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Started reading
May 25, 2025
if things look good today, they will most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.
I became seduced by the world—and the freedom that television had given me—to travel it as I wished. I was also drunk on a new and exciting power to manipulate images and sound in order to tell stories, to make audiences feel about places I’d been the way I wanted them to feel.
Like a lot of travelers, I started to turn inward from the view out the window, started to see what was going on out there through an ever-narrowing lens.
The indifference bordering on naked hostility was palpable.
the Empire of Mediocrity successfully spreading its tentacles everywhere.
This, I have come to understand, is the way of the world. To resist is to stand against the hurricane. Bend (preferably at the hip, ass-cheeks proffered). Or break.
An unsolicited gesture of kindness and I have a very hard time being mean.
The notion of “selling out” is such a quaint one, after all. At what point exactly does one really sell out?
Certainly, anytime anyone gets up in the morning earlier than one would like, drags oneself across town to do things one wouldn’t ordinarily do in one’s leisure time for people one doesn’t particularly like—that would be selling out,
Who in this world gets to do only what they want—and what they feel consistent with their principles—and get paid for it?
There’s that old joke, I’ve referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she’d fuck him for a million dollars—and she thinks about it and finally replies, “Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah…” At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. “Fuck you!” she says, declining angrily. “You think I’d fuck you for a dollar? What do you think I am?” To which the guy says, “Well … we’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
to be ten times richer—twenty times—and NOT take crazy-ass chances on restaurant concepts that no one ever expressed a desire for would mean to expire from boredom.
I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to be called on bullshit—unless knowingly bullshitting.
But when my daughter came along and I continued to say “no,” I knew I wasn’t saving my cherry for principle. I’d just been waiting to lose it to the right guy.
Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you. Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.
Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay… Then they shoot your fucking dog.
Like a lot of things in my life, there’s no making it prettier just ‘cause time’s passed. It happened. It was bad. There it is.
The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem.
There’s no lying in the kitchen.
The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy—where anybody with the skills and the heart is welcomed.
If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel—as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them—wherever you
Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d
There is no debating that it’s “better” to cook at home whenever—and as often as—possible.
We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn.
But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
What specific tasks should every young man and woman know how to perform in order to feel complete? What simple preparations, done well, should be particularly admired, skills seen as setting one apart as an unusually well-rounded, deceptively deep, and interesting individual? In a shiny, happy, perfect world of the future, what should every man, woman, and teenager know how to do?
I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck.
Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age. A standard vinaigrette is something anyone can and should be able to do. The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season, to tell whether or not something is ripe or rotten might be acquired at the same time as one’s driving license.
Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past—or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty. Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.
People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit.
Belt-tightening implies a bad thing. But it also means you’re getting thinner.
For a young man with indie aspirations and a modest disposable income, there is now a certain cachet involved in hunting down a shoebox-size Uiger noodle shop in the cellar of a Chinese mall in Flushing.
Money may be less abundant but bullshit we’ve still got plenty of.
Maybe people will have to start cooking again. To save money, and because the cold reality is that people without jobs have more time for that sort of thing.
Why, with our enormous Asian and Latino populations, can’t we have dai pai dong—literally, “big sign street,” the Chinese version of the indigenous food court, like they do in Hong Kong—or hawker centers, like in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur? Or “food streets,” like in Hanoi and Saigon? The open-to-the-air “wet” taco vendors and quesadilla-makers of Mexico City?
The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter.
Using sexual metaphors to describe food is a practice blithely, even automatically employed by most food writers—yours
Visiting a popular pho shop, particularly later in the morning, after the first waves of hungry people on their way to work have been through, resembles nothing so much as the set of a porn shoot.
You complete pho at the table—and unlike with many similar dishes, where everybody’s got their own way of doing things, in Hanoi there seems to be an accepted orthodoxy. A dot or two of chili paste, a tiny drizzle of chili sauce, a generous squeeze of lime, toss lightly with chopsticks in the right hand—and spoon with the left. Ideally, one wants a perfect marriage of beef, broth, and noodle in each mouthful. Slurping is encouraged. As is leaning down into your bowl. As is lifting the bowl to near your mouth.
