Restaurant critic: STFU up about food already!

[Dick Whitman]

Could not agree with him more whole-heartedly. It's out of hand.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/shut-eat?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook

Food is my favorite thing to talk about and to learn about, but an interest that is reasonable on a personal and an individual scale has grown out of all proportion in the wider culture. Imagine that you’re fascinated by model trains. You’re on fire with interest, you think about them all the time, they’re your consuming passion. But then, over about twenty years, the entire culture becomes obsessed with model trains. The model-train blogosphere grows exponentially. Model-train makers are plastered all over the covers of magazines, and stage train-building smackdowns on TV, and are treated as the new rock stars. Might you, in your private heart, think that maybe the whole model-train thing, still of tremendous interest to you, has somehow got a bit out of hand? That’s where I feel food is today.

 

[cranberry]

Sort of like baseball and sabermetrics.

 

[Dick Whitman]

When I'm among milennials every day, the conversation isn't about sabermetrics. It's about what the latest Chez Foo Foo they ate at was, and how the grass-fed asparagus was delightfully chewy, particularly paired with the apple blossom-infused pomegranate cous-cous.

 

[User 11148]

"Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s ..."

...

"Pesto is the quiche of the 80s."

 

[RickStain]

Aww, someone likes it when he's a special snowflake. Everyone else needs to stop liking things to make him feel better.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

When I'm among milennials every day, the conversation isn't about sabermetrics. It's about what the latest Chez Foo Foo they ate at was, and how the grass-fed asparagus was delightfully chewy, particularly paired with the apple blossom-infused pomegranate cous-cous.

Where do you hang out?


I feel the same about beer and beer discussions.

 

[Dick Whitman]

When I'm among milennials every day, the conversation isn't about sabermetrics. It's about what the latest Chez Foo Foo they ate at was, and how the grass-fed asparagus was delightfully chewy, particularly paired with the apple blossom-infused pomegranate cous-cous.

Where do you hang out?

I feel the same about beer and beer discussions.

Mostly at the safe haven of my home. But, during the day, Chicago.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Food is a big topic at our house. My son and daughter, as a team, have won amateur cooking contests. She's in the wine business and worked for a summer at a three-star restaurant-hotel in France. But it's not the only topic, and why shouldn't food be a big subject of interest, considering how folks eat it every day? This reads to me as if Rich Eisen starting complaining about the high level of interest in the NFL. It's nuts.

 

[User 11148]

When I'm among milennials every day, the conversation isn't about sabermetrics. It's about what the latest Chez Foo Foo they ate at was, and how the grass-fed asparagus was delightfully chewy, particularly paired with the apple blossom-infused pomegranate cous-cous.

Where do you hang out?

I feel the same about beer and beer discussions.

Mostly at the safe haven of my home. But, during the day, Chicago.

A lot of that is signalling, DW. By droning on about the "infused this" and the "aioli that," people are trying to let the rest of the world know that they're hip, they're with it, etc., etc. If it weren't food, it'd be something else.

 

[Dick Whitman]

[W]hy shouldn't food be a big subject of interest, considering how folks eat it every day?

Because I'd rather talk about music, movies, sports, and current events.

But seriously, I like to talk about beer, cocktails, and spirits a little bit. But people lose me when they start saying that they can taste burnt buttered popcorn and dried apricots in their Johnnie Walker Mauve Label. Wine assholes are even worse. And, yes, I've read reviews where people talk about tasting burnt buttered popcorn in their spirit. Can't remember if it was gin, whiskey, or wine.

 

[3_Octave_Fart]

You know it's pervasive when wannabe food porn clutters our "social" media.
I don't give a blooming fig what someone chooses to put in their mouth and eat.
You love kale- hooray for you.

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

You know it's pervasive when wannabe food porn clutters social media.
I don't give a blooming fig what someone chooses to consume.
You love kale- hooray for you.

I don't mind if you busted your ass for four hours making a meal and want to show it off.
But to snap a photo of your T.G.I.Fridays club sandwich? Gimme a break.

 

[Vombatus]

You know it's pervasive when wannabe food porn clutters social media.
I don't give a blooming fig what someone chooses to consume.
You love kale- hooray for you.

I don't mind if you busted your ass for four hours making a meal and want to show it off.
But to snap a photo of your T.G.I.Fridays club sandwich? Gimme a break.

I don't get taking a photo of every meal. There's probably someone out there taking a photo of every poo too.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Milennials are obsessed with food and restaurants, much like prior generations were obsessed with their cars. There's been a lot of ink spilled about this. They don't eat ramen any more. And nobody eats at McDonald's.

They'll skimp on everything else - they don't buy music, cars, or spend much on clothes, for example. They often don't have cable TV. But you can pry their restaurant experiences from their cold dead hands. It's a true generational phenomenon.

(New mommies are also food-obsessed, in a different way, even the non-crunchy ones now.)

 

[User 11148]

So in a couple of weeks my wife and I (definitely not millennials) will have our annual turn at playing host to our church's dinner-party club. Your humble correspondent will be preparing:

Confit byaldi (the ratatouille you see Remy prepare in that Disney movie)
Shiitake-mushroom meatloaf
Buttermilk mashed-potatoes

And for dessert, we'll have chocolate pots de creme.

Along the way we'll be having three of my homebrews -- a nut brown ale, a pumpkin-pie spiced ale and a golden ale.

I'm going to go start a blog so I can come back here and post links to it for DW's benefit!

 

[Huggy]

You know it's pervasive when wannabe food porn clutters social media.
I don't give a blooming fig what someone chooses to consume.
You love kale- hooray for you.

I don't mind if you busted your ass for four hours making a meal and want to show it off.
But to snap a photo of your T.G.I.Fridays club sandwich? Gimme a break.

I don't get taking a photo of every meal. There's probably someone out there taking a photo of every poo too.

Never heard of ratemypoo.com?

 

[Dick Whitman]

I'd order pizza. And sausage pizzas. Because everyone lies and says they want pomegranates, Vermont-farmed portobello mushrooms, and non-GMO arugula on their pizza.

And then they all eat the sausage.

 

[User 11148]

I'd order pizza. And sausage pizzas. Because everyone lies and says they want pomegranates, Vermont-farmed portobello mushrooms, and non-GMO arugula on their pizza.

And then they all eat the sausage.

LOL. There's a story, likely apocryphal, regarding an art museum's board of directors meeting. They were struggling to interpret data from their latest survey of museum visitors, who kept saying they wanted lots of X and Y, but when X and Y had been booked in the past attendance hadn't been all that noteworthy.

During a break, one of the BOD members chatted up an after-hours janitor, telling him they were trying to figure out what museum visitors really want to see. The janitor quietly led the BOD member to a particular exhibit at which the carpet was, far-and-away, more heavily worn than elsewhere. That exhibit, you might have guessed, was a very attractive nude.

 

[3_Octave_Fart]

It really is such a millennial thing to be doing- obsessing over what will be excreted the next morning.
The same generation that thinks you have to earn ITS respect before being gifted its manifest talents.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Barry Zito is a foodie and a sexie.

http://twitpic.com/43bff