THE GURGLING COD

Employees must wash hands before returning to the keyboard?

The Gurgling Cod has been meaning to call BS on the huffiness attending the new system of sanitation grades for NYC restaurants. I can't imagine owning a restaurant and going on the record against this plan, but what does the Cod know? In particular, the argument that letter grades are somehow infantilizing seems extra-retarded.  But the Cod wants to rebrand as a uniter, rather than a divider. To that end, an idea for improving hygiene in all restaurants: every shift begins with a viewing of Chromeo's "Nice and Clean":

Guiteau Monday -- don't call it a comeback.

You might have thought that Guiteau Mondays took the summer off. Like, you know, 'Fessers and stuff.

Isn't it pretty to think so? Tip of the fin to Mme. Chandonet.

Automator & Koala & Patton & Charles &... Maws?

Craigie on Main gets on the lovage bandwagon. In a world without disambiguation, this would indicate that COM helmsman had signed up with the Handsome Boy Modeling School side project from the early Oughts, which would be exciting on several levels, not least for the challenges it would pose to our understandings of space, time, and genre.* In any case, it's  "simple syrup, grpfrt, lemon juice, 3 kinds of bitters" (including presumably lovage bitters?) and likely to be a topnotch thirst buster, like the rest of the stuff that comes from the bar at COM. And an excuse to revel in the self-conscious loucheness of Lovage:

*The chefs/bands thing is tricky, and arguable, with the shimmering exception that Thomas Keller is clearly secretly a member of Steely Dan.

Machete Tacos

So, the keeneyed cinetrix tells me that  Robert Rodriguez will be making an appearance at ComicCon to promote Machete, and giving away tacos from a custom-designed taco truck.

1) I hate to mention any particular feats of aquatic daredevilry performed by a character on Happy Days, but this might be that for taco trucks.

2) Brownsploitation is subtly different from blacksploitation. It is marginally OK, it seems, for Danny Trejo to give away tacos to promote this film, in a way that it would be out of the question for, say, Samuel L. Jackson to promote his reboot of Shaft by giving away fried chicken. The Gurgling Cod welcomes your explanation.

 

Going the extra mile for local food?

The Gurgling Cod has been accused in the past of being a bad reader, so I may be wrong about this, but this DI/DO feature about how more and more chefs have to woo local farmers because of the competition for good ingredients seems to suggest an enormous irony:

Beyond this, given the explosion of farmers’ markets, ingredient-hungry chefs have to travel farther to get what they want, said Mr. Mishanec. It can be easier for small growers to sell in farmers’ markets for immediate cash — and often more per pound — than extending restaurants credit for 30 days, said Jim Barber, whose family has inhabited the Middleburgh farm for 153 years. John Magazino, president of Primizie Fine Foods in the Bronx, a high-end produce supplier, said that increasingly “many restaurants now have to work with farmers outside the band of the Greenmarkets.”

So if I am correct, the popularity of local food means that chefs have to range farther and farther afield to find local food? Fascinating!

Sifton Soundtracks: Aquavit, b/w The Cardigans, "Iron Man"

Sifton, again so soon. Sifton takes one of Aquavit's previous three stars and puts it in his pocket, leaving it with two. Aquavit shares a homeland with this summer's bisexual hacker It Girl, and rest assured, Sifton cannot resist going there in the lede:

IT has been a Swedish summer here in New York. There seem to be Stieg Larsson novels on every fourth lap on the D train choogling over the Manhattan Bridge, on every third iPad glowing in the dark of the jitney driving east on the Long Island Expressway toward Montauk.

And:

Up front is a bistro serving fairly traditional Swedish food: meatballs and gravlax. In back, past a long bar, is a formal dining room. It is comfortable if slightly shopworn back there, a company boardroom and meeting space, replete with chic wooden plates and scarred wooden floors. Mikael Blomkvist, the hero of the Larsson novels, might arrive at any moment to blow smoke in the face of a criminal plutocrat.

You have to feel bad for the Swedes, who will have to wait a while until something displaces these books as the primary referent for folks elsewhere -- it's kind of like if you are from Chicago and you travel in Europe, people used to assume your two next door neighbors were Al Capone and Michael Jordan.

It could be worse, for the review and the restaurant -- there are no gags about torturing fish as if they were hapless victims of Avocat Bjurgmann, for instance, but Sifton does make it clear why he is turning down the rheostat:

Aquavit’s dining room can be somewhat lonely these days, only a little more than half full at peak hours. There is a sour scent to some of the passageways, the sort that flowers cannot battle.

So, a song from Swedes about a fellow a little past his prime seems like just the thing. Play us off, The Cardigans:

Good news for Brooklyn Squirrels!

Swedish Sifton Soundtrack tk, but more immediately, if you live in Brooklyn and have a bushy tail and black beady eyes, you can rest a little easier. Steven Rinella, onetime scourge of squirrels, has moved upstate and on to pigs. The single nastiest piece of blog-releated correspondence The Gurgling Cod has received was courtesy of Mr Rinella, who took exception to my reservations about his urban locavore project. There is some of the same fecklessness that permeated the earlier efforts, but The Gurgling Cod is a) supportive of roasting pigs, in general,* and b) kind of glad that Rinella documents a method so involved that it makes The Cod's preferred Caja China method seem like popping leftovers in the microwave.

*Will be roasting in state #5 this fall. Details TK.

