Sky Full of Bacon 06: There Will Be Pork (Pt. 2)

The phrase “farm to table” is used a lot in foodie circles. In the second half of this Sky Full of Bacon two-part podcast, I’ll complete the picture of what that really means with visits to restaurant kitchens… and to a slaughterhouse.

How to watch it:

Fastest but lower quality: hit play on the embedded version below.
Fastest with higher quality: go to Vimeo and watch it in HD. (Recommended)
Highest quality but slow download in your browser: Episode 6 in Quicktime.
Highest quality but slowish download in iTunes: play directly on your computer in iTunes (no iPod needed), by clicking here. (To play in iTunes once downloaded, hit Play on the episode you want, then double click on the tiny window it starts playing in to make it bigger.)
Highest quality, most convenient: subscribe in iTunes by clicking here and then clicking Subscribe; each new episode will download when you’re not looking and be ready to play whenever you want, plus you’ll never miss an episode!

Sky Full of Bacon 06: There Will Be Pork (pt. 2) from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Mike Sula of the Chicago Reader has been writing about the rare mulefoot pig for the last year and a half (see here). Now the Reader has enlisted award-winning chef Paul Kahan, of Chicago’s Blackbird, to plan an elaborate six-course dinner showcasing the meat of these pigs and the sustainable, humane way in which they’re raised, as a benefit for Slow Food.

In Part 2, Mike Sula and I watch as Kahan and chefs Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe), Justin Large (Avec), Mike Sheerin (Blackbird) and Tim Dahl (Blackbird) prepare for the big night and talk about why supporting and promoting good pork matters to them. And we go to the rural slaughterhouse with Jason Hammel to gain a better understanding of what really lies behind the meat we eat. (Warning: although we were not allowed to film the kill itself, the video does contain frank footage of everything else that goes on in a slaughterhouse.) (19:56)

Mike Sula’s account of the same events
Recipes from the dinner
The Chicago Reader’s complete “Whole Hog Project” archive
LTHforum posts on the dinner, and Chuck Sudo’s account at Chicagoist
Monica Eng of the Chi-Trib wrote a really great piece about her experiences at various slaughterhouses here

P.S. Originally I felt like this one needed some kind of summing-up at the end expressing how I felt after watching my dinner live and die. In the end, as I usually do, I preferred to let the subjects and the images speak, not listen to me yak. But here, if anyone’s curious, is what I wrote and recorded but left on the cutting room floor:

It was an amazing meal. Was it worth the price?

We all joked, before we went to Eickman’s, that we’d come out vegetarian converts.

But in the end, I found myself affected less by the moment of these animals’ deaths… than by the day I spent seeing their lives at Valerie’s farm, free and happy and living naturally.

And I was impressed by the thoughtfulness, even reverence with which all of the chefs approached the meat we brought them.

It’s easy to say meat is bad. It’s just as easy to buy industrial meat without thinking about where it comes from. The hard thing is raising, cooking and eating meat in a way that’s good for the land, pigs and people. That’s what I feel like I’ve seen on this journey… from farm to table.

____________________________________________________________________________________________
About Sky Full of Bacon
Sky Full of Bacon #5: There Will Be Pork (pt. 1)
Sky Full of Bacon #4: A Head’s Tale
Sky Full of Bacon #3: The Last Brisket Show
Sky Full of Bacon #2: Duck School
Sky Full of Bacon #1: How Local Can You Go?

Please feel free to comment here or to email me here.

Boka: gonzo for yuzu-ponzu!

I was a bit startled to learn from an LTHForum thread that Boka had opened in (late) 2004. I was thinking of it as one of the new restaurants; apparently it just slightly postdates Charcoal Oven. Nevertheless it is slightly newer than it looks thanks to the presence, and subsequent Food & Wine best new chefs anointment, of Giuseppe Tentori, who I guess has just been there a couple of years at most.

If, as was claimed at the time, Boka was once trying to be the new Blackbird, that’s clearly not Tentori’s aim. He’s clearly aiming for a delicate sort of Asian fusion in which main ingredients are paired with surprising new flavors, many of them citrus fruits or of a similar lightness. So it’s more like the new Yoshi’s, or the new Le Lan— or whatever the hot restaurant of Asian fusion circa 1991 was, it felt more like dining a decade-plus ago than the last several upscale meals I’ve had. Not that I object to a little time travel with my meal, any day.

