This was GREAT, most enjoyable Substack longread in ages (I say as someone in the sweet spot of "have read Buddenbrooks in the last 3 years" and "going to NYC next week and trying to see if I can fit in a side trip to Jersey City for goat curry")
Thanks! Buddenbrooks just speaks to people who live in the Lubecks of the world, I think...it felt very painful not to talk bring up my beloved Herr Permaneder and tell the anecdote about how my German friend once told us how Bavaria was "the Texas of Germany," but I needed to quit somewhere. There's also the anecdote about how I interned at an alternative weekly in Denver and we all laughed at the guy in the editorial meeting who praised the Tex-Mex taco spot nearly the alt-weekly office because they had friendlier (gringoified) service instead of the one a little further away where they served you much slower if you didn't speak Spanish but their cabeza was utterly perfect and you had to eat it quickly or it kind of hardened into mush.
Yeah, I subscribe to Sistema still---I'm sure he's got some awesome goat curry spots!
Haha dude I also love reading the New Yorker restaurant reviews despite living on the other side of the country and not really being a "restaurant guy" (well I suppose I am but as you know more for atmosphere reasons than food ones and not really interested in the hot new whatever). I read Helen Rosner though. I just think she is great w/ descriptions, any writer can learn from her, and I do like to cook so sometimes it kickstarts an inspiration. Agree whenever they write a trend piece based on five tiktoks it's unbearable.
I want them to give Rosner more space? But I also want her to hit the outer boroughs kind of spots that Goldfield used to do. She’s pretty focused on the Williamsburg/Downtown Manhattan corridor.
Yeah I suppose that is so much the default mode of LA food writing (thanks to j gold and his acolytes) that I don’t mind getting a look into the glitz and glam.
This was GREAT, most enjoyable Substack longread in ages (I say as someone in the sweet spot of "have read Buddenbrooks in the last 3 years" and "going to NYC next week and trying to see if I can fit in a side trip to Jersey City for goat curry")
Thanks! Buddenbrooks just speaks to people who live in the Lubecks of the world, I think...it felt very painful not to talk bring up my beloved Herr Permaneder and tell the anecdote about how my German friend once told us how Bavaria was "the Texas of Germany," but I needed to quit somewhere. There's also the anecdote about how I interned at an alternative weekly in Denver and we all laughed at the guy in the editorial meeting who praised the Tex-Mex taco spot nearly the alt-weekly office because they had friendlier (gringoified) service instead of the one a little further away where they served you much slower if you didn't speak Spanish but their cabeza was utterly perfect and you had to eat it quickly or it kind of hardened into mush.
Yeah, I subscribe to Sistema still---I'm sure he's got some awesome goat curry spots!
Haha dude I also love reading the New Yorker restaurant reviews despite living on the other side of the country and not really being a "restaurant guy" (well I suppose I am but as you know more for atmosphere reasons than food ones and not really interested in the hot new whatever). I read Helen Rosner though. I just think she is great w/ descriptions, any writer can learn from her, and I do like to cook so sometimes it kickstarts an inspiration. Agree whenever they write a trend piece based on five tiktoks it's unbearable.
I want them to give Rosner more space? But I also want her to hit the outer boroughs kind of spots that Goldfield used to do. She’s pretty focused on the Williamsburg/Downtown Manhattan corridor.
Yeah I suppose that is so much the default mode of LA food writing (thanks to j gold and his acolytes) that I don’t mind getting a look into the glitz and glam.