Sifton Soundtracks: Ma Peche, b/w The Tin Men, "So Uptown"

Anchower, I know. Unforgivably late to the party on this one -- blame Hughesnet.com, the worst ISP in the world, and a superabundance of stuff in real life. I was really looking forward to this one -- Sifton's first foray into the Chang Empire, and I had a song picked out in advance, and even bugged the Timelords to go ahead and review it. And then I had not the song, and the worst ISP in the world, and cousins and meals to cook and stones to drag around and a <strike>perfect storm</strike> exciting new challenges with the day job. More frustrating, the cinetrix and I dined at Ma Peche the Saturday before the review dropped, of which more later.

Sifton likes it. The dos seems about fair -- Sifton, et al, got a lot deeper into the menu than we could in one visit, and it's probably laudable that Sifton resisted the temptation to rave or pan.

The thesis of Sifton's review is that Ma Peche is the BMW 735i of the Chang Empire -- a little bigger and more comfortable than downtown's 2002 -- the analogy breaks down here, in that there is no automobile where you have to sit on a stool to drive it. 

Sifton is busy enough with the food that he does not need to amuse himself with Siftonian excesses, except possibly here:  

Accordingly, in line with a bistro, you may order from a raw bar — another first for Mr. Chang — offering oysters and clams, shrimp and Alaskan king crab, with a calamansi mayonnaise and a mignonette with a Thai basil bang. There is local fluke tossed with herbs and pickled pineapple, silky and difficult not to bolt. There is a flavorful squid as well, like a Vietnamese green-papaya salad born of the sea, cool and fragrant, chili hot. It is best to experience all these piled together onto a huge plateau fruits de mer, as if at some some imaginary Balthazar in Da Nang.

Yes, the imaginary Balthazar across the street from the imaginary MOMA store in Da Nang. Anyway, the song for you as you reread last week's review is "So Uptown" from the Tin Men, who are worthy of your attention regardless. 

 Tin Men, "So Uptown"

Meatopia: You say "meat," I say "opia"

I had fun at Meatopia. I had fun judging meats and meeting various folks. Other responses seem to vary from utter fulfillment of the promise of a utopia of meat, to a sunstroked Clara Peller starring in a reboot of Shutter Island. As LT Chronicles suggests,  graph of  satisfaction w/ the event would mirror a graph of arrival time. I arrived at about noon, and got an inkling that crowds would be a factor when I saw the line for the ferry to Governor's Island. However, that part moved pretty fast. In the early going, lines were scarce to nonexistent, and I scarfed some Hill Country brisket, the famous duck tacos of Sue Torres of  Sueno, and an underrated chicken chorizo sandwich from The Smoke Joint. I took a breather, enjoyed a Six Point Ale, and found some shade. By the time I was ready for Round 2, the complexion of the event had changed, I did get in some smoked meat from Mile End, and the lamb from Illi, but at many stations, lines stretched all the way across the rough circle where the food stations were. I had to finagle a little bit to get at the Caja China pigs from Smokin' Joes. Unfortunately, the layout meant that folks waiting in the lines had no shade at all on a hot day. Next year, I hope the Meatopians change the layout to take advantage of the shade. 

A few observations: people complain about lines, but one of the most compelling reasons for getting in a line is the existence of a line. From what I saw, it seemed as if people were looking for where they could get in a line, rather than where they could get a bite to eat.

This behavior also suggests the way the event reflected NYC's interest in celeb chefs. The folks I talked to on the way over spoke of specific chefs/restos they wanted to hit (Campanaro, Freytag, Waxman). What with the event taking place on a Sunday in July, when folks who can pull it off are likely to have escaped the city, the demo of the crowd skewed a little bit younger and broker than it might otherwise. Thus, lots of food nerds eager to try food from places they likely cannot usually afford to try seemed to amp up the line dynamic. Thus, the editorial assistant/aspiring charcutier from Red hook who showed up at 2:30 with a three bite ticket and an agenda would likely be frustrated.

That said, there are lessons to be learned here from Jazzfest. If you go to Jazzfest hoping to hear acts x, y, z for one low(?!) price, you will be disappointed. Seeing the Meters, Dr. John, etc, outdoors is not at all like seeing them at Tipitinas. If, instead, you treat it as its own thing, walk around, enjoy the music, and marvel at the magical process by which your twenty dollar bills turn into crawfish boudin and pints of Abita, you will have a good time. Similarly, if you go to Meatopia 2.0, arrive early,  take eating opportunities as they present themselves, you will have a good time.

In terms of attendance and response, Meatopia seems like it was a success -- the biggest issues are a function of the event's popularity -- and for a first-time event taking place on an island in the middle of the summer in NYC, there could have been more and bigger snafus. It will be interesting to see how this event evolves. Meatopia is a public iteration of what used to be Josh Ozersky's birthday, but I can imagine better, less hot times of year for eating meat and drinking fancy beers.

Nora Ephron: "I feel bad about my h8in"

Marginally food related, in that Nora Ephron was among those responsible for perpetrating that crime of cinema on the legacy of Julia Child. In the recent MC Eschery covered NYEr, Ephron for the ostensibly funny Shouts and Murmurs feature, wrote what claimed to be a parody of the Stieg Larsson Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. The Larsson books are dicey -- The Cod burned through them in a handful of June evenings while the cinetrix was off at the Flash, and enjoyed them -- evidently the famously uninhibited Swedish sexual mores mean that folks either have a) relentlessly honest and sincere extramarital affairs, or b) torture teen prostitutes from the Baltic. It is something of a Taco Bell literary experience, in that one enjoys it more during than after. That said, I might point out in response to Ephron's hamfisted and tone-deaf stab at a parody, that there was one book I saw on lots of beach blankets over the 4th, and it wasn't I feel Bad About My Neck.