THE GURGLING COD

Wet and messy* and wasteful

1,000 packs of ramen + slip n slide = hilarous viral video? Maybe when everyone has enough to eat, food wasting stunts might be funny.** Until then, it's evidence of just another Guiteau Monday. 

*It's a thing. Don't Google. 

**Kobayashi, this means you. 

A beefcake olive branch for Houston

Solid weekend. Work party Fri, friend party Sat, installed most of a garage door opener and the cinetrix helped me help Cousin Dan blacksmith a fireplace poker for us. Along the way, the Cod managed to troll the 4th largest city in the US of A on accident. A post w/the premise that the national rollout of Eater bureaus is fun b/c you can see that the folly and drama in cities you don't know much about is similar to the folly and drama among the ususal NY/SF type suspects led to allegations that I don't know much about the restaurant or bartending scene in Houston. Attempts to explain that my lack of familiarity w/ the participants was why I found this situation amusing were characterized as vitriol, which was not at all what I was trying to get across. In an effort to make amends, a sexy Houston collage (NSFWISH toward the end):

Bum Phillips!

J.R. Richard! 

 
Beyonce Knowles!

And Dan Pastorini! 

 

Hamnation in Houston and Miami

One of the great things about Eater's national expansion push is the reassuring evidence that restaurant folks outside of NY and SF are just as huffy and petulant. Two cases in point:

1) One Allison Matsu was kicked out of at Houston bar:

Matsu, an avid tweeter who won a Houston Press Web award for "best late night twitterer," was out enjoying a beer or two (an Allagash to be exact) at Down House with a friend when she overheard a bartender mention Bobby Heugel, a prominent Houston bartender and restaurateur. Matsu told Eater, "I tweeted that I heard the bartender behind the bar at Downhouse quoting Heugel. I said he was a twerp and used #jerkoff."

Matsu also added, "I didn't like that he was talking to other employees right in front of customers about a man that is a pioneer."

Down House general manager, Forrest DeSpain, saw the tweet (he runs the account for Down House) and immediately went into defense mode. In an interview with Eating Our Words, DeSpain said, "I immediately called up here and talked to her for a few minutes and asked her if she had any kinder words."

Accounts differ, but Matsu got run for Tweeting to complain that one Houston bartender presumed to quote another, more famous Houston bartender. 

For one thing, let that phrase "famous Houston bartender" roll around in your mouth. If we are talking about the Houston hospitality industry, it is worth remembering there is a city some miles to the east populated by folks who would rather suffer from lockjaw than live in Houston. Also, unless you are crapping on a shingle and calling it Kelller's salmon cornets, mentioning more prominent people in the food world while working in a restaurant does not seem like a party foul. 

2) Meanwhile, in Miami, a critic gets 86ed from a restaurant with a stupid name by pointing out it has a stupid name. The name "neMesis"? Shitting you the Cod is not. The response:

Lee, I happen to adore the name and and the word nemesis as it suits my bistro perfectly. My humble apologies that you find it difficult to spell. I am neither one of the shiny, happy, pizza pan people of the world, nor do I think I need a cheerleader with pom poms posing as a name for my bistro. If I had called it Micah's Place for Rather Cool Eclectic World Cuisine that would pass muster? Personally, I prefer not have my name plastered on the side of a building. I am a smidge more low key than that. It's neMesis...you either get it, or you don't...the disclaimer is clearly posted on the door, and it is evident from your words that you would have to stop at the threshold. Please don't bother to come here as you are not welcome at my table with an attitude such as this. A hearty thanks to those that rushed to my defense (you understand), and yes, Gabi, that is ONE of the reasons I chose nemesis: whether you speak English, Spanish, French or German...it is just the perfect nemesis...no need for augmentation, aside from accent mark placement (isn't that a novel idea)!

And it gets better from there. Treat yourself. FWIW, there are two issues here. One: "Nemesis" is a shitty name for a fusion bistro, or whatever this place is. It would be like opening "Andrew Toney's Ramen Hut" on Causeway St. in 1985. "Implacable goddess of revenge" does not suggest the general goals of the hospitiality industry. "Nemesis" is aggro in a way that might work for a rural srip club or second rate gat bar, but there is no excuse at all for "neMesis." 

The final Richman / M. Wells post? We can hope.

Already more attention than it deserves,* but a few loose ends from the first and second posts on allegations that a GQ food critic had fondled a server at a haute diner in Queens...

1) DuBarry, offers a take on sexual harassment of the assgrabbing variety that makes me proud she learned her law-talking where grandpa worked:

Here's an antiquated notion I know - don't ban the customer, but don't fire the waitress that whips around and slaps him in the face.

