January 2011
120 posts
December 2010
139 posts
“I’ve been going to New Orleans for most of my life, as I have family there, and as a result have eaten many, many, many meals in the food-crazed city — but rarely any really good ones. Alan Richman pissed off practically the entire English-speaking world with his thoughtful but ill-timed criticisms of New Orleans food in 2006, but he wasn’t actually wrong: a lot of New Orleans cuisine was overwrought, old-fashioned and generally lame. There was a tendency, in many of the city’s most celebrated restaurants, to pile crabmeat on top of everything, mix in some French or Italian stuff, and call it a day. If innovation did come, it was frequently horrific: even as I write this, a menu at one of the city’s most famous restaurants includes a “French pastry layered with melted Brillat-Savarin cheese, strawberry jam, brown sugar bacon & sticky bourbon infused honey.” Blech! I used to see that sort of overly fussy (or ongepotchket, as we say in Yiddish) thing in New Orleans all the time. But at a number of new restaurants I went to over the holidays, I saw a smarter, cleaner, more exciting kind of New Orleanian food — still rich in butter and Creole flavors, still deeply traditional, but with a new-school bent…New Orleans is rising to a higher plane, gastronomically speaking, than ever before.”
—
Time magazine (via cajunboy)
I had thoughts of my own about Richman’s piece and his persistent dickery.
“I’ve been going to New Orleans for most of my life, as I have family there, and as a result have eaten many, many, many meals in the food-crazed city — but rarely any really good ones. Alan Richman pissed off practically the entire English-speaking world with his thoughtful but ill-timed criticisms of New Orleans food in 2006, but he wasn’t actually wrong: a lot of New Orleans cuisine was overwrought, old-fashioned and generally lame. There was a tendency, in many of the city’s most celebrated restaurants, to pile crabmeat on top of everything, mix in some French or Italian stuff, and call it a day. If innovation did come, it was frequently horrific: even as I write this, a menu at one of the city’s most famous restaurants includes a “French pastry layered with melted Brillat-Savarin cheese, strawberry jam, brown sugar bacon & sticky bourbon infused honey.” Blech! I used to see that sort of overly fussy (or ongepotchket, as we say in Yiddish) thing in New Orleans all the time. But at a number of new restaurants I went to over the holidays, I saw a smarter, cleaner, more exciting kind of New Orleanian food — still rich in butter and Creole flavors, still deeply traditional, but with a new-school bent…New Orleans is rising to a higher plane, gastronomically speaking, than ever before.”
—
Time magazine (via cajunboy)
I had thoughts of my own about Richman’s piece and his persistent dickery.