The down side is that many of these novel flavor combinations just didn’t pan out; the meal was a frustrating mix of spot-on marvels and weird, who-thought-that-went-together moments. A starter of hamachi paired with a brightly grassy cilantro sauce and something called “young coconut-buddha hand vinaigrette” (I could look up what all that means, but really, it’s better as just pure poetry) was exquisitely light, a little shot of helium for the palate. Slices of duck breast in some combination that included a cornmeal sauce (however such a thing is possible) were savory and intensely satisfying. Sweet roasted beets with a tangy beet puree and little dicey bits of smoke flavor from Nueske’s bacon was a terrific salad.

But a scallop came with some odd combination of fruit and whatnot that tasted like banana next to it, doing no more to enhance the flavor of the scallop than dipping it in chocolate sauce would. And a baby squid accompanied by squid-ink tapioca (trying to be caviar, coming off more like a briny Jell-O pudding) was flat, it just needed another note to make it all zing. Nothing was so far off that I wanted to call in Gordon Ramsay to ask “Did you fookin’ taste this before you sent it out?”, but I would have sent a couple of them back for rethinking and simplifying. The fact that you can get an odd fruit this time of year does not mean you have to use it with the first piece of protein that comes along…

Dessert ended things on a high note; I really, really liked a crepe cake with cider sorbet, a perfect autumn dessert with great texture and flavors. The room is quite nice, romantically dark and cozy, sails that look like they came from Calatrava’s Milwaukee art museum make something dramatic out of a square box room. Service was pretty solid, a little young and overeager in its enthusiasm for chef’s cuisine, but capable and on top of things throughout (when my wife noted that her cocktail had been quite strong, the immediate response was to summon an extra round of bread service). All in all a good meal, but not one that made me feel like I was in the assured hands of a master; if I were to return it would be with more thought given to each thing before I ordered it, and whether I really believed that its four or five preciously described ingredients belonged together.

Boka
1729 N Halsted St
Chicago, IL 60614
312-337-6070
www.bokachicago.com

Dispatches from the new media world

A couple of notes about being a small, one-man media outlet in this fast-changing world, rooted in my corner of the world (Chicago foodblogging/podcasting) but surely applicable to any niche market in the new media world. If you’re mainly interested in food, feel free to scroll to the next post.

Data point #1: I commented on a blog post at a major Chicago media outlet’s food blog on either Friday night or Saturday morning. Then I thought, why did I just bother doing that? No one will approve the comment till at least Monday. (I was correct.)

Data point #2: Another major Chicago media outlet does food videos too, not exactly like mine. They host them on Vimeo too. So I checked their stats. Here they are, with a subscriber base in the six figures and celebrity chefs (okay, I have those now, but not until recently) and all the power of cross-promotion. And their videos… draw way fewer viewers than mine do. As in, the one I put up 5 days ago has already outdrawn the one they put up a month ago. As in, my most-viewed one has had six or seven times as many as most of theirs.

I point this out not to gloat but to make a serious point. For all that newspapers and magazines are going around bemoaning the impending porcelain swirl of their industry, these factoids suggest to me that they still haven’t grasped how to harness the power of new media and build an audience online. The things I know how to do that they still don’t, quite, include:

• Post frequently. Blogging isn’t even the main point of Sky Full of Bacon, the videos are, and yet I manage to get 3 or 4 posts up a week. Where oftentimes the bigger media, with contributing food blog staffs of anywhere from 2 to 10 people, manage to get… 3 or 4 posts up a week. If you can get a daily paper or a weekly magazine out, yet can’t manage to post new content online on a regular schedule, that says where your priorities still are.

• Post on an audience-timely schedule. I became acutely aware of when most people are at their computers while helping run LTHForum. It was dead till about 9:20 am, busiest from then till just before noon, dead from noon to about 1:30, moderately active till about 4:30, dead till about 7, moderately active from 7 to 9, then low but steady until past midnight.

So what’s the blogging schedule at most big media publications? I suspect it’s basically like this:
10:30 am: writer turns in blog post to editor
4:30 pm: harried editor turns from putting out fires on print edition to email box, reads and finally approves post
4:57 pm: post goes up just as audience shuts down computers and goes home

• Interact with your readers. The name of the game is reader loyalty— they have to want to come back. What makes them want to come back? Interaction. They come back to see if someone else responded to what they said. They come back to see if the writer of the original piece flatters them with attention. So how do you expect to build that if 1) you can’t even approve a comment in less than 3 days and 2) your writers are too busy on print assignments to check back and interact on the blog?

