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Service 101: So You Think You’re a Foodie

F, the new scarlet letter (for Foodie)

Nowadays, it seems like everyone is obsessed with food.  But just because you own a micro planer, have eaten at Momofuku, sip cult Cabernets, vacationed in Paris and Tuscany one summer, and stock three kinds of salt in your larder, doesn’t mean you’re an expert. According to Bruni in the New York Times yesterday one commenting critic* on Grub Street NY , self-titled foodies wear a badge “of unsophisticated douchery.”

So what if you like being a foodie? Does that mean you have to put up with being called douche bag?

Not if you learn a few basic rules. It’s when self-proclaimed Foodies throw around their new found knowledge at the restaurants, bars, and gourmet stores they visit, that problems come up. Amateur gourmets just shouldn’t play in the same sandbox with professional chefs without knowing a few rules. Whether you like it or not, you’ll end up looking like a sand-throwing toddler next to the big kids in chefs whites.

Continue For Rules All Foodies Should Know Before Dining Out »

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Eating our way back to Normal


Metropolitan Cook Book, originally uploaded by Paula Wirth.

What happens when the world goes topsy-turvy? The shaken up inhabitants create structure where there is chaos and hominess where there is no permanence. A flood sweeps away a home and the survivor painstakingly stacks chipped mixing bowls and dishes in a pile. The stock market crashes and the Wall Street trader eats a baloney sandwich on Wonder bread because it reminds him of lunches with his mother.

For the underpaid, stressed out, unemployed, politically freaked out and fearful men and women of cities all across America, food is the easiest way to calm the F**** down.

NY Magazine reports that even though mammoth casual restaurant chains can do nothing but lose money right now, comfort food brands like Kraft Macaroni and cheese and Oscar Meyer cold cuts are “on fire”. For the first time in decades, powdered cheese on macaroni and baloney sandwich with mustard looks really, really good.

My neighborhood is better than your neighborhood

In the wake of economic uncertainty, people all over the country are suddenly filled with civic pride. Over night, foodies all over the country are clambering to define their city’s specific contribution to the national food scene. Recently, in front of a standing room only crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium, a respected panel that included Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold and a handful of well-respected LA chefs, spent an evening talking through the defining terms of what constituted a Los Angeles dining scene.

On the opposite coast, NY Times food critic Frank Bruni and food bloggers ignored deadlines and spent precious time to define what was, in particular, the “New Brooklyn Cuisine”. For the fiscally uncertain and totally devoted NY foodie, that’s NBC, for short.

To qualify as the NBC, a restaurant should have “culinary sophistication melded with a wistfully agrarian passion for the artisanal, the sustainably grown, and the homespun…” something new restaurants all over our country currently share. And, following the NBC definition of clientele, people “who quote Michael Pollan and split shares in the local CSA,” I can only imagine that perhaps food loving people all over this country are craving the simple and the basic because they crave something simply NORMAL.

By embracing the back to basics ideas of artisinal and sustainable farming, we hope to eat our way back to better times.