Sifton Soundtracks: ABC Kitchen b/w The Very Best, "The Warm Heart of Africa," Architecture in Helsinki Remix

All JGV does is open good restaurants, evidently. All Sifton does is review them. This week, it's ABC Kitchen, and another deuce. Sifton seems to admire the place, but has a hard time really enjoying it. What with it being in ABC Carpet and Home, it has a bit of a casual sensibility by JGV standards, but for folks where a dinner plan that begins with "let's just..." can end w/ three figure per person check total. What with ABC Carpet and Home evidently what would happen if Moby took over Anthropologie and made the housewares a little less like they were for furnishing a brothel in The Quiet American, the place is, like, ecological:

Ingredients for the cooking, as a position paper on the back of the chic cardboard menu declares, are “consciously sourced.” The breadbaskets were “handcrafted by the indigenous Mapuche people of Patagonia.”

1: "Consciously sourced" suggests that other chefs at other restaurants source their ingredients unconsciously - raising the possibility, just maybe, of Peter Hoffman huffs ether before jumping on his lowrider bike and heading over to the Greenmarket, and is as likely as not to come home with nothing but daikon to put on the menu. 

2: "Handcrafted by the indigenous Mapuche people of Patagonia"? Fuck me with a jaggedy piece of a Putumayo CD. This sounds like somehing a horny sophomore might use to lure you into the hammock he got last summer before he roofies you. And if the eco includes sustainability, and there's a focus on foods from "up and down the East coast," there are folks a lot closer who can handcraft circles around these Patagonian, basketwise. 

And yeah, the food sounds nice, but not terribly interesting. The vibe Sifton conveys of in Manhattan but of the Hamptons sounds nice for folks who can afford to be homesick for the Hamptons, but a bit much for the rest of us.

With twin themes of earnestness and privilege emerging as the salient aspects of this review, the compass points in the direction of Vampire Weekend. More still, the collaboration of VW front guy Ezra Koenig with The Very Best. (btw, I liked The Very Best when it was a Radioclit+EsauMwamwaya mixtape, but the album sounds a bit like Graceland for the PBR n singlespeed crowd.) But! There is good news -- there is a remix of this song by Architecture in Helsinki, which takes EK out of the mix and replaces it w/ a horn track that sounds like they hired cartoon robot walrus session muscians. Get it here. Via here.