Fact is, I can’t remember on most of the big media blogs when there’s even been the least little sign that the bylined writers even read the comments. Which is why when a similar topic goes up at a big media outlet and at LTHForum, frequently the big media outlet with thousands of paid subscribers will be stuck at 3 or 4 responses when the LTHForum thread is on to its 3rd or 4th page. There may be far more readers at the former, but there’s far more positive reinforcement at the latter, and that’s what builds audience loyalty and keeps them coming back.

That’s why, even though I don’t get many comments, I take the possibility of comments very seriously, and check my blog at least a few times a day to make sure I can approve any that have appeared. And I try to respond in comments to any comment I have anything of value to say about. I am grateful for the time commenters take to write anything here and try to reward it with appreciation.

• Don’t underestimate the audience. A few people questioned, when I started doing these videos, if people would sit still for 15 or 20 minutes on these subjects. It’s odd, 15 or 20 minutes is, of course, shorter than any food TV show, but the perception was that online video needed to be 2 or 3 cute, snappy little minutes at most; the idea of spending 20 minutes going somewhat in depth into a topic (and a restaurant, and the life of the guy who owns it) seemed like something nobody would watch.

Yet here we are about five months later and as the viewership stats at Vimeo demonstrate, there’s a much stronger audience for 20 in-depth minutes on the people and philosophy and technique behind something than for 3 quick little minutes on the technique alone. There’s a much stronger audience for something that represents a single podcaster’s quirky personality and way of looking at the world than there is for something that plays like a skillfully-made but rather generic food demo that just happens to have local chefs.

And I think that points to another thing about our new media world. Generic doesn’t sell, individual does. The sites I go back to are the ones where I feel some bond, some kinship with the blogger/podcaster/whatever, because of his or her unique personality. It’s not about getting a million vaguely interested readers with the common denominator any more, it’s about getting a thousand fanatically loyal ones because they feel they need to hear from you on the topic of the moment.

Follow these principles and the lowly individual blogger, with no more resources than his own sensibility, will and spare time, can be shockingly competitive with huge media companies in terms of audience gathered, and by some measures occasionally kick their butts. Which is an exciting thing for him, but will be tragic if it means the big media outlets sink before these lessons sink in. I don’t want a world in which the media I grew up on and still read pretty faithfully bit the dust and were replaced by EatingOutWithBigEd.com. I want a world in which they successfully made the leap from the print era to the online era by absorbing the ways in which online behavior and expectations and tactics are different.

And if any of them would like my help in getting there, they know where to reach me….

Tramps and Tartes

This is how my life works now. I read about tarte tatin at one blogger’s site. So I go to Green City Market and wind up buying the apples for it from another blogger.

Ruhlman made it sound good and easy, so I found a recipe for it in (another blogger) Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pie and Pastry Bible. I knew I was going to make an apple run Wednesday because I had made a terrific apple pie using Mutsu apples, so I wanted to stock up on a few of them and cut them up for pie and vacuum seal/freeze them.

Although I grant you that Honey Crisps are damned tasty apples, and it’s no mystery why they’re the apple of the moment, I also think of them as the tramps of apples, easy and obvious in their sugared-up appeal, their in-your-face 44DD flavor. Instead I looked over the other apples and two Charlie Brownish varieties (small, irregular, bumpy, a little sad-looking) caught my eye. Of course I can’t remember their names, now, but they were both old varieties. The goldish ones were especially pretty; I just ate one and it wasn’t complex but had a nice astringent apple-juiciness, like apples used to taste before that brazen hussy Honey Crisp came along.

The reddish ones screamed pie and were said to be good for that, by Fruit Slinger himself (who I had talked to many times, but never until yesterday actually talked about being a fellow food media outlet with). It was a gray drizzly day, nearly over for him, and he looked very ready for it to be over, but he did give me his imprimatur on my choices and purposes for apples, so I felt blog-approved in my purchases.

Anyway, so here’s the gist of tarte tatin. Make some caramel with butter and the juice that dripped off of your apple slices as they sat in sugar and lemon for half an hour. Arrange the slices as neatly as you can in rings.

