A dis from Grub Street

Today, New York magazine's 10 day old food blog Grub Street says:
"Frankly, we're not always flattered to be part of that great, wide, amateurish group of people known as food bloggers. But some blogs we very much admire — like Augieland . . . "

To see the full post, click here.

Everything but the

I found this sink on Butler Place while walking to the farmer's market on Sunday.


This second sink has been bugging me for a while. It's chained like a dog to the front of a brownstone a block away from my apartment.

I'm obsessed: who has a kitchen big enough for these sinks . . . why is someone on Butler throwing their sink away, while someone a block away is chaining their old sink down, hanging on for dear life, as if someone could lift the thing if they wanted to . . . then there's this Craigslister I linked to from Apartment Therapy:Kitchen who tore out their big old kitchen and is selling it on Craig's, while wondering if they should be keeping it.

[Link] Bill Buford on the Food Network

Here's an detailed, well researched article about the Food Network by Bill Buford. He explains that many chefs are leaving the Food Network line up in favor of hot personalities.

I'm reading Craig Claiborne's memoir right now; Craig Claiborne was a 'gay American' and was a food editor at The NY Times. His book has made me very curious to learning more about famous (or semi-famous) gay guys who work in the world of food and food media. Buford gives us this little bit on Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh, hosts of the Party Line:

“We are a gay couple,” they’d announced on their audition video, “and you should really think about that, because the gays right now, they’re hot.” They are from Chicago—actors who started a catering business—with a low-wattage repartee (on dirty dishes: “We have people for that. We call him Dan”) and an anachronistic, almost blithely oblivious aesthetic: their meals seem like something someone’s parents once ate, a campy “Joy of Cooking,” or a display at a MOMA exhibit.

I haven't seen Party Line yet, have you?

I have seen Guys Big Bite. . . and the show bites. Guy beat out my pick Nathan Lyon and went on to win the second Food Network star search. Dan and Steve pulled a Richard Hatch and won the first season.

Sometimes, rarely, never: the answer

My friend Two emailed today, reminding me to post the answer to the question I asked here.

The answer is this: The picture is a detail from a photo I took inside the 8th Street subway station, home of the R and N trains, or the Rarely and the Never as I like to call them, in a nod to their service frequency. After graduation, I lived in a $600 one bedroom on the last stop on the R train in Bay Ridge Brooklyn. I bumped along on that slow train all the way to work in Soho. Little did I know that R* also lived in Bay Ridge at the same time, just a few blocks away.

My photo shows a mosaic of a grup hanging out by the produce stand. It caught my eye because its art that captures guys, the grup and the shop keeper dressed in brown, in a home cookingish setting. I thought it was interesting because (outside of the celebrity chef universe) we more often see women, like the one in green, in these pictures.

The art goes along with the post I wrote for AT:Kitchen where I wondered if 8th Street could become a new zone for the city's home cooks.