Everyone needs to read Schmucks by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder before they die. Luckily I didn't die laughing while reading it, but it is very funny. The duo takes on everyone from Bill Clinton to Larry Silverstein and every group from TV Weathermen to the ACLU.Here's a short excerpt from his "Dumb Schmucks" section, the chapter entitled "Restaurant Critics. Talk about food and whine":
Food critics changed forever dining out from a pleasant, non-challenging, no-nonsense family gathering to a fancy-schmancy, status-conscious event where you had to have spent a year at Berlitz to understand the menu.
Waiters turned into poets, describing the dishes as "The lamb is boiled in a reduction of Australian beetle juice, and then is basted with a turkey gizzard mélange and lovingly caressed by an open flame for 30 seconds before being bathed in a 1946 crapola red wine which is assertive without being impertinent."
Suddenly, Da Bella Gypolla, out local Italian restaurant, became a "ristorante" and overnight, spaghetti became pasta, cheese transformed into formaggio, and every shmo diner started using the phrase "Al dente, per favore."
Later in the chapter he explains that burnt fish magically becomes "blackened" if it's served in the "dingy, depressing swamp country of southern Louisiana".
It's odd, but nobody eats a burnt bagel. The fad has stayed mainly in the fish area. But, as this concept becomes trendier, we envision the Cajun bagel, burnt to a crisp.
Funny. Well...OK. His food sensibility is probably not amusing to everyone.
I often tell my children, "When I was your age, we didn't have pasta."
ReplyDeleteBut I don't particularly mind the boiled reductions and finishing foams. It's part of the experience of some restaurants, their version of, "You want fries with that?"
I've been to the dingy, depressing swamp country of southern Louisiana, though, and they know from burnt fish when Yankees show up and order it.