Cook, basting frequently, till the caramel is nice and thick. Let cool a bit and fit a crust over it. Bake.

Flip like a Spanish tortilla (plate over pan, one firm decisive flip, listen for plop). Fix any egregious spots while still warm and wet. Let cool and harden.

Take another picture, it’s so pretty.

It was very good, accompanied by (instead of Ruhlman’s creme fraiche) Scooter’s custard, although as a dish I’d still rank it second to a first-rate American apple pie, or the apple tart with apricot marmalade and custard I make from this book.

Here’s yet another blogger, suggesting something else to do with apples from Green City in a nice little video she made. Who knows, I’ve probably seen her there, too.  Life’s like that.

Sky Full of Bacon 05: There Will Be Pork (Pt. 1)

The phrase “farm to table” is used a lot in foodie circles. In this Sky Full of Bacon two-part podcast, I’ll show you what it really means— from the farm to the slaughterhouse to the kitchens of five of Chicago’s top restaurants.

How to watch it:

Fastest but lower quality: hit play on the embedded version below.
Fastest with higher quality: go to Vimeo and watch it in HD. (Recommended)
Highest quality but slow download in your browser: Episode 5 in Quicktime.
Highest quality but slowish download in iTunes: play directly on your computer in iTunes (no iPod needed), by clicking here. (To play in iTunes once downloaded, hit Play on the episode you want, then double click on the tiny window it starts playing in to make it bigger.)
Highest quality, most convenient: subscribe in iTunes by clicking here and then clicking Subscribe; each new episode will download when you’re not looking and be ready to play whenever you want, plus you’ll never miss an episode!

Sky Full of Bacon 05: There Will Be Pork (pt. 1) from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Mike Sula of the Chicago Reader has been writing about the rare mulefoot pig for the last year and a half. Now the Reader has enlisted award-winning chef Paul Kahan, of Chicago’s Blackbird, to plan an elaborate six-course dinner showcasing the meat of these pigs and the sustainable, humane way in which they’re raised. Kahan in turn recruited chefs Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe), Paul Virant (Vie), Brian Huston (the newly opened The Publican) and Justin Large (Avec), as well as Blackbird executive chef Mike Sheerin and dessert chef Tim Dahl, to each prepare a course utilizing different parts of the whole animal.

But no meal begins with the restaurant. In Part 1, Mike Sula and I visit the farmers who’ve raised these mulefoot pigs in southern Wisconsin, and consider the paradox of why eating an endangered pig breed could be the key to saving it. And as preparations for the meal get underway, we talk to Huston and Virant about why raising pork humanely from farmers you know and using the whole animal matters to them. (Warning: video does contain vivid footage of meatcutting.) It’s an epic tale with as much meat (pun unavoidable) as two or three Sky Full of Bacon podcasts, which is why it’s broken into two parts, the first of which runs 19:57.  Next week, in Part 2, we’ll complete the story.

Mike Sula’s account of the same events
Recipes from the dinner
The Chicago Reader’s complete “Whole Hog Project” archive
LTHforum posts on the dinner, and Chuck Sudo’s account at Chicagoist

____________________________________________________________________________________________
About Sky Full of Bacon
Sky Full of Bacon #4: A Head’s Tale
Sky Full of Bacon #3: The Last Brisket Show
Sky Full of Bacon #2: Duck School
Sky Full of Bacon #1: How Local Can You Go?

Please feel free to comment here or to email me here.

#15, #16: A Tale of Two Tacos

Sunday, driving up Elston.  I spot that a perpetual, never especially interesting hot dog stand has suddenly become a taco place.  The name, Taqueria LP Express, seems generic, but they are touting their steak tacos.

I soon understand why: the LP stands for La Pasadita, the famous trio of steak taco joints on Ashland near Division.  The same family owns several places with various names (Las Asadas, for instance), and this is a slightly less hidden-in-plain-sight version, since signage and clippings are at some pains to establish that you’re getting the real La Pasadita deal.  Which you pretty much do; I’ve never thought La Pasadita’s were the greatest steak tacos on earth, but they’re certainly good, and they’re certainly better than anything else Mexican I know of on that stretch of Elston (not far from the supremely 1950s-looking Las Cazuelas).

