gastropoda

In a week that started with depositors panicking outside a failed bank, you would think the Chimp could show just a hint of sensitivity at the table. But that would be misunderestimating his soullessness. Dinner for 245 after his silly ballgame was a full five courses, including crab salad and rib-eye steak, when for once hot dogs would have been more appropriate. But here’s a “fun fact” from the White House web site: Parties during the Hoover reign were big events, too, with 4,000 invitations routinely delivered around town. And how’d that work out again?

The base camp is getting even harder to maintain now that I have been swept into the E-ZPass of the internets, a blog that needs links more than words. But it can be trouble, too. After skimming part of the Drivelist’s latest “and then I did this and then I did that” when the wheel was already invented, I set off to Youtube in search of a postable “toddler makes first doody.” Yikes. If I had any money to invest, I’d be sinking it into pharmaceuticals big time. A whole generation is going to regret that youthful exuberance in a cellphone/video world. But even so, a close-up of a floating first turd in a toilet bowl cannot be as embarrassing as, “Look, world: I made snail butter.”

Will the last copy editor at the Home of the Human Scratch N Match please turn off her laptop on the way out? I got sucked into reading her latest excrescence and learned that Verbena was an Italian restaurant, the new joint apparently uses the leaves and not the flowers of hibiscus, and the “Torrontes 2006” was just scrumpy. If you can’t decipher a simple wine label, at least do a Google.

I also felt slightly queasy reading the Journal — apparently the last American newspaper with an absurd travel budget — on where the two candidates eat out when they eat out. I guess it made more sense than comparing arugula and orange juice, but it had a decided taint of stalking to it. (Or maybe I’m just worried some restaurateur will give up the goods on my second glass of wine at lunch.) Overall, the Great Black Hope comes off as the more sophisticated diner, even if he does — as the father of two young kids — succumb to a funky pizza place way too often. The Old Guy at least knows his Arizona-Mex even if the critic didn’t (I would kill for those enchiladas), but I was floored by his driving all the way to Jerome from Cornville for a BLT. The millionaires’ cuisine, after all, is right there in Sedona. Note to this campaign’s Panchito: Check the ZIP Code on the BBQ’d ribs you love so much.

Almost the best novel I have read since the last Richard Price is “Lush Life,” which I just barreled through in two middle-of-the-nights when dread was lurking right outside the bedroom door. Nobody is as cinematic in drawing characters with dialogue alone. It helped that I was such an aficionada of Schiller’s (and its uneasy neighborhood) way back when, but even a reader who could not conjure the place from memory would be transported by the descriptions of its subterranean side, and of the quotidian realities of running a restaurant in a city where waiter is so rarely a valued profession. Mostly, though, the book made the frenzy over the closing of Florent seem even more ridiculously hysterical. All that weeping and gnashing and rending of garments when the city is changing everywhere in every way by the second, constantly and relentlessly. Not to throw out a spoiler or anything, but I hear the Borgata is looking for a transvestites’ diner. . . .

What’s even funnier is that one of those sackcloth-and-ashes sites leading the grief parade just touted the opening of a Qdoba. (Manhattan is now a mini-mall.) And on another I learned there apparently is a supermarket chain called Roach Bros. Vermin Ltd. would be more reassuring.

Funny how the Great Black Hope was so thoroughly lambasted by the wingnuts for suggesting a second language might actually be an asset in modern life. I wonder if the “talk English, damn it!” knuckle draggers are now going to boycott McDonald’s, given that a slick flier tucked into two of our newspapers had coupons in both Spanish and a form of English. It should be the end of America as we know it. But a country cowed by tomatoes will never give up its cheap beef, let alone 20 piezas of chicken “nuggets” por $3.49.

One of the most talented photographers the hometown paper ever hired had to come in the back door, through the web when the web was the crude and rude cousin of the staid and serious print edition. He was one smart kid, though, because he worked the soft sections like nobody’s business, getting assignments to do anything the other guys already ensconced in their velvet coffins were too comfortable to bother with, and doing them much better. The surest sign of his brilliance is that he managed to get hired on staff, with all those once-lavish benefits, but did not stick around to molder in the velvet. So when he throws out advice, you would think newspapers would listen. He has a long screed up in cyberspace about new media, and one thing he despairs over is a newspaper sending out videographers to cover car crashes simply because those generate the most hits online. What does it profit a publication to attract mega-traffic and suffer the loss of its own soul? Hmmm. Nestle not buying cookie ads? Might be time to review another strip joint. . . .

I’ve known MoDo was full of Rove fertilizer ever since the day her urgent message went through the Style department desperately seeking a food metaphor on deadline, but lately I’m almost feeling sorry for ol’ Howell’s golden girl. Every time she bares her teeth you want to toss cosmo-soaked Clinton kibble to her. Obama is “in danger of being too prissy about food,” she snipes? When the elitest of the elite throw polished stones, you gotta wonder if old McLame might not be our next president. He sweats. He stumbles. He is a Manly Man out of the Chimp’s mold. Someone please buy this woman a cucumber.

The latest proof that there is no justice in this world: The Chimp has done more than enough to be convicted of war crimes. But considering the hot dogs he has inflicted on guests in the White House, he would not suffer a second on a prison diet. Maybe he could be force-fed foie gras?

I don’t think it was intended as a spoof, but the half-page ad an Italian-American group took out in the hometown paper was pretty amusing. Protesting some sportscaster’s dissing of a golfer with a name perceived to be one step up from Guido, it listed Graziano and Marciano and Colavito. I read the thing twice looking for the D chef. Either I’m blind or they are embarrassed.

This is the season for reality checks on Union Square. I stopped to inspect the corn even though I should have learned last week, and as I was turning away from the piles of shrunken ears, I overheard an accented voice say: “They are so small.” To which the kid collecting dollars said, “Well, it’s early. They’ll get bigger later on.” And the response: “Why don’t you let them grow?” Foolish foreigner. When you can get 50 cents now, why wait?

As cynical as I am, though, I was still surprised to see Jersey farmers this summer have to spring for big signs reading: “Our tomatoes are safe to eat.” This was on 97th Street, and at least the photo looked like what was on offer, too-perfect specimens straight from the greenhouse, not the field. But once again, it made me wonder why we are not all storming the Capitol with pitchforks over the unbelievable fiasco the FDA has fermented with its bungling of the salmonella scare. Now the fools allegedly watching out for both bioterrorism and regular old food safety are saying the culprit might be jalapenos. Or maybe cilantro. And don’t forget scallions kill, too. Thank allah it’s only food, or half the produce aisle would be penned up at Guantanamo.

This same agency, of course, will probably get right behind the insane recommendation to put kids on cholesterol drugs. Kids. Whose little livers have to process whatever is in those pills for decades. I know from my pathetic health-writing years that the best prescription for a long life is to choose the right parents. But cholesterol should be controllable with diet and exercise. I guess that’s just not as lucrative for Big Business as taking the whole family through McDonald’s and then handing out the daily dose before the human larvae sit down to a long night of the latest Grand Theft Auto. If the choice is between hell and reincarnation, I’m going where it’s nice and warm.

One of the hoariest of chestnuts in the food writers’ patented Cliche Collection is staff meal, a k a family meal. I’ve experienced it, in restaurant school, and I’ve succumbed to it, for my infamous feature on Mexicans in high-end restaurants. But whether you call restaurant employees staff or family, they always — always — eat much better when a reporter is in the vicinity. In short, eight courses is the new loaves and fishes, the new water into wine. I’ve alway known there are no new stories, only new reporters. Who could have anticipated the internets would be just as gullible? Or that Keyser Soze is really a chef downtown?