an insufferably droll Bruni not that many months ago. We'll never know, as the proprietor is busy taking Clement Greenberg lessons, but this review seems mostly BruniDigest proof.

I was just helping that wine merchant over the fence.

Update: Someone pointed out that preventing this kind of thing would require the exact same mutual cognizance between advertising and editorial that would be necessary to encourage this kind of thing.

Gastropoda has pointed out this sort of thing in the past, but oops,  yesterday's DI/DO did it again. Asimov's piece on second string vintages, including this graf

That’s fine with me. In the latest catalog from Sherry-Lehmann, you can buy a 2003 Saint-Julien from Léoville Barton (a vintage rated 95 by Robert M. Parker Jr.) for $160. No thank you. But I would consider the 2001 Léoville Barton for $75. Why the discrepancy? Mr. Parker awarded 2001 only 88 points, even though he gave the individual bottles 95 for the ’03 and 92 for the ’01. In this case, I prefer the ’01 vintage to the ’03.

appeared opposite a full page ad for, you guessed it, Sherry-Lehman. The folks at Sherry-Lehman do not have input on editorial, but it creates a disagreeable impression that they do. There is impropriety, and the appearance of impropriety, and both can damage credibility. S-L and Zachy's appear to be two of the larger players in wine retailing in New York, and both advertise in DI/DO more often than not, and one could not cover retail wine without reference to them, but doesn't someone have a job to prevent these kinds of embarrassments?

Snuffallophagy

I was glad to see an article about the Jamie Oliver chicken business in the DI/DO yesterday. Inevitably, it has a degree of stunt to it, and lotsa p to the r for Jamie, but for all that, I think well worth doing. In a variation on "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime" we need something like "if you can't slit the throat, you can't eat the goat." I am an unapologetic meat eater, but I try to be mindful about my meat. When so much of the food industry works to obfuscate where meat comes from, this, and the slaughtering photos at the beginning of the River Cottage meat book, are important reminders. However, a phrase in Moskin's lede suggests she didn't get it:

LAST Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman’s license, Mr. Oliver staged a “gala dinner,” in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.

Surely, Moskin does not mean "snuff film," unless she feels that Oliver killed the chicken on camera to titillate his viewers.
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Toxic Bitches

Now and again something pops up in the news or in the tubes that inspires paralysis. The systolic dudgeon is up around 180, but the thought of re-reading the offending piece, posting on it and moving on is unpalatable because it would involve re-reading the thing that got me pissed in the first place. I'd missed out on the Skinny Bitch phenomenon until it popped up in the DI/DO, but my luck ran out on Wednesday. What nobody seems to have pointed out is that these women (not gonna abet their brand by calling them names) are the Dov Charney of the food world. Like the American Apparel founder, these women are promoting positive social values (in the food industry, rather than textiles) using a reprehensible philosophy of gender and sexuality. Actually, the waif taint iconography Charney uses to push panties is probably healthier than the worldview coming out of SBITK:

“You know how you feel when a tall, thin, pretty woman walks by and something inside you wants to say, ‘That skinny bitch!’?” said Ms. Barnouin, who happens to be tall, thin and pretty. “The book takes that envy and anger and gives you a new place to put it.”

The world needs more of this shit (hollerin atcha, US weekly and imitators), like it needs more pan-Asian restaurants. I am not going to plough deeply into SB bibliography, but getting women to buy shit by making them feel shitty is the oldest trick in the book.  I don't see how wanting to get skinny so other women will not like you is an improvement over wanting to get skinny so men will like you. According to a t-shirt for sale at an alumnae reunion I crashed recently, my girl Madeline Albright says "There is a special place in hell for women who refuse to help each other." A self help industry with a foundation based on making women feel like shit suggests that there's a warm spot waiting for these women. In all, further evidence that being a vegan may make you stupid.

As a palate cleanser, the kind of Toxic that is good for you (contains swearing, and some weird stuff about Muppets) Hope Asgard is treating you well, ODB.

I know.

*Charney is probably ahead of the game here, as not having textiles made by eight year olds in China is a clearer social plus than heeding edicts of an alumna of an "unaccredited school for alternative health"