Taqueria LP Express
4968 N. Elston
773-282-8226

Driving down Ashland, scouting out unknown sout’-side places.  I see what looks like it used to be a fast food place I can’t quite identify, advertising tacos, breakfast, rib tips, all kinds of stuff, but not actually bearing a name.  41st and Ashland.  It’s next to a pork processing plant so I make two quick assumptions: one, it’s their de facto cafeteria, two, order the pork.

Both seem correct to me.  I order a pork and a steak taco.  The steak is lame, overseasoned to make up for many manifest deficiencies.  But the roast pork seems pretty good and tasty, roast pig, what’s not to like.  I get a call from Pigmon on my cell (this stop was, I must admit, merely a recon stop for our real lunch to follow immediately) and tell him he should come have the carnitas, the pork.

Ten minutes later he orders the pork and the al pastor.  The pastor is lousy, mealy, kind of gross.  A moment later I notice he’s eating the pastor while avoiding the pork.  “You’re not eating the carnitas?”

“The pastor blows.  But it’s the best thing here.”

“I didn’t think the pork was so bad…” I say, suddenly my own opinion of the meal thrown in doubt, like a guy who was standing up for Franzia Rosé in front of a stranger who turns out to be Robert Parker.

“Worst I’ve ever had.  Totally tastes like ass.”

So I don’t know what I think now.  I mean, it’s not like I would have recommended this cafeteria-like place overall to begin with, but I did think the pork was okay, it’s roasted pork, a pretty simple pleasure that I was okay with.  I guess the only thing to do is to sum it up like Alpana on a Check, Please:

“And we tried carnitas at Kiki D’s Carnitas Family Restaurant in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.  Mike enjoyed the pictures of the soccer team they sponsor and the roast pork carnitas.  Pigmon thought everything tasted like ass, and wouldn’t feed that shit to a dying donkey.”

Kiki D’s Carnitas
4117 S. Ashland
773-254-3526

Academy award winner Sir Ben Kingsley as Kiki D, the ex-military soccer coach from Kazakhstan who turns a lovable gang of inner city kids into international champions in Carnitas! from Touchstone Pictures.

P.S. Chuck Sudo reviewed Kiki D’s once.  He agrees with Pigmon.

P.P.S. We finally had lunch here.

To see more in this series, click Restaurant Reviews at right and look for the numbered reviews.

Some Random Rambling While The Computer Computes

Ghosts Before Breakfast, by Hans Richter.

The final cut of the next podcast is complete and the computer needs some time to itself— 4 or 5 hours— to turn it into a Quicktime file for uploading. A few notes I feel like taking note of:

• The fourth podcast, A Head’s Tale, will shortly have had 1000 viewers at Vimeo. (It’s been stuck at 998 all day, frustratingly. I don’t normally watch things that closely, but— go to 1000, dammit! UPDATE LATE MONDAY NIGHT: Finally!) This is the kind of milestone that really encourages me to keep doing this— 1000 people watching it all the way through. Cool. (As opposed to the 4 or 5 who read this blog.)

• Interestingly, the second podcast, Duck School, also had a big boost in viewership recently. A thread on LTHForum recounted Sun Wah’s recent temporary closing by the Health Department (not an unusual thing in Chinatown— personally, I think Sun Wah is MUCH cleaner than it used to be). Some people were reacting rather harshly to this news, so I linked to the podcast and said “You want to see how clean Sun Wah’s kitchen is?” I figured two or three people might go watch it. The actual number was 81. The first day. Over 100 new viewers checked it out as a result in the last 3 days (typically it would draw one or two viewers a day by now). A little insight into what drives traffic, I guess….

• Week before last, I went to Green City Market on its last day of the season in the park before moving indoors to shoot some footage for what, at this point, will probably be podcast #8 in February. It’s about Oriana Kruszewski, the little Asian lady who sells pears, paw paws, black walnuts and some other oddities in her own inimitable fashion. (The pears are wonderful, I had some that had gotten a little old in the fridge and made an aigre-doux, a form of sweet pickling with them.) Anyway, while I was there I saw another camera crew— not an unusual thing there— probably students from Columbia College or the like, a young woman directing, a couple of guys hauling Canon XL-1s around for her, and various other people doing sound or being key grips or who knows what.

