THE GURGLING COD

Scary restaurants

UPDATE: Gentleman that he is, Adam Kuban made a very gracious apology for the stuff I complained about in the initial post. Be sure to visit AK at Slice and AHT.

ADD UPDATE: Perlow, not so much.

I've never been to Maurice's, but I have been here,* and I think it's worth noting they are both scary in their own way.
*Details available at Slice, and elsewhere.

Alton Brown's Gunboat Environmentalism

I think it might be worth taking a moment to point out that Alton Brown is completely full of shit:
Alton Brown’s doing penance: That’s what the Good Eats star tells Grist’s Roz Cummins in an interview; according to the article, “his TV show would begin focusing on sustainability issues: how crops are grown and animals are raised.” Brown says, “I’ve been busy being clever, but now I want to use what credibility I may have to help people think about sustainability.”
Fantastic. Good for him. But:
Brown says, somewhat weirdly, that the police motto “to serve and protect” will be his new approach to cooking and eating. And then, when the topic turns to overfishing, the interview takes a truly strange turn: “Somebody needs to sink the Japanese tuna fleet,” Brown says. “Everyone’s willing to point the finger, but nobody’s willing to pull the trigger.” So Cummins—“[s]urprised by such a rash declaration, and wanting to present a more effective, lasting, and peaceful alternative”—asks him if he’d be willing to crew on a Greenpeace boat. “‘Yes! Absolutely!’ he answered.”

I am confident that the Japanese tuna fleet is perpetrating all sorts of crimes against the planet. But it's convenient for Alton that he chooses an adversary both remote and telegenic, instead of, say, looking in on stablemate Paula Deen's pig hell. Considering his track record as a histrionic scenery-chewer incapable of not mugging, it's not surprising that he went this route. Brace yourself for Alton Brown doing live shots from the bridge of the PT-109 -- I'll be on the porch reading a book.

How droll!

Generally speaking, my engagement with the publication known as "T:" is like Ignatius Reilly's with the cinema. I know it will likely infuriate me, and yet I cannot look away. Not so long ago, in the early days of the Cod, the "food" T: provoked a whole week's worth of posts. In these latter, more jaded days, I can gaze on $353 ice buckets with placid indifference.
With one exception. There seem to be plenty of folks with plenty of room under the bus for Julavits and the rest of the Believer crew, and while the mag seems precious at times, it does not seem worth the effort to put a lot of energy into disliking a magazine. However, this is the exercise Julavits describes:

The challenge: to transform a distressing culinary relic like Ladies’ Seafood Thermidor or Bologna Biscuits With Vegetables into a dish you’d proudly serve your food-snob friends. This is the stated objective of the Betty Crocker Card Game. The unstated objective is to amiably enact what we’ve long known to be true: that every dinner party is an unspoken competition with your guests, i.e., I see your beef Wellington and raise you a cassoulet. The B.C.C.G. allows you to compete openly over ludicrously time-consuming food, and for prizes.

To initiate play, you need the Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library, that plastic flip-top box from 1971. The library holds up to 700 recipe cards with lurid photos of, say, Salmon Noodles Romanoff; it is organized into chirpy categories like Foods That Go Places that are no less upsetting.

As best as I can tell, this game is a ritual designed to establish that the players are cooler than their parents, but with the exception of Jakob Dylan and Scott Caan, who isn't? And this exercise in generational self-congratulation would be more plausible if the undertaking seemed a bit more shelf-stable: "Kate arrived in her Zipcar bearing not one but three salads." Of course she did. But this pronouncement crystallized my difficulties with this article:

I summoned a judge (hereafter the Judge) famous for his ability to produce remarkable party fare from a kitchen the size of a Portosan. Further recommending him: his former post as Susan Sontag’s assistant, meaning his critical acuity wouldn’t override a crucial appreciation of camp.

You can judge for yourself, but I have a hard time with this logic--even if working for Sontag produced a Sontaggy comprehension of Camp, the entire exercise Julavits and her friends conduct seems to be deliberate and self-conscious in ways that Sontag derides as beneath real Camp. Camp, properly done, is an exercise in appreciation:

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy.... What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

 

This contest of making dishes that allude to Betty Crocker receipts, but updated to reflect the more refined tastes of Julavits and her friends has more to do Alanis-level irony than anything Sontag writes about.

More generally, and I've already spent more time on this piece than it warrants, this article suggests that irony works less well for food than for other arts. You do not have to put an MC Escher poster, a Herb Alpert record, or a DVD of Smokey and the Bandit in your mouth.