2) Its proximity to L'affaire assgrab made me more sensitive to this than otherwise, but it was a bad week for a pitch on the "Manliest Restaurants in America" to hit the inbox. In particular:

"Readers are now invited to visit www.menshealth.com/nutrition/manliest-restaurants and vote for their favorite guy-friendly restaurant."

 Guy-friendly? You mean like every restaurant in the world, pretty much? Or is there some oppressed remnant somewhere, silkscreening ESPN AND JALAPENO POPPERS ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY t-shirts in a basement?

3) And speaking of guy friendly, I suggested in a previous post that Ruth's Chris might be the kind of place that would not mind so much if you grabbed their waitresses' asses -- the misdeed that Richman was charged with by M. Wells management. I hope neither is true, but it did remind me that Richman and Ruth's Chris both went out of their way to throw a half-drowned city under a bus. 

 *In general, the level of attention paid to the rise and fall of a diner serving poutine in Queens makes me wonder what's missing from NYC dining, circa 2011. Besides fava beans, of course. 

Add Richman's ass/burgers

An earlier discussion of Richman's oafish musings on ass and burgers at M. Wells seems to be striking a chord. A few odds and ends:

-Someone cleverer than the Cod could probably model this with math and graphics, but Richman's decision tree does not make much sense, if he is, indeed, telling the truth. The assgrabbing accusation was in a private email to Richman. He then gives this ostensibly false ( but private) allegation enormous publicity by refuting in in the pages of GQ (not sure if this appears in the actual print mag or not). If the allegation were, indeed, false, wouldn't it make more sense for Richman to run his bad review of M. Wells, not mention the alleged incident? If team M. Wells came out w/ it after the bad review, it would look like a childish ad hominem attack.

-On the other hand, bringing up an allegation of harassment the day after, via email, is kind of lame. I gather that the proprietors were off premises when the incident occured, but it seems as if the grabee could have confronted Richman and encouraged him to keep his hands to himself for the rest of the meal, or said something to whomever was in charge of the dining room, who could then warn Richman or run him. That's how it should work, right? 

-This does raise a larger question, in terms of the obligations a restaurant's proprietors have to its staff. Our local permanently 86ed a regular for grabbing a bartender's ass. The Cod would like to think most places in the hospitaility industry would back up their staff like this, but suspects that it might be difficult to turn a profit running a Ruth's Chris or something if you insisted on a non-assgrabbing clientele. 

Play us off, GA Satellites! 

Alan Richman's ass/burger syndrome

Greetings NOLA types who found their way here via Brett Anderson. It's not all Richman and assgrabs, all the time here. More stuff on the 504 is here. 

Greetings, Gastropoda shoppers, et al. If you need further musings on Richman and L'Affaire Assgrab, over here.

The other day, the Cod was fussing about this dudebro who wants you to stop writing about food, and step aside and let the pros handle it. "Professional," in its literal sense, would include Alan Richman, who, quite remarkably, supports himself by being paid to write about food. Or, used to. Now, to make a longass, (long ass?) story short, Richman gets after the late, variously lamented M. Wells, but spends more than 1/2 of the story discussing allegations by the management that he had grabbed a server's ass. Based on conversations with friends who have worked in restaurants, the majority do not enter the field hoping to have their asses groped by strangers.  If I ran the zoo, pinning the offending assgrabbing hand to a table w/ a steakknife would be decriminalized. (Call it The Cod's Steak House Sharia.) Sifton was kind enough to share the gem at right from Jonathan Gold:

Would that it were the world's longest Yelp post. This is actually several times more self-indulgent. People pay to read GQ. Advertisers pay to advertise there. I don't like assgrabbing, but I also don't like lying, and it's difficult to know who is telling the truth here. The trouble is that Richman is using up a chunk of an actual magazine's (online) real estate to discuss how he would never, ever, grab a waitress's ass. Does anyone else still work at GQ? Is there someone who, you know, passes an eye over what Richman writes? Or is it like when Rene Lachemann coached third base for the Sox? 

Forge the family dinner? With Velveeta and a creepy blacksmith?

We have miles to go before we sleep, etc., but when family meal time involves processed cheese and implied rough sex with a blacksmith, you just know it's a Guiteau Monday. Tip of the fin to La D. 

Hey kids - who wants to see an airbrushed photo of Craig James in a duster?

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the cinetrix, the barn yields up its treasure, in this case a promo package from a Craig James vanity recording project from 1986. 

But I don't imagine anyone would be interested in mp3s of the songs.  

Sebastian's got a Shake Shack

A rare overlap between The Cod's food avocation and his college football obsession -- Danny Meyer is bringing the Shake Shack to the U. Granted, Coral Gables is a ways from the Orange Bowl, and only a churl would point out that 'Canes have historically not functioned well waiting in line outside of hospitality establishments. On a brighter note, aren't shakes and burgers just the kind of food a soldier needs for battle?