It struck me that one of the things that everyone seems to do is feel like they need to turn film or video production into, well, a big production. The young woman was clearly enjoying expressing her vision in the form of commands to her crew, the videographers were busy getting just the right shots, and so on. Meanwhile, there I am just walking around, camera in hand and bag on my back, getting what I need with no fuss in much less time and, I feel certain, getting enough pretty footage of pretty food in sunlight that there will be a certain visual grace to my rough and ready production. I really like that the low cost and low weight of my style production makes it possible to just grab and go and shoot what I need so easily; if I were the teacher of these kids, I wouldn’t be sending them out in a pack of 6 with two cameras, I’d send them out by themselves with a single camera and make them rely on themselves and find their own subjects and be part of their movie the way I am. It’s a pen, write with it, don’t have a scribe to write for you and two bearers to carry it….

• It’s a small food world #1: I was shooting the next podcast at Blackbird and the pastry chef, Tim Dahl, mentions that the dessert will include Asian pears. Mike Sula, who’s working on it with me, says “Are they Oriana’s?” They were. (Mike did a piece on her in the Reader a couple of years ago.)

• It’s a small food world #2: I’m standing at Oriana’s stand, getting a panning shot of the Green City Market, and suddenly a guy in my frame turns and looks at me and waves. It’s Paul Virant of Vie— who’s another one of the chefs in my next podcast.

• A little about the next podcast: it’s about the mulefoot pig dinner that the Reader arranged with Paul Kahan of Blackbird, who recruited several other notable chefs such as Virant to participate. Sula has been writing about mulefoot pigs for 18 months and so he recruited me to tag along and shoot everything— the farm, the slaughter process, and as much of the cooking of the meal as we could get access to. Kahan and company were really great about allowing us so much access and being gracious about it in the midst of busy times (especially for The Publican, which had just opened to much more business than they were quite ready for).

One of my goals in doing these podcasts was to keep them under 20 minutes. That seemed a good maximum length. So I cut each individual segment for this one, and put them together, and I found I had slightly exceeded that maximum.

By 16 minutes.

36 minutes. Yikes. Not an insane amount of time for the subject— it’s less than an hour-long Food Network show minus commercials— and considering that I had three podcasts’ worth of subject matter here— farming, slaughter, cooking— not a self-indulgent amount, I feel sure. But I really doubted whether my audience would sit for that in one go. It seemed like it would scare people off, just the running time alone.

There was another issue. Slaughter is an emotional subject, an emotionally charged one, a viscerally affecting one. If I followed the story chronologically, slaughter would come in the middle somewhere, and make everything that followed look barbaric. I also felt my subject had something to do with the fact that it’s too easy to separate meat from animals, to mentally disassociate a square of meat from a living creature, and that honesty demanded that I keep the reality of the animal’s life and death in the story, not let the viewer push it out of mind once it’s done and we’re on to more congenial cooking subject matters.

So I came to two decisions. One was, to break the saga up into two parts. The second was, to jumble it up chronologically, so that you’re always conscious of meat-eating when looking at cute piggies, and vice versa. So part 1, which will go up later this week, runs just under 20 minutes (whew!) and bookends our (quite charming) visit to the farm with footage about the handling of the meat at the restaurants. Part 2, which will go up next week, will include the slaughter sequence, again in the context of the restaurants as they work on the meal. (We weren’t allowed to shoot the moment of death, but I got everything else about the slaughtering process, believe me.)

Watch for Part 1— officially Thursday, actually Wednesday night.

Preview of the next video podcast

Trailer for Sky Full of Bacon 05 from Michael Gebert on Vimeo Music by Kevin MacLeod.

But enough about Barack Obama

Let’s return to something genuinely interesting: my comments about the demise of Eater Chicago, in the post “Death Eater” below.

Several reactions to the piece worth noting:

1) Helen Rosner of Menu Pages gently pointed out that the especially dull procedural item I cited as an example of Eater New York’s attempts to make newsy news out of trade news and minutiae… was in fact a quoted-in-its-entirety example of Grub Street (another NY food blog thing, which is corporately related to Menu Pages BTW) attempting to make newsy news out of trade news and minutiae.

So yeah, I kinda bungled that, but I think the point still holds, since Eater New York evidently found it thrilling enough to warrant reprinting.

2) Grub Street has its own comment on my post:

Sky Full of Bacon is ignoring the power of more “hype-ridden” blogs to drive readers to food-focused endeavors such as his own. Come on, man — all boats rise with the tide, or all bacon bits rise with the fondue or whatever. SFB points to the hype over Fergus Henderson’s appearance as an example of Eater’s superficiality — but if it gets someone to try crispy pig’s ear for the first time, or to pick up Henderson’s book in order to learn more about nose-to-tail eating than can be shared on a restaurant blog, well then what’s the harm?

