THE GURGLING COD

What the hell, 02139?

So, the aforementioned pizza w/ grits topping. It's creating complicated feelings in the Cod, as the grits pizza is at All Star Pizza, the kid sibling of All Star Pizza. Under normal circumstances, an idea as inherently bad as grits on pizza demands an immediate and total DQ of the resto in question, as it suggest leadership that is wildly indifferent to common sense, but could the people behind the delicious sandwiches across the street have totally taken leave of their senses. And, reliable informants like Rose's Lime indicate the pizza is good, and less precious these days than Emma's which seems to have caught a taking itself way too seriously bug from Franny's. 

But! More important. This place. With world enough and time, would love to have a conversation w/ their FOH person:

The Gurgling Cod: "Your restaurant is called 'Thelonious Monkfish,' how come?" 

Thelonious Monkfish FOH Person: "Well, Thelonious Monk was a jazz musician, and monkfish is a kind of fish." 

TGC: "I don't understand." 

TMFOHP: "Sir?"

TGC: "What is the connection?" 

TMFOHP: "We do 'sushi and Asian fusion.' Here: ' Great food like jazz is spontaneous and joyful. Nothing warms the palate like an explosion of flavor or the heart like a burst of song! We are passionate about ethnic flavors & jazz, and that’s why we’ve branded our unique take on sushi & Asian specialties: Thelonious Monkfish. We love to jam on Asian culinary themes. Our menu reflects both our respect for gustatory tradition and our sense of play and innovation.'"

TGC: "Ethnic flavors and jazz? Just in general? So I can have, like cardamom and hard bop, or galangal and some Marsaliseses? Have you thought at all about who you are and what you are doing?"

TMFOHP: "Well, here is the menu." 

TGC: "Ohh, Asian fusion is like jazz? Because both things were popular in the 1980s? And you have a jazz-themed sushi/curry/whatever AZN resto, and none of your soups are called 'Bitches Brew'? What is wrong with you? 

TMFOHP: "Sir?"

TGC: "Miles, get us the fuck out of here."

 

I like my lovers like I like my beef...

...lean and finely textured. And, make your haters your motivators, pink slime fans:

Do you even have to ask if it's a Guiteau Monday? 

An open letter to Puritan & Co

Dear Puritan & Co:

1) 

2) As confluence of vocation, and avocation, it's a perfect storm for the Cod. How do I get a shirt? 

Is it the Onion? Nope! It's McNamee!

It's a headline worthy of the Onion:

Is it Ignatius Reilly? Is it Larry Groznik? Nope, it's old friend Thomas McNamee! As a premise for an article, welp, the HuffPo got what it paid for. When the Cod thinks about legacies of 9/11, there are not one, but two, wars that come to mind, not to mention lost lives, trauma, etc, before that whole post-9/11 improvement in customer service thing comes to mind. But it was actually Danny Meyer who got the whole post 9/11 warm fuzzy thing rolling -- back in 1985:

Then with the opening of Danny Meyer's Union Square Café in 1985 New Yorkers discovered that delicious food and gracious hospitality could be found under the same roof, and from then on, even the stuffiest grand palaces had to learn to smile and be nice.

Sixteen years later came 9/11, and another, deeper change. New Yorkers learned that they were more profoundly together than they had realized before, and you felt it everywhere, and as the years passed the feeling persisted.

Is Thomas McNamee on glue? His narrative goes like this:

1) In the beginning was Le Cirque,* where the likes of Thomas McNamee would be seated in a broom closet. 

2) Then Danny Meyer opened the first of an armada of restaurants that took customer service more seriously than the NY fine dining pioneers of the previous era.

3) Then 9/11 happened, which put things in perspective, and brought New Yorkers together and so, 

4) Thomas McNamee should have no trouble getting a table at Babbo:

Then, last week, on 9/11/2012, I'd gone to a memorial concert in Brooklyn, with lovely Bach pieces for solo violin, and afterwards walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge and went down to Ground Zero to see the towers of light blazing into the sky. Hundreds of gulls were whirling through them, eerily evocative of floating ashes. The streets were full of firefighters and cops, people laughing, people crying.

I wanted to go somewhere where a bunch of New Yorkers would be close together having fun, and I thought, well, maybe Babbo.

At the podium three members of the staff were staring into a computer screen. After what seemed rather a while, a tall man in glasses looked up and greeted me with that universal bad sign: "Yes?"

It is only the intrinsically risible nature of this logic that redeems it from being, like, Wurzel-level offensive. Is there a planet where you can swan into a popular and well regarded resto, announce "I have been listening to Bach, and thinking about 9/11, and now I would like to sit down and have you bring me Bucatini all’Amatriciana."? And the host is all like "Mr. McNamee, you had me at Bach. Right this way. Mr Stipe's party will just have to wait." Perhaps there is that planet, but it does not have a 212 area code. Play us off, Ms. Banks: 

 

*I know, right? 