The Internet is for... lorn? Pt. 2 Or, it's never too late for bloggers to get off The Economist's lawn.

 

It's August, 2011, and for some, the Internet, and the social media that are possible because of it, continue to stump some folks like Shaggy 2 Dope and a magnet. 

 

Elsewhere, dudebro named Tom Harrow, the, you know, Winechap founder, wants people to stop writing about food on the Internet. Is there a German word for "very slight nostalgia?" Reading this took me back all the way 2007, when there was maybe still a little pepper in the salt, and Tawm Brady and Randy Moss were going through the regular season like a school of bluefish through a shoal of menhaden.

Me? I can't believe the noise. I'm nostalgic for the days when criticism was an art. Most blogs about food and wine offer ceaseless narrative with little insight. A good critic, however, does not merely catalogue dishes but assesses them in a way that's illuminative. "I wish the critics of today would taste a little less and think a little more," said Elin McCoy, an author and critic at Bloomberg, at an international bloggers conference last year. I would then add: And write a little less. In some cases, it would be best if they didn't write at all. 

It's like the epic Pete Wells cheese sandwich troll, rebooted for the age of Obama! But on a website spinoff of the Economist, not Food & Wine. Because, you see, these guys:

The critic, once the arbiter of good taste, has become a mere citizen in the blogosphere. Now the disparate opinions of an engaged—if not quite engaging—online community (such as the appropriately shrill-sounding Yelp, or Yell in Britain, and Amazon's own enthusiastic customers) have displaced the authority of experts. 

Took over for these guys:

The dining (or drinking) experiences of Kingsley Amis, Keith Waterhouse and later Will Self could yield illuminating and even philosophical observations. 

I agree, that Kingsley Amis vs Yelp is not a fair fight, prosewise, but who the hell looks at Yelp for the writing? Yelp is on the Internet, but it is not a food blog, so maybe Harrow's beef is that people use the Internet to communicate about food, rather than wait for Kingsley Amis to tell you the deal. As far as actual blogs go, 

 "anyone who heralds the meritocracy of the blogosphere fails to appreciate the density of inarticulate and inexpert writing now out there. Amid so much scum, it is difficult for the cream to rise."

Cream rising amid the scum? That's one jacked-up dairy. But "difficult" is the key word here. There are jillions of bad food blogs nobody reads, and some good ones that lots of folks read. (Also, arguably, bad food blogs lots of folks read, but I digress.) If you read blogs using the "next blog" thing on Blogger, and have an Aspergerian compulsion to read each blog all the way through to the end, it would be hard to find blogs you like.) Fortunately, it's not a blind search. This part should be obvious to anyone who uses the Internet, but Harrow evidently missed the part where blogs can list favorite links. Lists on Twitter allow the same kind of thing. Actually, this kind of connection is bad, turns out: 

Some also appear to write less for the public’s benefit than for other bloggers—a bizarrely incestuous cabal. Thus Twitter's re-tweet function offers a new outlet for the solipsistic.

I cannot understand how re-tweeting is solipsistic, or for that matter, what a solipsist would want with an "outlet." Perhaps "narcissistic" works, but unless you only retweet nice things people say about you (TheAtlantic, hollerr!), it's not really that either. I also cannot understand how these networks form the aforementioned mat of scum from whence the cream cannot escape. 

Harrow hazards another metaphor to explain the difference between bad food writing and good food writing: 

What's worse, their reviews of a mediocre or frustrating meal are often mediocre and frustrating in themselves, and often appear just as visibly in online search results. When Adrian Gill skewers a sacred cow like L'Ami Louis in Vanity Fair, the result is an electric, hilarious clash of the Titans. The sniping of waggish bloggers is often more like horseflies on mules. 

This very passage is frustrating, in a mediocre sort of way. The utility of famous critics writing about Paris restaurants in glossy monthlies cannot be denied, but for those moments when one finds oneself peckish in another arondissment, it can be handy to refer to non-famous critics writing about food in weeklies, dalies, or even online, or "horseflies on mules," as Harrow puts it. Some sample "snipes" from these "wags" might help, but Harrow can't be bothered. 

The takeaway?

Everyone has the right to an opinion, few the sense or sensibility not to express it. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon, but all these frivolously documented sips and mouthfuls are becoming harder to swallow.

It may or may not be worth it to suggest to Harrow that one way around his problem would be not to read all of these frivolously documented sips and swallows. However, a notion like "there are things on the internet that don't interest me, so I ignore them," seems like something most of us understand intuitively and move on with our lives.  Instead, taking a page from Frank Bruni on Harry Potter, Harrow's move is "there are things on the internet that don't interest me, so here is a column about them."