Bourdain constructs the essential overrated menu

[Jenise]

http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-mag ... d_menu.php

Comments?

Completely cracked me up, Jenise! I guess I must be just as cranky as he is.

ROTFLMAO!!! A fantastic article. Thanks for the pointer, Jenise.

-Paul W.

[Robin Garr]

Comments?

Great stuff! Cross-posted to LouisvilleHotBytes.com forum, with gratitude.

Good yucks. Loved the marshmallow-anise foam. Shocked not to find a Caeser salad strewn with irrelevant leftovers.

Jenise, this is terrific! Thanks for sharing.
My favorite part is "When the water sommelier comes over, I reach for my gun."

Second favorite part is about the T-shirt that should be given to the Chocolate Martini drinkers. Reminds me of the bumper sticker that I think should go on the back of all Hummers.

The only problem with this is that I am now fearful that some enterprising young Sacramento chef will see this and think, "Water Sommelier? Now why didn't I think of that?!"

Obviously, Tony was on autopilot when he wrote this. Probably earned $500 for the 15 minutes it took him.

Shouldn't that choco-martini come with an oyster shooter so he could leave his audience groaning?

[Jenise]

Obviously, Tony was on autopilot when he wrote this. Probably earned $500 for the 15 minutes it took him.

Shouldn't that choco-martini come with an oyster shooter so he could leave his audience groaning?

LOL! Actually, I totally disagree with his statements re crust, but I was so happy to see someone denounce foam that I was willing to forgive it.

It's the more poignant for being close to reality. When I saw excessively compound-adjectived, gratuitously-esoterically-sourced fictitious courses, I thought immediately of one real, "destination" restaurant in the Carolinas whose whole menu read like that (but without the irony) when I dined there. Chocolate martinis? Almost too real for a parody. Like those other syrupy sweet Technicolor drinks many young adults now enjoy at fashionable bars.

It's the kind of menu the Hesses parodied 30 years ago in their classic book, The Taste of America.

[Jenise]

Ah, the Hesses! Great book, I recall that once or twice I disagreed with their take on things, but their rants were all delicious. Nice review you write there, too, I laughed out loud at the quote about the "flabby little Cornish Game Hens", which was particularly timely as my husband and I were discussing them over our lunch (duck and truffle pate with pickled okra standing in for cornichons) just now, and I was explaining to him the difference between same and the little spring chickens (poussins) I'm going to prepare a la brun with a tarragon pan sauce for our dinner tonight.

The Hesses' book is certainly unique. So exasperated were they, evidently, with pretensions and mythologies in 20th-century US cooking (and especially its professional spokespeople) that they sometimes veered to the unkind or petty. (MFK Fisher wondering about potato water; criticism of Julia Child, especially the review of her biography that is in the current reprint, with little on what good she may have done.) This has turned off some readers, unfortunately, distracting them from the book's enlightening food and food-writing scholarship, its illumination of popular misconceptions and of some genuine feet of clay among popular gurus (Claiborne, Beard). Also, the Hesses' faith in an organic or traditionalistic idyll (reflecting partly, I wonder, the 1970s era when they wrote the original?) became messianic in places.

Chocolate martinis? Almost too real for a parody. Like those other syrupy sweet Technicolor drinks many young adults now enjoy at fashionable bars.
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It's only time before we'll start seeing KoolAid-tinis at the 20-something bars. Indeed, damn that I didn't think of the possibilities of combining KoolAid with vodka when I was mixing drinks in high school!

Bernard, when I was a teen, we used to get Coke "Slurpees" from 7-11, pour some out and add rum to them. Yum!

[Jenise]

Bernard, when I was a teen, we used to get Coke "Slurpees" from 7-11, pour some out and add rum to them. Yum!

Tang and Gallo Pink Chablis.

Bernard, when I was a teen, we used to get Coke "Slurpees" from 7-11, pour some out and add rum to them. Yum!

Tang and Gallo Pink Chablis.

Bourbon and pink grapefruit juice!

It's only time before we'll start seeing KoolAid-tinis at the 20-something bars. Indeed, damn that I didn't think of the possibilities of combining KoolAid with vodka when I was mixing drinks in high school!

Well I will admit to using pure pure ETOH (obtained from the gas chromatography lab) mixed with grape juice back in university.....

Why am I even chiming in...

Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill half and half in a tumbler with beer playing a drinking game called "spoons"...

But this is more about youthful folly than seriocomic libation.

It's only time before we'll start seeing KoolAid-tinis at the 20-something bars. Indeed, damn that I didn't think of the possibilities of combining KoolAid with vodka when I was mixing drinks in high school!

Koolaid-tinis! Excellent, Bernard. (I'll think of that word next time I see a bartender serving up martini glasses with incongruous blue or green or scarlet content.)

To your point on creative mixing: There's a US commercial genre as you know (Boone's Farm, Thunderbird, Ripple, etc.) In the 1970s I was told that one such arose when marketing staff at a large winery, known mainly for jug wines, investigated high sales of cheap generic "white port" in a metropolitan ghetto. They found regular drinkers there favored mixing it with Kool-Aid or the like. Being an astute manufacturer, the firm stepped in to offer the finished product direct.

And Carrie, the bit of rum in cola is a popular flavor combination, as you know; but also, fast food counters and cafés in parts of Europe routinely offer rum as a garnish for tea, cola, etc. (Against the cold, I suppose.) As a US teenager there I would sometimes order a cola with a shot of rum in it. (Partly for the sheer novelty of seeing a culture with a more relaxed approach to alcohol -- the US had a strict minimum age of 21. Some Europeans I told about that hardly believed it. Just as some Americans balk when I describe chain fast-food restaurants with a routine liquor selection beside the soft drinks -- and not much used, from what I could see.)