Breaking Brestaurant News!

The aforementioned breastaurant chain Twin Peaks has recently established a presence in the Cod's listening area. The advertisements mention hot waitresses and cold beer. How hot? Who knows, but they do specify that they serve draft beer at 29f, a temp most experts agree is ideal! Better still, the advertisements assert that Twin Peaks has a "chef driven menu." Precisely! It's like Ferran Adria and Maya Lin teamed up to articulate a strong clear vision of fast casual dining int he 21st century. Or, perhaps its "the chef arranges to have the Sysco truck driven to the restaurant, to deliver the riblets and suchlike." Perhaps a fact-finding tour is in order. Possibly related: if you drop $5k/week at the cheescake factory, you go broke! 

Two good things, and Deadspin.

David Roth on Fieri:

T. S. Eliot, Hunter Thompson, and Sam Sifton could all find something to applaud in the descriptive power brought to bear on the Ringer burger: “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, crispy rojo onion ring, Bourbon Brown Sugar BBQ sauce, LTOP (Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, and Pickle), SMC (Super-Melty Cheese), and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche.”

Also, FOC David Shields, asskicking polymath extraordinaire:

Dishes once popular but now completely gone: blanched celery conserve. Gardeners only contrived the celery we know at the end of the 18th century. The mid 19th century saw a fashion for white foods, so blanching the celery by mounding dirt around the stalks made it commonly available in market. Cheap and abundant loaf sugar made it a favorite preservative of both fruits and vegetables. Only sugared tomatoes--"tomato figs"--were more popular than celery conserves in the 1850s among sugared vegetables.

Get on his level right hurr.

Also, speaking of our Gamecock neighbors, can we all just chill out about a Sakerlina checking out Bruce Ellington? If you are a woman who is employed in a restaurant that serves cheesburgers, chances are this kind of "eyefucking" is about as constant as 80s hits on the XM radio. And if we are in the mood to be real, Bruce Ellington looks good in tight pants w/ his shirt off. 

The Coco Chanel Syndrome, or, you can't spell "Dayenu" without "u"

 Coco Chanel is famous for saying something like “Before you leave for the day…take one thing off…” or, "take off the last thing you put on." In any case, it's a dictum that comes to mind for a certain kind of restaurant that's a little bit ambitious and is likely in a town with an Airport with more gates for Southwest than for legacy carriers. They want to please, but they want that Beard nom, etc, so they keep on adding stuff, a la Todd English on an Adderall bender. Soby's, the restaurant where the Cod and cinetrix hit on this Coco-restaurant connection, (and the host for a recent Romney fundraiser), has an unusually compelling example this evening. Skirt steak w/ mashed potatoes? So far, so good, though the mashed potatoes seem out of keeping with the Gaucho vibe skirt steak wants. But then, grilled asparagus (in September? where does it come from, besides off the Sysco truck?), and a dressing that screams "scared money don't make none" - toasted garlic and chives? For a salad dressing? 

And dessert. Bread pudding? Dayenu - in the right hands, bread pudding can be a ridiculously compelling dessert. But, this one, propped up w/ blueberries, and, uh, lemon curd, and an utterly confounding garnish of "fruit and nut white chocolate bark"? Is there any reason to imagine that the chef at Soby's has thought much about a) skirt steak or b) bread pudding? De La Soul has the answer:

The real crisis in academic publishing? Not enough fried chicken receipts!

Via G & G, news of a new series from UNC Press that has the Cod all hot and bothered. The Cod loves little books (and cannot lie) - the 33 1/3 series, Very Short Introductions, Pocket Canons, etc, etc. 

And now these. Pecans and Buttermilk, for starters. And for those of you in the academic publishing racket, either as publisher or author -- are the sales of your monograph sluggish? Are you on the verge of pulping 60% of a very small print run? Well, how many fried chicken receipts did your book have? 

Perhaps you have answered your own question.

Forget Oreos.... no seriously, forget Oreos

Eat Cool J cookies if you want, or not, but forget Oreos, as in history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. They went and took the delicious concoction of chocolate-flavor wafers and sweetened suet, and mated it with everyone's favorite diabetes bullet, the candy corn. In case your day of the week app on your phone is busted, yes, this is evidence of just another Guiteau Monday.  

Next level, pop @spottedtrotter

Ctr C; Ctrl V: 

"Pinot Bianco is the most widely planted white grape in Alto Adige, a DOC in Italy but few versions have as much complexity or style as the wine we used to wash this Ossawbaw/Red Wattle LOMO with. Produced from grapes sourced from a vineyard more than 1500 feet above sea level, this wine received a short time in large casks that are a few years old. Medium-full bodied it has aromas oF pear and dried tea; Overall, this is a wine that displays outstanding varietal purity, excellent balance and amazing complexity, so we decided, it was fit for our beautiful LOMO wet brined and washed with this wine, it has turned one of the most complex dried whole muscles we have made to date. Come get some!"