Well, yes and no.  On the one hand this is the all-purpose defense of any form of media that willfully undershoots the intelligence level of its audience— to apply it to the world of film, it’s basically “Yeah, Entertainment Weekly may be bubbleheaded and running its 53rd cover story on The Dark Knight, but at least people will also hear about Kristof Kieslowski and they’ll check him out!”  You may be surprised to hear, from the snark with which that sentence was composed, that I don’t dismiss this out of hand.  Such media have greatly contributed to our hype-ridden world in which people care more about weekend grosses than the actual content of movies, seemingly creating an environment in which nothing could be more irrelevant than a European art film that makes bupkis.  But on the other hand, your local Blockbuster actually does have a couple of Kieslowski films which rent fairly steadily, which, I can assure you, is NOT what life was like when I was a 12-year-old film buff in Wichita reading about Antonioni and Godard films that seemed as impossibly remote to my life as a cocktail party thrown by Cole Porter at the top of the Ritz.

So media like this can make us a little dumber and a little smarter at the same time, depending on how we use them.  I accept that, though it also means they have to accept that I just don’t find all that industry news all that valuable to me, either, and a distraction from the things that are interesting to me.  This is really what it comes down, to the distinction between news and commentary.  Commentary interests me because there’s a person with a sensibility behind it.  News doesn’t interest me, because there just aren’t that many things happening in the restaurant biz that quite rise to the level of real news, in my book.

The other thing I am forced to accept, in honesty, is— I’m a total hypocrite and if Eater Chicago does ever launch here, please post about Sky Full of Bacon!

3) I got an email from the president of Eater inviting me to i) look more deeply at Eater NY and see some of the more feature-length, substantive stuff they’ve published, and ii) view the backstage double secret test site that Ari Bendersky has been posting to in anticipation of Eater Chicago’s launch.  I appreciate him taking the time to contact me and offer me that access, though I might still quibble about the whole idea of secret practice blogging— to me, one of the main virtues of blogging is the chance to discover what you’re about in public through feedback and just seeing how things play in the real world.  Will you do some stupid things and make mistakes along the way?  Welcome to the club.  I think corporate bloggers are foolish not to bite the bullet and accept that and be part of the world, secret practice blogging is sort of like secret practice at losing your virginity, there’s only one real thing and it requires more than one person.  Nevertheless, I appreciate his offer and will, when not eyeball deep in Obama’s transition the next Sky Full of Bacon, take him up on it.

LTHForum Great Neighborhood Restaurants announced

Though they don’t seem to be making a big deal out of it as yet.

UPDATE: photo thread from the dinner is now up here.

Overall they shot down a few more than I would have predicted (the awards tend to be overly generous in my book)— Urban Belly and Great Lakes seem to have been rejected for being too new (Bill Kim’s anti-blogging comments probably didn’t help, but I doubt they really mattered), Peoria Packing for being too far outside the definition of the program, CND Gyros engendered an interesting debate over where the line is drawn between crappiness and great atmosphere, no one seems to have bought the Roman Hruska*-like argument that Lincoln Park deserved to make the list with the Athenian Room (or the fast-foody Little Brothers, which only I even tried), likewise Hannah’s Bretzel for the Loop, El Pollo Giro in Aurora or Naperville was just too obscure, Bonsoiree became the first two-time loser, without enough new trials to overcome last year’s mixed reviews, Kang Nam, once loved, failed to measure up, and Beef and Burger, though a convenient go-to place for me, didn’t strike anyone as that far above average.

I would have shot down Sahara Kabob (never been that impressed, south suburban middle-eastern would kick its ass, see my reviews of same), Double Li (a one-dish star and that one dish is overrated), Poochie’s (my meal was a definite miss) and I have pretty damn high standards for fine dining GNRs and the reviews on both Paramount Room and Prairie Grass Cafe were too mixed to justify a GNR at their price points, in my book.

And why in God’s name is Avec classified as Spanish?  Just because of small plates?  The food’s Italian and American contemporary if anything.

All that said, a good list, check ‘em out.

* Nebraska senator who, upon hearing a Nixon nominee for the Supreme Court described as mediocre, asked “Don’t mediocre people deserve representation too?”