originally posted by VLM:
Honestly, this could be made into a New Yorker cartoon. Total NY/CA myopia, with Portland thrown in since it is basically Brooklyn west.
I know you guys all think she is the bees-knees, but YAWN.
After thinking about it for a long time, I’ve decided that there are three mutually reinforcing reasons for the Great Brooklyn Buy-In. One is psychological. I believe that Brooklynites grossly overestimate their restaurants as a defense mechanism against the anguish of exile. The great unspoken fact of Brooklyn life is that nobody, at least nobody I have ever met, moved there because they liked it better than Manhattan. (“It’s not true!” I can hear them saying. “I have no interest in living in Manhattan ”) In fact, though, they live there because it’s the best place they can afford. Restaurants nearby become wildly attractive via a gastronomic form of beer goggles because their neighbors are so happy not to be eating falafel. Thus, The Farm on Adderly, a perfectly acceptable haute barnyard outpost, seemed like another Gramercy Tavern, just by being better than the only other decent American restaurant in Ditmas Park, Picket Fence. Mediocre lardcore joint Buttermilk Channel, a southern restaurant incapable of serving decent fried chicken or biscuits, gets hailed as masterful, mostly, I suspect, because you can take squealing infants there and nobody will complain.
Like McSweeney’s Quarterly, which claimed to be a repository for rejected articles but quickly developed a house style so exquisitely toned that only eight people could write for it, Brooklyn food culture is bounded by the hardest of parameters: the comfort zone of callow youths and the insecure older writers who seek relevance to them. Contrary to the assertions of food mandarins across the river, most of the young Brooklynites I talk to aren’t, in fact, fed up with white tablecloth dining of the Le Cirque variety. They simply have never experienced it. As a result, they don’t really have a standard for what good restaurants are supposed to be like. The Mutton Hut is their working frame of reference; so the borough multiplies Mutton Huts one after another, each one mining the same vein of flavors in an endless feedback loop of bacon doughnuts and pro-am charcuterie.
They are the backpack dads in Animal Collective shirts, the ex-debutantes in torn hose.
originally posted by VLM:
A seriously wonderful quote from either Plotnicki using a psuedonym, or a Plotnicki impersonator.
After thinking about it for a long time, I’ve decided that there are three mutually reinforcing reasons for the Great Brooklyn Buy-In. One is psychological. I believe that Brooklynites grossly overestimate their restaurants as a defense mechanism against the anguish of exile. The great unspoken fact of Brooklyn life is that nobody, at least nobody I have ever met, moved there because they liked it better than Manhattan. (“It’s not true!” I can hear them saying. “I have no interest in living in Manhattan ”) In fact, though, they live there because it’s the best place they can afford. Restaurants nearby become wildly attractive via a gastronomic form of beer goggles because their neighbors are so happy not to be eating falafel. Thus, The Farm on Adderly, a perfectly acceptable haute barnyard outpost, seemed like another Gramercy Tavern, just by being better than the only other decent American restaurant in Ditmas Park, Picket Fence. Mediocre lardcore joint Buttermilk Channel, a southern restaurant incapable of serving decent fried chicken or biscuits, gets hailed as masterful, mostly, I suspect, because you can take squealing infants there and nobody will complain.
Somebody needs some hits.
originally posted by SFJoe:
Anthony's Pier 4!
Who had the least idea?
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
It's funny, but it's not very persuasive.
Also, because they may have trained in Manhattan, Brooklyn chefs are not Brooklynites now?
What about Manhattan chefs who trained in France or Italy?
Very silly business.
Thus continuing to preserve '96 Le Mont sec on the list!originally posted by mlawton:
originally posted by SFJoe:
Anthony's Pier 4!
Who had the least idea?
Now say I was in that part of town. And say I was hungry and thirsty. I think I might find myself at Menton or if I was truly thirsty, maybe in Chinatown at one of the places with the boundless lists and retail markups.
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Also, Diner is "generic" but Marlow & Sons is "niche"?
I feel like the words he is using do not mean what they are supposed to mean.