Blood, Bones, and Butter

Maybe it's just bald-faced jealousy that taints my opinion. I mean here is an author with a MFA in fiction writing with articles appearing in GQ, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, not to mention a best selling book and the chef/owner of the very successful, if oddly named, Prune in the East Village. But in the end it just feels all a little too...

It comes off like Gwyneth Paltrow experiencing things at a level us mere plebes can only play at. Gabrielle Hamilton has been there done that. Drunk at 13, coke at 16 then off to backpack Europe to come back to a prime offer of running her own restaurant with no real prior experience. In the meantime this “staunch Marxist feminist, budding lesbian, black nationalist sympathizer, and literacy advocate” goes off and marries a tall, dark Italian doctor with his own villa, ironically of course.

Maybe what rankles is that I'm just too much the suburban foodie wannabe that plagues the industry with my uninformed opinions on taste.

“There is a way, a distinct way, that people who work in the industry speak to each other about food and you can tell, within minutes, that they are part of your extended clan. It's not like an obnoxious foodie talks about food, ostentatiously throwing around kitchen terms and names of ingredients they have researched at length. it's not like an appreciative eater talks about food - awed and enamored and perfectly happy to speak of his enjoyment without having any idea of what he's just eaten or how it was achieved. It's the way only someone who works in the industry talks about food, by almost not talking about it, but just throwing out a few code words and signals - like a gang member flashing you his sign. Every single time that I sit at a restaurant's bar, order the txacoli or gruner veltliner rather than the sauvignon blanc, ask for the razor clams and not the calamari, I am sniffed out immediately by the server as an industry peer, having said nothing.”

Or lamenting the state of cheese.

“I am grateful for the burratta, to be sure ...In fact, I have finally understood that we will not be eating burratta in the US anymore, because even the best that you get at Agata and Valentina, “fresh off the airplane” is not it. You can't eat burratta in the States because it can't stay fresh long enough to make the journey. it is always a hair sour and just starting to harden and it turns watery and “off” not matter how “just flown in from Bari” the wholesaler at Murray's insists it is.”

So yeah food porn galore, I just couldn't escape the whiff of condescension on my behalf.